Mario Party DS

The good
An excellent conversion of the Mario Party Experience to handheld
Complete multiplayer experience with only one game card
Less crazy game-changing pickups
A plethora of modes and options

The bad
The Mario Party Juggernaut has now spread to handheld
Stars are as frustratingly fickle as ever
Solo experience manages to be depressing AND frustrating
If you are lucky enough to have friends around you, there are probably better things to do

7/10


Well, another year has rolled around, which means on average another 1.5 Mario Party titles have been released. The Wii already has the distinction of bearing the weakest ever Mario Party, so from a review perspective the only way is up, right?

This latest version for the DS doesn’t have the distinction of being the first hand held Mario Party, which came out on the GBA a few years back. Technology and time have ensured that this version bears more relation to its big brother console versions. Still, no one will be shocked to discover that you’ll still be playing as your choice of Mario Mascot in a chance-heavy board game peppered with mini games of varying quality.

Nevertheless, Mario Party DS does distinguish itself from its brethren for one important reason: It contains arguably the most important innovation in handheld multiplayer history.

No, that innovation is not Wi-Fi. After all, unless you’re within a distance that could easily be covered by a cable, the true freedom of wireless play needs to piggyback off a desktop or other hardlined connection, so it doesn’t count.

Nor is the innovation in question 3D graphics, touchscreen play or anything involving microphones. The innovation in question isn’t even a new one, come to think of it. But it is something that should have been standard in every shred of handheld multiplayer gaming since the day Nintendo introduced the gamelink cable for the first ever Gameboy.

The innovation is called single cart multiplayer, and Mario Party DS stands as one of the cleverest examples of its use. While it’s true that many DS games feature downloadable play, up until now single cart play has always meant “stripped down”:
Palette swap characters, smaller levels, reduced gameplay options and a nice fat download time to kick off. Not so here.

Upon booting their first partay session (woooo), most will notice that the single player menu features a rich list of options, including a mini game mode, puzzle mode, the standard party mode and the now obligatory story mode. Therein players may discover a completely bonkers take on the standard “Bowser steals/transforms/kidnaps something, turns out stars/shines/crystals are the only solution, go get them stars/shines/crystals” story. This time it involves shrinking. Hopefully only children of rural Australia will find themselves isolated enough to find out how it all ends.

Luckily all of the single player modes are fully functional in multiplayer using just one card. Kudos has to go to the developers for pulling this one off, as aside from at the start of each mini game, loading is almost entirely masked during the mini game introduction screens. Unless everyone in the party has gone through the game enough times to know all the mini game controls, that’s hardly an issue.

So what’s it like to have a freakin’ Mario party? (woooo) Well, you'll be floored to learn that not much has changed in this respect. Long term fans of the series (There’s got to be at least a few left) will note that there’s a shift of focus away from Mario Party’s shopping and item heavy past, with the focus generally staying to the board. They will probably be happy about this.

Others will note that the switch between touch and D-Pad controls in various mini games mean that you’re doing a lot of stylus stowing and retrieving at times. They will probably not be so happy about this, but then someone will pipe up that this only happens during the mini game loading scenes so it’s barely a problem.

The mini games have the same issues with repetition and quality as before, but porta-party fans are sure to be pleased by the graphical variation in the new DS games. The coathanger flying fox through a giant garden is just one example of a standout.

Of course it goes without saying that the graphics are extremely clean and bright, that’s virtually guaranteed by the word “Mario” in the title. The soundtrack and voice samples are also very clean and detailed, with the music shifting appropriately for each stage but remaining within the signature Nintendo bouncy-midi genre.

As you’ve probably realised by now, it’s a console standard Mario Party experience pared down expertly for the DS. If the score was purely based on the conversion then I’d definitely be considering five stars.

So if you’re after the consummate handheld party game experience this title is a no brainer. Just be sure to stay away from that solo mode. If you find yourself getting pissed when a mate steals your four star lead on the last turn of an hour long game, imagine how you’ll feel when the computer does it.

Moto GP 07

The Good bits
All the riders
All the tracks
Achievements up the wazoo
Nice handling mechanics

The Bad stuff
Graphics that make an English winter seem bright and interesting
Pointless arcade mode
A wind-blasted skeleton of a championship mode
Very little appeal outside of existing fans


The first big surprise of picking up the MotoGP box is the publisher's logo in the corner. Wait, Capcom? Isn’t it EA’s job to flog franchises into horse flavoured burger? ...Oh wait.

Moving on. The '07 season of MotoGP is now over and Capcom is probably hoping that a few more Australians are looking at picking up some sweet gaming merch. After all, 22 year old Kurri Kurri boy Casey Stoner secured this year's winning trophy with three whole races to spare.

The problem is, racing bike simulations don't exactly have a history of being pick up and play titles. Cars are easy, they only have the steering, brake and throttle to worry about. But on a motorbike it's not so simple. You also have to worry about weight distribution. See, you can throw your body around like a straight edger on red cordial when you're strapped behind the wheel of a souped up WRX and the worst thing you'll do is bump a piercing. But try the same thing on an 800cc Ducati and you'll quickly find yourself injected into a tyre wall on a cartwheeling slab of hot steel.

