NDS Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] Geometry Wars: Galaxies (Vivendi, Nintendo DS, 2007)

Studying your many many shapes on the go.

Geometry Wars has had one of the strangest arcs to prominence in gaming history. It was once a simple hidden minigame in the old Xbox racer Project Gotham Racing 2, became hugely popular once Xbox Live Arcade got ahold of it, and now is still a semi-regular concern while its parent racer hasn't seen a new entry since 2009. Imagine you take Robotron and replace each of the robots with glowing vector-like shapes that move around the playfield in recognizably quirky ways, and now mob the player with hundreds of them. It's awe inspiring twin stick goodness, and thoroughly earns its subtitle of Retro Evolved.

Galaxies tries to inject a campaign into the experience with mixed results. Levels are separated into planets that introduce gravity wells, strange level layouts, and tinker with your lives and smartbomb counts. Defeating enemies gives you "geoms" that add to your multiplier (up to 150x) and act as currency for new planets. Each planet has three score goals, though this is either annoyingly difficult to manage on one life or boringly easy to blow past 50,000,000 on. You have a helper droid you can upgrade as well, but all told, none of it makes things all that much more addicting.

There is good news, however. Retro Evolved is included, and it is still the aggressively good time it was on the Wii and Xbox 360. It's well-built, with only a bit of slowdown at its absolutely most hectic. For this DS version, you can shoot with the touchscreen or face buttons, and while the latter is the obviously nicer choice, buyer beware on heavier DS models like my 3DS XL, because holding and manipulating both sides of the console at the same time gets downright painful. My advice? Stick this on a multicart or TWiLight Menu solely for the Retro Evolved mode, and then go play the Wii version with a Classic Controller instead.