DS Game Roundup
Monsters, mazes and more that you've never heard about.
New Touch Party Game
In fairness to whoever signed off on the name "New Touch Party Game", we're not sure what we'd call a mini-game compilation set in a haunted house either. Then again, we're not sure why New Touch Party Game is set in a haunted house at all. The "Challenge" mode is merely each of its seven mini-games played in succession, wrapped up in a plot that wouldn't have passed for a bedroom coder's best effort 25 years ago. Good thing, then, that you can simply play through those games in Free Play, with five difficulty settings for each.
This you may very well do, because although the developers haven't completely resisted the urge to produce mediocre stylus-driven mini-games (darts, for example), the others include two fairly strong card games (Speed and Page One, which is very much like UNO), a neat little word jumble and everyone's favourite strategic board game, Othello. Well, my auntie's favourite.
Put your hand up if you've played Othello. Right, not all of you. Well, it's simple enough. Played on an 8x8 grid, the object is to end up with more stones than the other player. On your turn, the idea is to place your stone so that there is at least one straight (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) line between it and one of your others. Any stones located in between are then converted to your colour. With each passing turn, you and your opponent aim to convert more and more. It's a bit baffling to begin with, but soon becomes second nature, and there's a good bit of strategy to it (as the annual World Othello Championship, which has been running for nearly 30 years, ought to attest).
Strategy is also a bit of a factor in Page One, but luck is more significant (or maths, if you can be bothered to count that many cards). Like UNO, you start with five cards each and take it in turns to lay one down in the centre if you can match number or suit, or take a card off the pile. Producing certain cards skips other players' turns, forces them to draw two or three cards, reverses turn direction or allows you to pick the next suit, and the ultimate goal is to get rid of all of your cards - the final quirk being that when you place your penultimate card you have to hit the "Page One" button, or else you'll be given another five cards when play returns to you a few seconds later.
Less strategic but still quite demanding is Speed, where you and the other player both have four cards in your hand, with two sat on the table between you. The idea is to get rid of your cards as quickly as possible by adding them to the piles on the table, but you can only add a card one number away from one of the ones before you. Limited then (and a bit of a pain against the better AI), but still a lot better than Pairs, which is simply a memory game, and quickly saps your will to live. Darts is certainly better than that, with players using the stylus to "throw" darts with a flicking motion, but it's very difficult to gauge speed and distance, and it ends up being more fun chuckling at the AI, which tries to simulate a bad darts player on lower levels by building a score slowly - managing to fill its column with impossibly precise double-2s and triple-1s.
Finally there are the two hunts: Ghost and Word. Ghost Hunt shows you a room. When furniture wobbles, a ghost is about to pop out. When it does, you tap it. Ghosts escalate in speed and volume, but the premise is always the same, and in the absence of a high-score table or anything else to liven it up, enthusiasm quickly wanes. Fortunately Word puts in a better showing for the Hunts - it's a game where you drag the stylus over letters in a grid to form words based on a particular theme ("Greek Alphabet" has Delta, Alpha, Beta and Pi, "Fish" has Blowfish, Shark, etc.). It's a neat little game, and although there are only five difficulty levels there seems to be a fair variety of jumbles to work through.
Sadly though, anyone hoping for a left-field recommendation a la 42 All-Time Classics is going home disappointed, because much as we like Othello, Page One and Word Hunt, they are but three games, and there are lots of other things that count against NTPG overall.
The lack of structure isn't a big deal in this context, but the quality of the graphics is a bit of an issue when you're struggling to tell spades from clubs, and the interface for dragging cards with the stylus can be rather fiddly. It's also disappointing to discover that multiplayer requires more than one copy of the game. Given the simplicity of the activities on offer, it's hard to imagine this was a programming decision, and it knocks a mark off the score. As it is, card and board game fans are better with 42 All-Time Classics, although if you spot this going for a fiver at some point in the future, it will do a good job of filling the hours.