An RPG played like a grid like board game? The concept used in Dokapon Journey for the Nintendo DS isn’t really a new one. A childhood friend of mine used to draw up maps on a big piece of grid paper and from there he’ll populate it with monsters, traps and most importantly, he maintained stats of each and everyone of our characters. A pen and paper Dokapon Journey!

Now he forsaw that while someone is engaging a monster/trap, the rest will have to wait their turn to roll the dice and move their characters along the map. To counter this, he allowed concurrent movement, so unless your dice roll brings you to the same tile, you can basically move about the map without waiting for the previous guy to finish his turn. His ability to multitask as a pseudo dungeon master helped in this aspect as well.

Unfortunately, Dokapon Journey is nothing like that and if you ask me, it can be a whole lot of wait. You have to wait while your A.I characters (you can’t call them allies, more like competitors) battle someone, you’ll have to wait when the A.I character encounters treasure, or enters a shop. Basically the game applies the entire turn based aspect to everyone, and it’s transparent (you get to see what an A.I character buys from a shop!)

Patient gamers can get something out of Dokapon Journey’s inherent boardgame fun but does who want more meat in the form of action? You are better off getting some real-time RPG action. But if you want the game, check it out here.

I love pinball games, and back during the heydays of shareware, Epic Pinball was one of the main stays in my “big” (back then) 420 MB harddrive. But I wonder whatever happened to that shareware distributor, I  remember subscribing to their newsletter (which was more like a huge listing of shareware stuff) on Computer Shopper Malaysia magazine but that was many donkey years ago. They gave out shareware diskettes through that magazine as well, if I remember correctly.

In any case, the only other pinball game that competed for my attention was the ubiquitous Pinball, the scurge of productivity for anyone running a Windows PC. And for the past 2 years, Metroid Prime Pinball along with the included Rumble Pak rank as one of the most played games on my Nintendo DS. The game is so good that it’s hard to believe that people still make pinball games for the DS.

But always willing to give games a chance (Speed Racer wouldn’t have been highly recommended by yours truly if I took it at face value as a movie tie-in and didnt play it), I decided to check out Pinball Deluxe for my favourite handheld platform, the Nintendo DS.

The first thing that you’ll notice is that Pinball Deluxe trumps Metroid Prime Pinball in the number of boards available, as they are divided into two themes, toys and sports, which further drilldown to individual boards for tennis, soccer,etc.. However quantity doesn’t equate quality as these boards are rather simple bothering on being boring.

While the boards feel like they were pieced together with little imagination, the gameplay suffers from lag as the pinball itself travels as though it has an anvil chained to it. And if you must know, the Adventure Mode will have you fulfilling objectives such as scoring x amount of points for a particular board, and by doing so unlocks the board for the Free Play mode. A pretty standard modus operandi for this sort of game.

At the end of the day (or the play-through session) Pinball Deluxe doesn’t really live up to it’s name. Having a huge number of boards doesn’t stick as a plus point as the quality is questionable at best (with some capable of putting you to sleep), and if you are in a situation where you have to choose between Metroid Prime Pinball (click here for purchase info) and Pinball Deluxe, pick the former. Trust me, you’ll thank me for it.

As requested by a commentor on a previous post, check out the following gameplay video for The Guild DS:

For my review of the game, click here.

When it comes to occupation, I really can’t imagine myself as a travelling salesman, going from door to door selling wares. The work seems incredibly hard, travelling from town to town (by bus, car or plane), living in motels, and a lot of talking with perhaps not so desireable outcomes.

Take this back several centuries to medieval times and you’ll find the  prototypical travelling salesman on a horse-drawn cart. Instead of Tupperware and Anway products, he’s buying wares such as breat and meat in one town, only to sell them to traders in another town. Living it rough, he might be have to spend the night out in the open, exposed to bandits/robbers/scum of the earth. If he’s lucky he’ll escape in one piece or, perhaps with just his wits left.

The Guild (for the Nintendo DS) attempts to convey this as a turn-based strategy game not unlike that of Heroes of Might and Magic (the map is actually quite pretty and features intuitive use of the touch screen, even though on-screen cues are at most, sparse). However, the simplistic gameplay (buy and sell stuff from town to town) with the overall goal of earning enough money to fund different strategies to persuade merchants to join your titular Guild, might leave you wanting.

Even the sword fights are reduced to whether you can slide your stylus  repeatedly and quickly as you can choose to forgo parrying your opponent’s strikes! While the story mode can become a bore after 30 minutes, the scenarios mode might hold your interest a while longer. Some of the scenarios include making X amount of money in a number of turns or building up your business (to a certain winning extent) in a number of turns.

