DS thoughts

Napolean asked me today when the last time I bought into Nintendo was. I thought momentarily and answered: Super-NES. But just now it occurs to me that I bought into the Gameboy Advanced SP some time ago. Anyway, all that to say I'm not a huge Nintendo buff, but I did make it a point to pick up the latest portable iteration of Nintendo's pedigree.

Today I picked up a Crimson DS Lite ...and it's exactly what I thought it would be. It's funny that I blissfully ignored the reviews and just picked up the two game I really wanted to try: Cooking Mama, and Lunar Dragon Song.

Cooking Mama is one of those oddball titles I was instantly drawn to because I enjoy those wacky off-beat designs - this one featuring a cartoon Asian mom leading you through a variety of cooking activities like tenderizing meat and peeling carrots to make dishes all of it through the use of the touch-screen. Broken down to basics, however, I found that after about 15 minutes or so I was doing the same sort of thing over and over again. And the novelty wore of quickly. Thankfully this game I paid only $15 for used.

Lunar is a console-role-playing-game in the old 16-bit sense. You walk a colourful avatar around on his adventure to collect treasure and explore the fictional Lunar world. While it scores a weak 6.5 or so on most sites, I fall under the "fanboy" category because I happen to recall enjoying the simple pleasure of the earlier Lunar games. It takes advantage of the dual screen quite well, placing action on the top screen and keeping relevant menu options on the bottom.

Anyhow, the only question remaining is, why hadn't I picked one of these babies up earlier?