Out of kindness to the first time racers, MotoGP offers a tutorial race upon start up. After "monitoring" your racing style for a lap or two, the game will suggest a handling mode that suits your skill level. In short, if your rider spends most of his time nipple grinding in the gravel pits, the game will helpfully suggest "arcade mode". If you manage to find the brakes at some point, it will suggest "Advanced". Differentiate between the front and rear brakes (oddly defaulted to square and R2 respectively) and the game will suggest "Simulation mode".

The biggest difference in Arcade mode is in the weight distribution. The bike feels heavy and sticky, with very little variation when you lean your rider back and forward. A little like a two wheeled car, strangely enough. This is in stark contrast to the other two modes, where accelerating without leaning forward can quickly turn a wheelie into a back flip, counter pointing on your head. Or in reverse, braking hard without leaning back can result in an uncontrollable "endo" or nose stand, which inevitably throws your rider face first into the tarmac.

But all this simplicity means that Arcade mode comes across as exceedingly dull. The very word "Arcade" should conjure images of powersliding around hairpins in an impossible drift, or snaking dangerously over boost markers. Instead, Capcom has taken the more traditional meaning of "Arcade," which is to say, "two buttons, one joystick, the nagging feeling you're wasting your money, crap graphics."

Did I mention that before? The whole ugly thing? MotoGP 07 features some of the most uninteresting patches of green and tan ever before seen in a racing game, a fact compounded by the fact most of us have driven the Laguna Seca in Gran Turismo 4, yet have no recollection of it being covered in beige crepe paper.

None of this makes the gameplay bad, of course. In spite of the steep learning curve, once you get the hang of the mechanics there is some fun to be had. It's just that the visual blandness of MotoGP seems to highlight all the other parts of the game where there's an absence of fun.

For starters, the sensation of speed is not great. As usual, a low framerate is the culprit. This can be excusable when there's lots of detail, but there isn't. What's more, the championship mode simply consists of a points table and 18 races, with cheesy tourist videos as your only segue. That's right, no podium videos, no money earned, no damage and no upgrades.

I even found myself wishing there was some commentary. After all, it's one of the best way to make a dull sport seem more interesting: "holds it...holds it...HOLDS IT!"

Unfortunately, there's none to be found.

Luckily, for the diehards who already have this game on pre order, things get a little better. Every single track and rider from the '07 season is present, and they perform similarly to their real life counterparts. In addition to the arcade mode, there's also an Xbox-style 100 point achievement list, which extends the longevity of the no frills championship mode considerably.

But for the rest of us, it's not going to be enough. Perhaps the best way to sum up this game is the sole portrait of '06 champion Valentino Rossi that appears constantly while the game loads. Frozen into an unrecognisable grin, he seems to say, "Yeah, I'm here. But I'm not sure if I want to be."

Jenga: World Tour DS

The good
- The main points of Jenga are all there
- The physics programmers did their job well
- You can now play Jenga on the bus…

The bad
- It’s otherwise pointless
- The designers were also the physics programmers
- …so long as the bus has stopped.


It can’t be an easy task, porting a game that requires deft, delicate touch and complex physics onto a gaming console. It’s not too hard to imagine some die hard fan of the block stacking game witnessing the release of the Nintendo DS and its touch screen and proclaiming: “Yes! Finally, with this incredible new ‘touch screen,’ my dream can become digital reality!” Possibly while frothing at the mouth slightly.

The rest of us are going to see Jenga: World Tour sitting on the shelf at your game store of choice and simply wonder, “why?”

Perhaps, when pinholing at the smaller details, there is some justification as to why this project has gained release. After all, what better than a stylus to convey that finest of touches that determines whether your Jenga stack topples or stands tall? What better than the world’s most popular portable console to ensure that one may never go without a chance to go mano a mano in a gripping Jenga clash? The Jenga fun is no longer confined to lounge rooms, holiday homes and desks of the terminally alone! Now you can get your Jenga action in a car, on a train, even on a plane!

The concept is pretty simple as well. Hold the DS on its side, so that the screen can display the block tower at its maximum height. Holding the DS this way also has the effect of making some DS owners feel like they are doing something more intelligent than playing a game, which is either a bonus or a complete irrelevance depending on your viewpoint.

Next, all players have to do is choose from a collection of the world’s most unnappealing avatars this side of an RSL pokie and the game begins.

In game, the stylus is used to select a block, with the player motioning a straight line forward, backwards or sideways to remove the brick from the stack. The physics model is pretty accurate, with each brick reacting to those around it with a real sense of friction. If those cues aren’t enough to determine whether you’re about to cause a game ending collapse, there’s also a colour coded system and a “heat” meter. The colours are fairly basic: green for easy, yellow for medium and red for hard to impossible. The heat meter reacts while you are teasing out each block. When it’s swinging into the red, you’re courting not only a game over screen but also an obnoxious voice yelling something along the lines of, “Tiiimbeeerr!”