While simple, The Guild is probably best described as Capitalism 101. It’s a perfect tool for explaining to a child the effects of supply and demand as well as the really excellent concept of profit taking, albeit in a medival setting.

It’s almost like playing one of those spot the difference games when you’re comparing the box art for The Dark Spire (American release) with its Japanese release, Genmu no Kiri to Ken no Okite which was released last year in Japan by Success.

Aside from the obvious title change (but the fonts look really similar), there’s an additional brick-like motive on the US cover, shaped like a tower/spire, to give emphasis to the title.

A throwback to really old-school RPGs, the US version of the game was released recently and it’s currently bundled together with the soundtrack CD, a pretty good bargain I must say at USD 34.90 (click here for details). The Japanese version is selling at the usual price of USD 48.90 for Japanese imports (click here for details)

Fans of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the Nintendo DS, want in on the recently released manga in Japan but do not understand Japanese/or don’t know where to get it? Well don’t fret as some nice people have “scanslated” the manga into English and put it up in an easy to read web format (no downloads necessary).

The first issue is available here and be sure to bookmark the site.

Welcome to another installment of Nine Over Ten 9/10′s Bargain Bin spotlight. This time, we’ll look at bargain bin Nintendo DS titles (that are worth your time and money) for under USD 20:

• Bleach: The Blade of Fate (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• Drop Case (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• Metroid Prime Pinball (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• Pipe Mania (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• New International Track & Field (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• Super Monkey Ball DS (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• Spore Creatures (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• Wacky Races: Crash & Dash (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning (USD 14.90) – Click here for details
• The Legend of Kage 2 (USD 17.90) – Click here for details
• Glory Days 2 (USD 17.90) – Click here for details

This month’s bargain-of-the-week on Play-Asia is the Japanese RPG  titled Lux-Pain, for the Nintendo DS. While I’ve not played the game before, it’s going for a really attractive price of USD 14.90.

For details of the game (synopsis, screenshots) as well as purchase details, please click here. Free international shipping applies to certain countries when purchasing from Play-Asia, so do take advantage of this.

My earliest memories of the side-scrolling beat-em-up genre were mainly limited playing Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on the Micro Genius console, and I wasn’t really good at them. In the case of Double Dragon, it didn’t take long for Billy and Jimmy to get the crap beaten out of them, as I approached the game more like a button-mashing exercise than anything else.

Time has certainly tempered those er..wild..instincts, and as luck would have it, there’s a new beat-em-up in town, and it’s called, how aptly, Tokyo Beat Down. You main play as a cop, Lewis Cannon, who likes nothing better than to deliver some smackdown to bad guys, and boy, there are plenty of them in this game.

From gangster types carrying assorted weapons (including molotov cocktails) to looters, to walking Frankenstein like fellas, to military type guys with guns, Lewis will have his hands and legs full, punching, kicking and shooting them. For a man of action however, Lewis does seem a bit sluggish when it comes to executing moves (e.g. drawing his gun), and whether it is intentional or not, this opens you up to be attacked by enemies.

This being a current generation game with old school gameplay, in place of 2D sprites, Tokyo Beat Down has 3D textures in essentially a 2D sidescroller. The graphics are functional at best, so don’t go expecting something really pretty. I wish they add some comic touches to them death scenes.

The storyline is told using stills and the lines, both in-game and in stills mode are pretty funny and irrelevant at times. I bet some of these puns work better in the Japanese version of the game.

Sluggish controls aside, beat-em-up starved fans on the Nintendo DS, can still find plenty to like about Tokyo Beat Down. Now, if only someone can take up the task of making one based on the Hokuto No Ken IP, without the touch-screen shennanigans of the previous release.

Tokyo Beat Down is available at Play-Asia, click here for details.

If someone decided to take the Tamiya Mini-4WD experience and put it on the Nintendo DS, what would you get? In a nutshell, Trackmania. Like the real-life counterpart where it seemingly takes inspiration from, Trackmania can be a really fun experience.

Races are divided into three different categories and while each category features a different set of cars and tracks, each race is actually a fast sprint through several checkpoints in order to get from point A to B. And like Mini-4WD, control when going about a track is everything, and should you veer off course (and fall off a track), you can say goodbye to your race.

This makes for course memorization and lots of practice. While there are no guardrails to guide your car, turns have to be taken precisely and jumps, well, just becareful where and how you would land as you can just as easily lose control and veer totally off course.

Trackmania is purely racing without the flashy look and feel that was in Mario Kart. Functional graphics and sound aside, you’ll stay more for the racing and also for the Editor mode which allows you to create more diabolical tracks.

Do check it out. Trackmania is available at Play-Asia. Click here for details.