DS

Naruto, to any casual observer of Japanese animation, seems to be the new Pokemon. Sure, Pokemon still has an immortal presence in our media and attics, but things are surely a-changin’.

Here’s the formula : take an endless anime series about a kid on an frighteningly obsessive quest of their own devising that has no relevance to the real world, give it a prominent time slot on Cartoon Network, and lend the likeness to action figures, video games, trading cards and underoos. You have a formula for frenzy. Those Pokemon were just the adorable advance troops, but there are far more sinister things on the way, and their eyes are huge and sparkly.

The extensive line of Naruto video games spans dozens of titles across every current video game systems. How can the story of one overconfident kid who wants to be a super-ninja fill such a vast array of gameplay? Somehow, it does – when you transplant the same story into all genres of games – so while some of the games are turn-by-turn RPG quests across Naruto’s world, some are presented as a series of side-scrolling puzzle challenges, and some are plain ol’ classic fighting games, where two opponents face off and beat the living snot out of each other. Such is the nature of Naruto : Ninja Destiny for the Nintendo DS. I can always enjoy the simplicity of a good pummelfest, and the familiar process of knocking out one increasingly difficult opponent after another.

Of course, Naruto is a bit more complex than gems like Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat – first, because it’s presented in 3D. Since the camera always resituates itself to a level perspective, the game doesn’t breach the potentially dizzying world of the third dimension too boldly. The greatest advantage to fighting in three dimensions, besides the fact that it looks pretty, is that you can quickly sidestep your opponent’s attacks with a tap of the up or down arrows – which is a lot more stealthy and effective than blocking or stepping backwards. It’s almost a move that proves to be TOO effective, as it leaves the other fighter staring off into space and launching attacks at the air for a few moments while you land a few punches yourself. Tapping the L-button on the shoulder of the DS enables ’substitution jutsu’, a move that’s absolutely way too effective, since you immediately appear directly behind your oblivious opponent, who is defenseless for that moment – except for the ability to do the same disappearing act to you. What results is a long series of disappearing leapfrogs until someone misses a button and gets smacked.

The second screen on the DS system is used for touch-activated controls. For this Naruto game, this aspect involves a randomly generated set of magical power-ups that are activated by tapping this touchscreen. All of the fighting action takes place on the top, non-touchable screen of the DS, and since both hands are used to control movement and fighting, the practicality of an additional set of touch controls that requires you to abandon either your left- or right-hand controls is questionable, but not as distracting as one might think. Gotta use that extra screen for SOMETHING, and it’s a better use than useless data readouts about the battle, which some games resort to.

Running below your standard life meter is a ‘chakra meter’, which builds in strength as you hit your opponent, or are hit by your opponent. When this meter is completely full, a simple press of the B button will allow you to perform your ’special jutsu’ – a powerful move (which is different for every character) that seriously depletes your opponent’s energy, and plays a small animation of an action-filled, magical ultra-smackdown.

Fans of Naruto will see a collection of familiar characters to choose from when battling, though you start out with only 6. A total of 16 characters can be unlocked as you accomplish various victories. The instruction manual is limited to 5 pages of useful info, so much of this needs to be discovered on your own.

There are two modes of one-player action. In Story Mode, you’ll venture through a narrative of talking heads talking about how hard their lives are and whatever pseudo-political struggles they’re involved in before you get to fight each round. I have to be totally honest in saying that I blindly skipped over these, as I have no brain-space left to fill with fictional ninja clans and whether or not they’re jerks. My own willful ignorance aside, hardcore fans of the series’ story will completely dig it. While in Story Mode, the story will dictate which character you are to use for each successive battle.

Battle Mode allows you to choose one character to battle every other character with, one by one. The game also makes use of the DS’ wireless function, enabling two players with this same game disk to play against each other from across the room. The game, unfortunately, does not go online wirelessly for a worldwide ninja battle championship. Which would be pretty great. I’m a total sucker for any DS game that allows me to play against anonymous, live opponents at 4 AM when I get lonely.

