Thanks a lot for all these articles, been reading them since they showed up on here but they actually gave me the final push I needed to decide and grab a handheld. Got a DS along with a few games last week, (Advance Wars, Panzer Tactics, Zelda Phantom Hourglass) mostly based on what you wrote and a few other articles I read here and there.. And I love it so far
. I look forward to the next one.
Great choices there on your first three games. Big thumbs up. I have also picked up those recently and those are the definite cream of the crop for the DS.
Panzer Tactics is perhaps not the most innovative game - but it is definitely a solid turn based wargame that would have been very home on the PC ca. 1997. Of all game titles currently available for the DS,
Panzer Tactics DS aims at the highest age group.
As for non-RPGs for the DS, here's the results of my recent forrays on the platform:
Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a great puzzle game with wonderful art direction and great use of the stylus, and it aims at a Teen+ age group. I've been playing through this and the developer, Japan's Level 5, raised the bar with this game. No, it's not an RPG - but it is a definite showpiece for the DS. Level 5 has impressed me all to hell with this game. Highly recommended.
I've heard very good things about
Anno 1701 which has been available in Europe a while but just released in North America this past week. It's based on a best selling German strategy series for the PC, very similar to Sid Meir's
Colonization. Again, adult aimed turn based strategy, with elements of Civilization. It's not a port - and makes heavy use of the stylus. I'm definitely going to grab
Anno 1701 this week at my local EB Games. Reviews on it are great so far.
I really didn't like and cannot recommend
Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles. The graphics are great - sure - but the gameplay just isn't there. Stylus use is minimal. It's too bad as the base the developer had to work from was certainly solid. I love eye candy and I firmly believe a great game has to have great eye candy - but that doesn't mean that great eye candy makes a great game. It's just a base you need to work from. If it's all you got - your game will fail miserably - and Gameloft failed on this title, imo.
Lastly,
Ninja Gaiden DS is out later this month and all of the preview movies indicate that unlike
Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles,
Ninja Gaiden has awesome graphics and awesome gameplay. The big deal with
Ninja Gaiden DS is that the dev budget and time spent was
vastly higher than virtually any other title available for the DS platform. It seems to me that 98% of DS developers just mail in the effort, know what I mean? Not so with
Ninja Gaiden DS. The thing looks amazing.