Drinkable Chicken

I love this game. It’s basically a collection of small puzzles, disguised as an adventure. The charm of it is that you can pick it up at any time, solve a puzzle or two, and put it back down. Or at least you *could*… I find it very addictive. Some of the puzzles are well-known, like the pitcher puzzle, and a variant of the river-crossing puzzle, etc. Still, unless you do this sort of thing all the time, some of them can be quite challenging.

I like this sort of “brain exercises” better than the Brain Age type games… those tend to be focused on solving problems within a set time, which tends to really annoy me. :-)

This Nintendo DS game is the third in the Phoenix Wright series. As such, it’s much the same as its two predecessors, and doesn’t introduce much (or anything at all) in the way of new gameplay. In spite of that, I found it to be quite enjoyable.

The ongoing story of Phoenix & co moves ahead, sometimes in unexpected ways. Most of the well-known supporting characters are here again. We get to learn more about their past, and sometimes you even get to play them for a while (rather than Phoenix). Also: Phoenix has a love interest! :-) Or maybe two. In addition to that, there’s the usual number of cases that seem impossible to solve at first glance, but turn out to make sense (well, sort of) as the game goes on.

Like the other two games, there are some minor nits that make gameplay somewhat less enjoyable than it could have been. Where some text adventures suffer from the “guess the verb” syndrome, PW sometimes suffers from “guess the correct piece of evidence”… or rather, presenting a piece of evidence at the exact point the makers of the game had in mind, even if there are other points where it would make sense to do so. Saving often helps, but is still annoying.

But overall, this game’s highly recommended. It’s too bad the Phoenix storyline seems to be over now. Fortunately it’s not the end of the series; the next game will be Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. ^_^ (Apparently it’s already out; I haven’t seen it anywhere yet.)

Arkanoid DS. With a paddle controller!

Unfortunately, judging from the preview, the game itself is disappointing (and isn’t the same as the original Arkanoid we all knew and cursed back in the 80s).

Bangai-O Spirits preview:

“Once you’re done your creation, you can save it to cartridge and send it to other Bangai-O Spirits owners in a very unique way: through the power of sound. Using old-school modem-like technology, you’ll convert your levels into a sound that other Bangai-O Spirits carts will recognize. Place a set of headphone earpieces to a DS microphone, plug in the 1/8th inch jack to the host, and send that file off through high-pitch whines. It’s similar to the way that we Commodore 64 and TRS-80 programmers used to save and load our created programs, and here it makes a return in a contemporary game design.”