Fortunately, the game allows you to choose between ‘normal’ difficulty and ‘hard’ difficulty, since I blew through both ‘normal’ modes on my first attempt and unlocked some unlockables. I’m not yet modern enough in my gaming to have a set catalogue of expectations for my handheld gaming experiences, since my brain is still enthralled with the oldschool green-and-yellow Tetris blocks dropping across my slowly disintegrating Game Boy screen – which makes the fact that I was able to pick up the mechanics of this game so quickly something of a testament to its intuitive control scheme.

I did enjoy Naruto : Ninja Destiny, as it miniaturizes the whole 3D fighting experience without skimping on any style or detail. Keep this in mind if you’ve played the other Naruto fighting games on larger systems – this is a DS, not a supercomputer, and it will behave accordingly. Unlockables make the game replayable, and 2-player action further improves the appeal – even if you’re not a fan of Naruto. We don’t even have to hear his annoying catchphrase every 15 seconds this time, which is like, a thousand bonus points.

Hurricane Ernesto blew through New York this past weekend, and when you live in a town where trees outnumber power lines by about a million-to-one, that spells a 24-hour power outage. No showers, no life-giving internet, no oft-taken-for-granted ceiling lights. Nothing but me, a candle, and my Nintendo DS… and a great excuse to go out and buy a new game for it. Boredom and me go together like water and elemental potassium. If you don’t know, look it up.

I’ve been in love with the StarFox franchise of games since the original Super Nintendo first used it to demonstrate their newfound usage of polygonal graphics, which was both revolutionary and fascinating. Piloting your simple spaceship through space and across planetary terrain, you’d blast strange enemy ships from the sky as they approached you head-on from the deep distances within the screen. The graphics were relatively simple rotating shapes, but the sheer dimensionality of play and various paths that you could choose through space made the game endlessly playable. At the end, you’d fight a giant monkey face, and if you were lucky, you’d vanish completely into a secret world where you’d fight origami airplanes against a backdrop of rainbows and smiling planets. There was even a special issue of Nintendo Power that contained a folded paper Arwing, along with instructions, that I lovingly assembled. Thanks to the internet, I can make it again!

Nintendo followed up the success of their original character, the dashing and daring Fox McCloud, with games spanning their major consoles : StarFox 64, StarFox Adventures, StarFox Assault, and finally, StarFox Command. Seeing as how Nintendo is relatively protective of how their signature characters (Mario, Link, Samus Aran, Donkey Kong) are treated in gameplay, all of these games have been exceptionally realized. And that last one? You can play it after the power goes out for, like, ever and you’re about to fork yourself to death with boredom. Bless portable gaming.

StarFox Command makes a wonderfully unique use of the Nintendo DS’ touch screen. For the first time in the history of flight games, the DS allows your flight path to be completely intuitive and determined by the relative position in which you touch the screen. Past StarFox games were made difficult by the fact that they’d emulate real flight controls, in which pressing upwards sent you downwards and vice versa. Touching the bottom screen to fly takes a little while to get used to, but mostly because regular players of flying games have been so completely trained to reverse the controls in their minds. Once you adjust, nothing could feel more natural. Wiggle the pen to do a barrel roll, tap the top of the screen to get a speed boost, drag the pen from your bomb supply to drop a bomb. At the same time, the touch screen operates as a radar, showing you the location of everything on the battlefield, while the top screen displays your actual fighter. Darting your eyes between the two screens is an exciting challenge, and not nearly as frustrating at it might seem. If you want genuinely complex controls, try Steel Battalion for XBox. That’s a 2-foot wide controller with 40 buttons.

In addition to the clever dogfighting system, you must also strategically navigate your way through star systems and protect your mothership from enemy fighters and missiles. In a turn-based system, you draw very particular flight paths to intercept enemy clusters and recapture fallen cities. Should you fail at any one mission, you can always have backup fly in for the rescue, but if they’re off fighting giant space jellyfish, you might just well be screwed. It’s a rare mix of strategy and actual battle, and I’ve become pretty taken with it.

I have a hard time paying thirty dollars for any video game, but I’ll gladly pay that much when you can actually take that game online, for free and wirelessly (at an acceptable WiFi hotspot) and play against opponents all over the world. StarFox Command features both online, worldwide play, as well as the ability to transmit a scaled-down 2-player version of the game to anyone within 30 feet and who owns a Nintendo DS system. Not only is free (temporary) distribution of the game and free online play exciting, it’s completely unheard of and wildly generous for only thirty dollars. It’s been added to my cache of Nintendo WiFi games (which I avidly collect) for those lonely winter nights when all I have is cocoa, a snowstorm, and some guy in Japan’s ass to kick at Tetris.

