The blog post where I review the Nintendo 3DS and Professor Layton

Hi everyone, hope you have all been well over the winter and avoided getting sick as much as possible!

Embarrassing fact: I haven't blogged in so long that I couldn't remember the URL to my own blog, so I tried to Google it, but my blog doesn't show up on Google for some reason, even when I type in the exact title of it (which I wasn't 100% sure that I completely remembered). I couldn't even remember what my blog was supposed to be about until I read the description (over on the right hand side column). So, I used to review Nintendos games. Now I think I might review a Nintendos product!

This winter I bought David a Nintendo 3DS because I'm pretty awesome like that. And also because I suspected that if I bought David a 3DS I could get his old, regular-type DS as a hand-me-down, a ploy which has totally worked. And also because I thought it might be cool to play Nintendogs in 3D (although I haven't gotten around to that yet because I'm still pretty attached to my 2D Nintendogs and I don't think I can handle another one at this point in time).

To go with the 3DS I also bought Street Fighter and Pokemon (I can't remember if it's Pokemon Black or Pokemon White). The Pokemon game came with a cool 3D Pokedex feature, which for the longest time, I used to call a "three-Pokemon-dexter". The best part of having a 3DS is probably having this 3D Pokedex, which regularly gets updated with new Pokemon. Anyway, moving on now (because I don't want to alienate any of you readers who aren't into the Pokemon franchise)...

One negative thing I'd have to say about the Nintendo 3DS is that it uses a different battery charger to the regular-type DS, which is of a minor inconvenience because both of us have regular-type DS chargers at home so no matter whose place we're staying at, there is never a problem with running out of battery. It's also different to the regular-type DS (that I'm used to) in that the power button, volume button, and stylus are all in different places. This means that I often randomly grope the side of the 3DS to get the stylus out. But I'm sure the men at Nintendo had their reasons for making these changes.

Another negative is that the 3D vision only works if your head is at exactly the right angle in relation to the screen, which means that if David is playing and I want to look over his shoulder, the display will be stuffed up and blurry for at least one of us. However this is mitigated by a handy function with which you can use to turn the 3D feature off.

The third negative is that there is a feature on the 3DS that takes a photo of your face and turns it into a Mii, which I initially thought was pretty cool, until it turned my photo into a really ugly Mii. But Miis don't resemble humans anyway, and I suspect that any person who actually gets a decent looking Mii out of it looks pretty freaky in real life!

Anyway the positive points are that the 3DS comes in a rather fetching electric blue cover and it provides us with hours of mobile entertainment.

On another note: I just played Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (Professor Layton 3) and I can't wait for the next instalment in this series! The story was quite moving, but I won't tell you in which parts exactly, because I know that not everybody enjoys spoilers as much as I do! I was pretty chuffed with myself because I managed to find every single puzzle in the game (in Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, I couldn't find every single puzzle and had to resort to Internet walkthroughs to find the last couple that I'd missed).

The Professor Layton storyline was impeccably well written and nicely balanced and interspersed with puzzles. I found the difficulty level of the puzzles to be quite good (challenging but not impossible to solve). The worst puzzles for me are the sliding puzzles, I have very poor spatial awareness and can't do things like read maps or tell my left from my right, but I found that even the spatial-type puzzles were easy to solve with Hints (I suppose I'm a little older than the target audience for these games though).

However, the puzzles were sometimes a bit repetitive in that many relied on the same kind of trick (e.g. the number 6 can be flipped upside down to become a 9, etc). But I must say that in this Professor Layton game there were fewer "gimmicky puzzles" than in either of the previous Professor Layton games (by 'gimmicky puzzle' I mean trick questions).

Anyway, hope you have enjoyed my reviews! Tell me what you thought of the 3DS or Professor Layton! Next blog post I might review some Xbox games like Portal or L. A Noire. Until then, peace out everybody!

Nintendogs review!

People who used to follow my blog back in 2009-2010 (I believe this is a grand total of three people, including my boyfriend, who only read my blog because I made him), would remember that I reviewed the Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts. (I would put in some cool hyperlink over the word "Scribblenauts" that would take you to the relevant blog post, but I'm frankly not tech-savvy enough for that kind of thing yet.)

Today I'm reviewing another Nintendo DS game... Nintendogs!

The version I have is "Labrador and Friends" and the breeds of puppy available include the Toy Poodle, Schnauzer, German Shepherd, Shiba Inu, Corgi, and some other breeds that I can't remember because I didn't find them particularly cute, at least not in pixelated version (in real life all puppies are cute). I've included an image of the game's cover to the right so you can have a look at other breeds available.

If you get lots of "trainer points" (for being nice to your puppy and remembering to feed it and take it on walks and enter it into competitions), the "kennel" will get in "new breeds of puppy". So far I have unlocked two new breeds, the Pug and the Shih Tzu. Both breeds are pretty cute.

I believe you can have a total of three puppies in your house at a time, and there is always the "Dog Hotel" you can send your puppies to if you find that they are too much to handle. See, Nintendogs operate in real-time, meaning that if you feed your puppy, turn off your DS, then don't play again until two days later, your puppy will be starving. This real-time aspect kind of turned me off at first; I had a bit of an "I don't have time to be playing this every day!" sort of attitude. But really, nothing too drastic happens if you leave your puppy alone for like months on end, as I have done. (It's not like the Tamagotchis we all had in primary school, which got banned from schools because if you left them alone for like six hours, they would die.)

The game advises you that if your puppy feels neglected they will run away, but this has not happened to me yet, so I suspect it's just an empty threat. Anyway the aforementioned "Dog Hotel" is a handy way of effectively 'freezing' your puppy's hunger and thirst statuses if you need to take a break from your DS for a long time.

