Metal Slug 7 (DS)

If you don’t know Metal Slug yet, I’d suggest getting acquainted with it right now.  The games are basically like those wonderful B-movies that should be horrible, and you know they should be horrible, and you feel horrible because you enjoy them so damn much.  As much as you want to tell yourself that this is mindless and low-culture, you are just having too much of a good time to care.  The game is just too charmingly self-aware to get mad at it for any of its faults.  I mean, the soldiers’ screams are hilarious, and the violence is so ridiculously over-the-top that it’s more funny than gruesome to blow apart enemies with a shotgun.

Metal Slug 7 lives with Contra in the platformer/shooter vein of games, and like Contra, the one-hit KO is present for you, the good guy.  The difficulty of the game lies in taking on legions of soldiers without getting hit by anything.  Sure, the soldiers are mostly one-hit KO pushovers like you are, but the sheer amount of them mean that a few are bound to get a lucky shot or 5.  This really didn’t bother me until I realized the sheer amount of lives I was losing due to these small deaths.  This of course, led me to be nice juicy prey for Metal Slug’s ridiculous boss fights.  At the end of each level, you fight a boss, and the difficulty ranges from appropriate to I want to kick a puppy.  The level four boss’s nickname may as well be game over.

Metal Slug 7 brings a couple of changes to the series, one bad and a couple good.  I don’t know why they decided to leave two-player co-op out of the final product; I loved playing the game with someone alongside me.  But to compensate for this, SNK gave each soldier a unique ability.  Fio carries a heavy machine gun always, Eri gets extra grenades, Tarma is the best person in a metal slug, etc.  In addition, you can carry two special weapons in addition to your standard handgun.  This helps level out some of the difficulty, but as I said, some things just cannot stop those bosses.  As far as porting it to the DS goes, the only noticeable difference lies in the smaller screen; some of the wonderful detail is admittedly lost from the game.  It is very easy to overlook this, though, when the character is moving

I love the Metal Slug series, and here I got to play it anywhere I went.  That alone gives this more than a recommendation from me.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies (DS)

So I am admittedly late to the Geometry Wars scene; I unfortunately am a poor college student who can not afford the time and money to own an Xbox 360, thus leaving me with the equivalent status of a third-world country in the gaming world. I haven't played Left 4 Dead, Gears of War (1 or 2), and I have no access to the Xbox Live Arcade. Luckily, like any good Nintendo devotee, I have a Nintendo DS, which seems to be attracting more and more ports of cheap, easy to develop games. So when my birthday came around last week, I dropped a nice $10 on Geometry Wars: Galaxies.

I always get a certain apprehension when I see a subtitle put on a game I knew was a success in another form. When I saw Galaxies instead of Retro Evolved, I was worried that the 360-DS translation was going to go awry somewhere. It could've been in the gameplay, the hardware requirements, or the user interface, but I had this trepidation on whether or not I should have bought it. Well, the $10 price was enough to convince me that even if it wasn't bad, it would at least give me some fodder for my first videogame review.

Let me start off my review with what is likely going to be the conclusion of that same review: Geometry Wars: Galaxies is basically crack. I'm serious. I haven't lost track of time on a videogame like this since the original Super Smash Bros came out in 1999. Galaxies is one of those games that, if you're not careful, will make you forget that it is dinner time and when you put the game down, you will be wondering what that awful feeling in your gut is. It means that you haven't eaten in a week, and that your family is very worried about you.

So the game's addictive. That suggests that the 360-DS translation didn't go so bad for Sierra and Kuju. The game handles extremely well; you steer with the D-pad, which is expected, and you fire with the touch screen. The game is extremely simple; you are a ship, and there are glowing multi-colored shapes heading towards you. That's about all there is to understand. With it, we have the triumphant return of the high-score-only objective. It's very easy to get used to, and it allows the OMG-quick-reaction change of firing direction that these types of games need. I don't know how many times I have failed to notice a blue diamond sneaking up behind me before it is almost too late. I can immediately fire behind me and shy away behind my shield of bullets. The single-player campaign is not really compelling in its own right; there is no story, there is no mission structure, just a bunch of solar systems with a bunch of different levels and bronze, silver, or gold medals. The only thing making me want to gt through these levels is the promise of a new, interesting stage with like a black hole in the middle or a maze or something like that. It all comes together and works, especially if you are the OCD-fueled gamer who needs a gold medal on every stage to feel accomplished.

I really like Geometry Wars: Galaxies. It is what it wants to be and nothing more. There isn't a nonsensical story about an alien invasion that drives brightly-colored ships, and you aren't saving the galaxy from the scourge of a virus or plague of something. Heck, you might even be the bad guy; you're the one going from galaxy to galaxy killing everything on the planet. Either way, the game works extremely well, and I always feel good about games that I have to make a conscious effort to put down.