For the first time in
five months I'm going to write about games other than Animal Crossing. I still play it every day, mind, but I've been a bit lazy this week. I decided not to invest in any turnips this week so there was no need to play morning and evening to check turnip prices. As a result I've only played once a day to do the usual daily tasks of digging up fossils, finding the money rock and checking Nook's and the Able Sisters' for items I don't have in my catalogue yet.
Soo. I've sampled a few different DS games of late and I thought I might write about them before I get too lazy to care. I've also been switching between DS games somewhat sporadically, so here we are.
Fire Emblem: Shadow DragonI was meant to write a lengthy review about it but I just never got around to finishing it. For now I'm going to say that it's enjoyable but it definitely lacks a lot of things that I love from the GBA games (the first one in particular). No support conversations, for one. The online shop is interesting but it annoys me that it is the only way you can get the Elysian Whip, and only on certain days. That was the reason I put the game down, so it's quite inconvenient.
I have a few quibbles about the controls, possibly because I'm just so used to the GBA controls. I don't like the semi-3D graphics and battle animations either.
I like this game but I wanted to love it. Maybe part of the reason why is the lack of support conversations. Corny as this might sound, support conversations between characters always helped me build a connection to them. No support conversations means not being able to connect to the characters, so I don't feel so attached to the game. Maybe.
I'll get back to it once I can be bothered visiting the online shop to buy the Elysian Whip I need to change Sheeda into a Falcoknight, but for now I'm not in any hurry.
Castlevania: Order of EcclesiaI put this down a little while ago because I was starting to feel exhausted (as if I were the one running around a monster-filled castle), but then I picked it up again some time after putting
Fire Emblem down. I looked up ways to make lots of money fast, too. One might say that the best way to play and save money is not to get hit, but dammit, I just can't do that so I need a huge, disposable income to blow on potions.
Anyway, I'm up to the battle with Dracula now and it's obviously quite difficult so I've put the game down agan and shall resume at a later date. It's a damn cool game, though. If you liked
Dawn of Sorrow you'll probably like this, too.
Loving the Volaticus glyph, by the way.
Zoo KeeperI didn't play this for a while and started playing again a couple of days ago. I've suddenly improved in Time Attack, able to hit scores in excess of 1,000,000 points (compared to 80,000 last time I checked) so hey! Still have no idea how Kat can manage scores of over 6,000,000 but there you go.
Honeycomb BeatI quite like this game despite the lax reviews it's been given. The premise is simple: flip the honeycomb tiles over in a set number of moves. Game controls are touch-screen only. When you tap a honeycomb tile to flip it over, it affects the adjacent tiles as well, so don't think that you can be flipping tiles willy-nilly. There are also special tiles that, when tapped, will flip all tiles in a certain direction (a horizontal or diagonal line, for example), so it's all about thinking ahead. Deceptively simple and annoying as many puzzle games are when you're stuck for a solution. It's the kind of game you can pick up and play for five minutes.
Gardening MamaMama's out of the kitchen and getting her hands dirty in the garden. If you've played any of the
Cooking Mama titles on the DS you'll probably like this. It follows the same kind of step-by-step gameplay from its predecessors, only you'll be pruning instead of chopping, and watering things instead of boiling them.
The game starts off in the garden where two flower beds are ready for planting tulips and pansies respectively. Then as you plant and cultivate more lovely things around the garden, you can unlock more flowers as well as fruits in the orchard, vegetables in the veggie patch, and the rose garden dedicated to growing roses.
I like that it has more depth than the
Cooking Mama games. In those, once you'd mastered a dish that was pretty much it. It was fun but short-lived. Growing things in
Gardening Mama are more of a process. For example, you might plant some pansy seeds, go to the fruit orchard to plant an apple tree sapling, then return to the flower garden to find that your pansies have germinated. Once you've transferred the tiny pansy leaves to a new pot it's time to check on your apples. Leave your newly-grown plantlings for too long and they will start to wilt, so you have to be careful not to grow too many things at the same time.
The process also adds a greater degree of difficulty in getting a perfect 100 and a gold medal when they rate your matured flowers/fruit/vegetables since you'll need to have a perfect score in every task along the way. The highest score I've managed is 98 which, annoyingly, only gets you a silver medal.
For the most part, the touch-screen controls work pretty well. The only exception I've come across so far is when you're tilling the soil. The screen prompts you to draw a downward-sloping diagonal line to push the shovel into the soil, but I have no idea how to make it dig up a lot of soil or a little bit of soil. I think I've got it figured out when you're shovelling soil from the bag onto the scales: drawing a firm downward stroke causes the shovel to pick up a smaller amount of dirt, whereas flicking the stylus in the same direction picks up more, but this method doesn't seem to work when you're tilling soil in the garden.
One more thing, and I don't know if it's really worth mentioning this, but one must bear in mind that this is a game. It is not intended to imitate any sort of gardening in real life and it never claims to. I'm sure that powdered fertilisers aren't arranged in little palettes of colours in the ROYGBIV spectrum, nor can you can clear away storm clouds by breaking them up with your stylus and blowing them away yourself. I say this because one 'review' (not so much a review as an opinion) I read complained that the game was not as 'realistic' as the
Cooking Mama games where many of the tasks are similar to those in a real kitchen. Please
please do not compare a simulation game to the real thing. If you wanted the real thing, you'd go and cook a real meal or grow some real flowers.
And now it's lunchtime and I'm starving.
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midget_kaplor's journal
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