There aren’t too many classic videogames that you can revisit in these future-rocket-powered times and get anything worthwhile out of that we didn’t get the first time around. If you really need to ultra-super-ify PONG, just go out and play real tennis. I’ll wait here, my arteries slowly hardening to the tune of a family size sack of Doritos. I’ll lose this stubborn gut when you tell me all about it later and I live vicariously through you. I can’t even keep score in tennis. Since WHEN is ‘love’ a score? Love is nothing but a painful splinter in the already infected wound that we rip across the flesh of time by continuing to live. Give me a sport that’s quantified in HATE and we’ll talk. Something like… I dunno, Innocent Kittenball or something.

Okay, not true. I love kitty cats. I wish I could sleep in a bed full of them. Or made of them.

Nevertheless, D3 Publishers have given us a revisitation of the quintessential classic, Breakout, which is a game that I’ve always loved. If you’ve never played Break Out, here’s how it goes :

You are a Panel, and you move back and forth across the bottom of the screen. It is your sacred duty to defend the vast gap below you from a projectile which is swiftly ricocheting around the room. You do this by moving the panel under the bouncy thing. However, as it bounces, it also knocks into bricks that are placed around the screen & destroys them. It is your secondary duty to strategically knock the projectile into these bricks and BREAK ‘EM ALL! If you don’t, you basically suck. It’s not called ‘Break Some of ‘em!’ or ‘Please Don’t Break Them Sir.’ Knock the daylights out of those stupid bricks. They were talkin’ smack about yo momma.

Of course, in the past, you’ve been limited to a joystick or an x-pad to move the panel around. NOW, with the advent of the Nintendo DS, you can control the panel with your stylus. It adds a whole new dimension of play and allows for a lot more fluidity of motion, breathing life into something that you might not otherwise be inclined to play. The new hands-on mechanics make the game well worth taking a new look at.

Break ‘em All has three solo gameplay modes – Tokoton Mode, Quest Mode and Survival Mode. All of them are presented against a kind of high-tech alien spaceship background, reminiscent of Metroid.

Tokoton Mode is your basic Breakout game, but with fancy customizable power-ups that’ll increase or decrease the respectable girth of your Panel, make the ball move at different speeds or enable it to simply destroy everything in its path for a short time. While the physics of this particular game make it initially difficult to redirect the ball instead of just frantically trying to just follow it, after a few games, you’ll probably adjust to the small lack of control. As you battle your way through different blocks and speeds and level arrangements, you’re informed that you’re EVOLVING by the top screen of the DS. From amoeba to dolphin to, and I kid you not, Jesus Christ (aka Invincible), you slowly attain purely extraneous and inutile titles. There’s the small issue of my big ham-hands getting in the way of the screen as I manipulate the stylus around, but generally, I manage to see around my fingers enough to play successfully. After three losses, you’re done – no continues in sight.

Quest Mode is more of the same, but with more of an emphasis on precision shots and trick blocks which require a few hits or hits from different angles. Every four levels, there’s a boss level (which requires more precise movements), and each boss is (strangely) based on the giant pictographs found etched in the ground at Nazca. There are the occasional ‘All Your Base‘ grammatical moments, but I think that only adds to the fun.

Survival Mode is simply bizarre. You choose an oddly shaped block, which surrounds a vulnerable core, and as projectiles fly around you in all directions (a la Asteroids), you try to vainly reflect them back without damaging your core. Adding to the bizarre chaos is the fact that there are enemy blocks jerking around the screen at invisibly fast speeds, shoving you uncontrollably into… EVERYTHING. Mostly, they’re completely off the edge of the screen, so you can’t sensibly try to destroy what you can’t even see. It’s like fighting ghosts with a ham sandwich. I don’t know exactly what that means, but neither do you. And that just about sums up Survival Mode.

So, while I’m an oldschool purist, I have a tendency to collect and explore clever re-imaginings of the classics. You can derive as much fun out of as it you might derive out of ANY game of Breakout, and said fun may vary from person to person. Enjoy.