I currently have three Nintendogs, and at the risk of sounding like a boring mother who won't talk about anything except her children, I'll give you a quick summary of my puppies:

• Henry is a tan coloured Shiba Inu (I actually want a Shiba Inu in real life!) who is very good at Agility Competitions, fairly good at Disc Competitions and pretty bad at Obedience Competitions because under all that agility he is actually a pretty naughty and hard to train puppy.
• Lucy is a white Toy Poodle who is pretty good at everything. She is also quite friendly.
• Batman is a black Pug who annoyed me from the very beginning because of his refusal to wear his ribbon as a bow tie. Ribbons are "Accessories" you can purchase to pimp up your puppy, and generally speaking, boy dogs wear their ribbons as a bow tie, and girl dogs wear their ribbons on their head. The whole point of purchasing Batman the pug was so that he could actually look like Batman the superhero (I had a vision that he would be entirely black, then wear this yellow bow tie, geddit?) But Batman the pug had other ideas in mind and preferred to wear his ribbons on his head. I have absolutely no problem with this subversion of puppy-gender roles, but, you know, he doesn't look like Batman the superhero.

None of my puppies are particularly good at Obedience because I find obedience training incredibly banal and boring because it's so repetitive! Even teaching the puppies their name is painful. Not to mention embarrassing, if you happen to be doing this in earshot of anyone.

Competing is the only real way of earning money in Nintendogs, which you need in order to buy puppy food, water, milk, treats, shampoo, brushes, and other puppy essentials. However if you're no good with the competitions there is another way to not-starve, and that is by taking your puppy on frequent walks (they can go on as many walks in a day as long as they take a 30 minute break between each one) and selling the items that puppy will find along the way. Preeeety cheap-ass.

Hmm, that's really all I have to say on Nintendogs, so I'll just end this game review with a bunch of random ratings of arbitrary salient points...

• "Gameplay" (not really sure what this means except perhaps the degree to which actually playing the game is fun and challenging) - 8/10
• "Visuals" - 7/10 (it's pretty pixelated and the competition commentators always look like Bill Gates)
• "Sound" - 5/10 (the music played in the competitions is pretty boring... until you get to the Championship level! Then it plays cowboy music. Other than that the constant yapping of the digitalised puppies gets a bit grating sometimes)
• "Plot" - 2/10 (there is no real plot to this game because it's meant to be a "slice of life" kind of storyline... just going through the daily motions of walking and feeding your puppy, bathing it, and entering it into competitions)
• "Replayability" (my gamer boyfriend tells me this refers to the ability to replay the game and still find it interesting after you've finished it the first time) - 10/10. Nintendogs does not really end because you can always start fresh with new puppies. Also, there are always new items and accessories to collect, and surprisingly, the other characters in the game have not yet run out of stock things to say to me when we meet whilst taking our respective puppies for walks.

In conclusion, Nintendogs is a very entertaining and even addictive game for anyone who likes basic gameplay and a proliferation of puppies. It's a tiny bit Tamagotchi but with the added bonus that your Nintendog cannot die. Highly recommend!

Scribblenauts

For main course today: a study of which animals defeat which in the Nintendo DS game "Scribblenauts", and whether this is at all an accurate reflection of reality.

So for those of you unfamiliar with this exciting game, Scribblenauts features challenges in which you type in any noun, to obtain items, which solve puzzles. For example, if the puzzle involves an unhappy classroom teacher, you might obtain an apple, by simply typing in the word "apple". If the apple makes the teacher happy, you win that particular puzzle. Most puzzles are of a higher level of complexity however, for example, retrieving a sunken bus from the bottom of a lake, or transporting a beached whale back into the ocean.

(As a spoiler: for this last puzzle involving the beached whale, I climbed atop the whale, armed myself with a "jet pack", held on to a "lemon", and simply flew the whale back into the ocean, holding said whale between my thighs.)

However, the true fun in this game involves not working through challenges in the conventional manner, rather, much enjoyment can be had in the menu screen before the game even starts! I'll show you what I mean.

Type in "bear", then type in "hyena". The bear and hyena will fight, the bear will triumph, the hyena will collapse and disappear in a puff of smoke, and if you're not quick to get rid of the bear, the bear will kill you too.

Type in "bear", then type in "bear" again. Whichever bear appears first vanquishes the other bear.

Type in "bear" then type in "shark". Bears and sharks are equally matched, with the results of 4 fights ending in 2-all. Despite the fact that the battle takes place on land. This should clue you in to the fact that Scribblenauts doesn't always accurately reflect real-life situations. (If the whole holding-a-whale-between-your-thighs thing didn't already give away the game.)

Other results (thanks to my sexy research assistant David who used his DS to simulate these matches):

• Lion v Leopard = Leopard wins
• Lion v Bear = Bear wins
• Tiger v Leopard = Tiger wins
• Bear v Medusa = a very long, drawn-out battle, involving the Medusa repeatedly turning the bear into stone, before the bear managed to delivered the killing blow between attacks. Bear wins.
• Medusa v Mermaid = Medusa wins. Mermaids are generally non-combative creatures. However, if this were a competition on how to appear most attractive to a man, I'm sure Mermaid would have won, hands down.
• Mermaid v Shark = Shark wins, but needed a little persuading to start fighting in the first place. Perhaps the shark and mermaid just wanted to be friends.

This is one of two ways Scribblenauts is entertaining even before the game begins!

The other way, of course, is to do what you'd do in any other good video game: arm yourself with the most lethal weapon you can think of, and fire away!