Sam's video game collection essentials

In the DS’s first year, it really needed games that really took advantage of the touch screen in creative ways in order to convince customers that the extra screen wasn’t just a silly gimmick. Kirby: Canvas Curse (or Power Paintbrush for the non-Americans in the audience) was one of those games. Kirby had already established a solid formula up to this point, 2D platformers with recurring gameplay elements such as flying like a balloon and eating enemies to temporarily gain their powers. You can see some of that DNA in this game…but it’s changed on a fundamental level. The story of the game involves a witch who comes from another dimension to place a curse on Kirby’s world. When Kirby pursues her back to the “paint dimension” from whence she came, Kirby is cursed and turned into a ball. However, he quickly finds aid from the Magical Paintbrush, which is wielded by the player to magically guide Kirby to victory to reverse the curses and set things straight. The objective of the game is s...

If you’re not an anime fan, the name “Shonen Jump” may not mean anything to you…but there’s no denying that you’ve seen and felt its cultural influence. Basically, Shonen Jump is an extremely popular manga/comic book publication in Japan that began in the late 1960s and still exists to this day. Some of the most famous anime of all-time (including Dragon Ball, One Piece and Naruto) got their start in Shonen Jump. The concept of a “Shonen Jump video game” bringing together the various series that graced its pages was first conceived in the late ‘80s, when Japan got a Famicom role-playing game (of all things) called Famicom Jump. That game proved to be very popular, and one sequel was made, but by the time of the DS’s release, it had been well over a decade since such a game was made. It was about time someone made another one, the type where the various characters could duke it out, and a young company called Ganbarion was tasked with making it. What we got was Jump Superstars and a seq...

I actually wrote a full-length review for this game on gamefaqs.com when I played through it back in 2020. Because of that review, this post might be a bit shorter than normal since I pretty much said what I have to say about the game in that review. You can read it here . Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love certainly looks like a follow-up to Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, with similar logos and the same basic graphical style. However, this is not simply “more of the same”, as this game ditches pretty much all the mechanics from its predecessor and offers a completely different type of experience. The story isn’t even connected, with only a few little cameos being the binding threads between the two games.  What we have here is a game that’s a little closer to what you would consider a “point and click adventure” game. And the biggest appeal of the game is definitely its quirky and bizarre sense of humor, which it delivers in spades. This time, Tingle is looking for love, as he reads a book ...

I already talked not long ago about the greatness of the Ace Attorney series. After creating the original Ace Attorney trilogy, the creator of the series wanted to work on a different kind of project. This new game would still be very story-driven and all about mystery like Ace Attorney, but the gameplay would be entirely different, feeling much more like a video game than something akin to an interactive graphic novel like Ace Attorney. The result was Ghost Trick, which hit the DS in 2010 in Japan and 2011 in the rest of the world. At the start of the game, the main character narrates and introduces you to a rather distressing opening scene. You see, this main character has just died. They identify themselves as a corpse laying face-first on the ground, a guy wearing a red suit and shades with a spiky yellow hairdo. There’s also a criminal with a gun at the scene pointing at a helpless young woman. Though this main character has died, apparently in this universe the dead do not simply...

Here we have one of the oddest Legend of Zelda spinoffs out there. Tingle debuted as a character in the Nintendo 64 hit The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, as a quirky map salesman who floats with a balloon that Link must pop in order to bring him down to earth to do business. Rather than keep him as a one-off Majora’s Mask character, he started appearing in more Zelda games in different forms, such as Wind Waker and Minish Cap. Nintendo eventually decided that Tingle had enough of a following to merit his own game, and this odd one was the result. The story starts with a main character who must be named by the player, a 35-year-old man who lives alone and doesn’t seem to have much of a life. He hears a mysterious voice calling out to him, which leads him to a well outside of his house. There he meets Uncle Rupee, who promises Tingle a better life in a magical place called Rupeeland if he can simply bring enough Rupees to the pool. Uncle Rupee casts some kind of spell on him, giving hi...

After the success of Fire Emblem on the Game Boy Advance, it was to be expected that we’d get more Fire Emblem on the popular new DS. But instead of sequels, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems decided to go the route of remakes. They started by remaking the very first game in the series, the one that basically introduced the strategy RPG genre as we know it. One motivation for doing so was that the first game had never been released outside Japan before. And very many gamers around the world were already familiar with the main character, Marth, since he was featured in the extremely popular Super Smash Bros. series. It was perhaps an interesting choice, because the first Fire Emblem game had already been remade once before. This was well over a decade previously, as part of the package that included the third game, on the Super Nintendo. This DS remake is its own thing and does not really take that remake into consideration at all. It brings back all the characters and stages from the or...