All sounds pretty on the level, right? But here’s the problem. After a game is released, the chance to pinhole on gaming mechanics is over. Certain things get cast in a harsher light. Aspects that at first seemed trivial, well now they seem kinda like vast oversights.

Let’s take what is ostensibly the whole point of the game: the ability to play on a bus or in a car. Okay, while it’s true that your virtual stack of blocks no longer require the services of a table in order to stay upright, Jenga is still a game that requires a steady, measured hand in order to win. Your stylus is just as prone to wobbles, shakes and checks. Bumps and shakes are detrimental to your block manouvering ability. In other words, if you try to play Jenga: World Tour on a city bus, you may as well be on horseback.

That isn’t to say there aren’t other advantages of having a digital version of Jenga. Some tables feature some interesting new advantages, such as having extra heavy “concrete” bricks that have more friction and weight, “ice” bricks that have less friction than normal and even levels where aliens or catapaults are firing at your bricks to try and cause a mistake.

In the end, what you get out of Jenga comes to this. Are you prepared to pay more than double what a Jenga set costs for a couple of extra game modes and not having to manually stack the blocks? Do you not care about bad menu design? Even if the buttons look like they were pinched from a website coded in 1993? Do you still trust a game that starts you on level 2, bizzarely locking the beginner stage until you’ve completed the game? Then you’re set to have a great, intense game of digital Jenga with your mates.

So long as they have a copy too.

Ace Combat 6: Fires of liberation.

Sims are a curious beast. They’re perhaps the only form of gaming where the player willingly takes proven game elements like pace, learning curves, intuitive controls and storyline to the pawn shop and trades them for things that most of us play games to avoid. Things like rows of statistics, keyboard overlays, ten million dials and a strict budget.

To Namco’s credit, the Ace Combat series has steadily increased its simulation factor over the years, but still managed to keep its gameplay intact. Sure, there’s real world plane models (though somewhat less than Ace Combat 5) that will make you check your disk tray to make sure you didn’t accidentally put in a Top Gun DVD. It uses every single button on the controller; even the select button that most people forget exists. It has realistic physics and draw distance, so that most of the time you’re furiously chasing nothing but black specs with a green square around them instead of plugging hordes of perfectly speed matched foes from about twenty metres a la Afterburner. You have to manually extend your landing gear. You have to manage things like weapon loadouts. But make no mistake, you won’t even have to think about the controls after the first ten minutes.

As mentioned before, the programmers haven’t taken Ridge Racer-sized liberties with the laws of physics. Still, there’s those little arcadey touches everywhere. Most players will notice after a glance at their HUD that their fighter is equipped with nearly 200 heat seeking missiles, which in some missions still aren’t enough to finish without reloading.

Players will also notice that while it’s still possible to stall your jet, your virtual pilot will never exhibit any ill effects, no matter how many consecutive high G turns he pulls off at speeds that in the real world would vacuum pack your intestines into your ankles.

In other words, clearly the developers didn’t want too many pesky realities creeping into your fun. This leaves more time to pursue the main game mechanic, namely the Bruckheimer-like pursuit of larger and louder explosions. It goes like this: See a red blip on your radar. Follow that blip until you see his green square in your HUD. Keep the green square in your crosshairs until it turns red. Press the missile button about six times. Wait for your co pilot to tell you how awesome you are. Repeat.

In between these sessions of unadulterated hot death, Ace Combat introduces us to its “story” aspect. It’s important to note that, as in earlier instalments, Namco has made an interesting break from gaming tradition by making the story not about your own character. Instead, it’s the epic overdubbed journey of a pilot’s wife, from her picket fenced home in war torn Emmeria to the slate and granite of Estovakia, in search of her daughter. There’s even tears and slow motion pans of innocent children at play.

The surprising thing is that it’s arguably for the best, because any story that involved the pilots directly would no doubt become an onslaught of backslapping, patriotics and machismo. Instead, the story is like a counter balance to all the killing, giving your opponents a real sense of character and humanity that is only somewhat diluted by the fact you’ll kill almost a thousand of them in your first two hours of play.

As far as first impressions go, Ace Combat doesn’t quite hit all the right notes. Namco’s menu design and presentation once again looks like it could have been ripped from an SNES role player. The first few missions offer little in the way of variety, and most will be somewhat under whelmed by the sense of speed, which is unfortunately realistic.

But then, finally, it all comes together. The radar and objectives start to make sense. You get enough consecutive kills to earn an allied attack. You pull off a multiple kill using your special weapons. The weather effects and clouds start conveying that sense of speed. You realise that you’re getting excited.

You might even then decide to stray into a multiplayer game, only to be instantly shot down by the hordes of diehard Japanese fans who love the game so much they gave the 360 its biggest ever month in Japan. But you’ll persevere and finally manage to take a few down. By then, you’re converted.

Like many sims, Ace Combat requires a bit more commitment before it starts to give something back, but when it does you’ll be immersed in a deep, beautiful game with a dedicated online community and masses of replayability.

The good:
Amazing Graphics
Slick Controls

The bad
Dodgy story
Slow start

8/10