Code Name S.T.E.A.M (3DS)

 It seems slightly incongruous for there to be a first party Nintendo game here, but it's one that doesn't even seem like it's been forgotten in the decade since its release, but rather no-one took any notice of it at all. They did try to build hype for it, and I definitely remember downloading the demo at the time, too. But no-one cared. If people were buying and playing it in 2015, then they weren't talking about it, and with it being a decade old now and with the 3DS having a minor renaissance in 2025 (thanks to the combination of broke nostalgic young people and the high price of new consoles - exactly how "retro gaming" should be!), I still don't see anyone talking about it.

 

Code Name S.T.E.A.M is a turn-based strategy game, with some mild action elements. You control a squad of very toyetic soldiers, with steam-powered armour and weapons. Moving a space uses up one unit of steam, different weapons use different amounts to fire, usually between two and four. Each of your soldiers generates eight steam per turn, and can store up to ten (though these numbers will change slightly as you unlock more equipment). So if you leave a couple of steam units at the end of a turn, they'll carry over into the next turn. Furthermore, when you fire weapons, you don't just select your target and pick "fire" from a menu: you've got to aim and fire yourself, either using a joystick on the touchscreen, or the right analogue stick if you're playing on a New 3DS.

 

I've played about ten stages so far, and all of them have had the goal of getting at least one of your soldiers (or in one case, an escorted non-combatant) to a goal area on the other side of the battlefield. After a few turns, more enemies will start generating on the map, so if you have infinite patience, you could theoretically keep killing them forever. But the battles also tend to be pretty tight, with my guys often just barely crawling over the finish line to end a lot of the battles. I think this whole semi-turn-based approach might be taken from SEGA's Valkyria Chronicles series, but I'm not very familiar with them, so I can't completely confirm this. 

 

As well as the toyetic protagonists, the game as a whole has a distinct aesthetic to it, too. The tech is all steam=powered, and your homebase is a blimp, but a lot of the fashion and such looks more inspired by 1930s and 40s military uniforms, and the world in general is a mixture of lots of brss and polished wood, with American and British flags draped everywhere. It kind of brings to mind a theoretical Fallout cartoon, made for an audience of kids in 1994. (I'll take this opportunity to make clear that I don't consider a work to be "steampunk" unless it's explicitly anti-imperialist, and since the aforementioned non-combatant you have to escort is Queen Victoria, this game definitely isn't that.)

 

This is a decent enough game, I guess. Playing through a stage is a decent enough way to pass twenty minutes or so, and there is some satisfaction to be derived from the active aiming, plus some of the sillier weapons are a lot of fun too, like the Lion Launcher (wielded by a lion-man named Lion, it makes him bounce on top of enemies for big damage), and the healing gun. Plus, if you play it, you can put it on your list of "3DS hidden gems" for internet clout, since I haven't seen anyone do that so far. Also uncharacteristically for a first party Nintendo game, you can pick up an actual copy for a pittance, if you are a cartridge-accumulating little freak.

Bugs vs Tanks! (3DS)

 One of the less popular titles in Level-5's Guild series, far behind the likes of Crimson Shroud or Attack of the Friday Monsters, Bugs vs Tanks puts the player in the jackboots of a Nazi panzer battalion's leader. However, the battalion isn't (in this battle, at least) fighting against the allied forces, as the title suggests, bugs. Because they've been shrunken down really tiny by some unknown force. "Bugs" in this case covers a lot of zoological ground, too, as apparently all the minibeasts of the forest in which your roman-saluting protagonists find themselves instinctively know that fascists are the enemies of all life, and team up against you. You'll even fight a spider boss backed up by fly bodyguards at one point!

 

So, the actual game has you driving a tank around, fulfilling various missions: secure resources, rescue lost comrades, destroy ant hills to make things a little safer for yourselves, and so on. Every now and then, there'll be a defence mission, during which you just have to kill all of the bugs beseiging your base until they're all dead. Proressing through the game, new kinds of bugs get gradually introduced alongside new mission types, and if you go looking for them, you'll also find more shrunken tanks lying around waiting for you to comandeer them. The obvious comparision to make for this game thematically is to the Earth Defence Force series, and it turns out that structurally, Bugs vs Tanks has a lot in common with Simple Series games in general, too.

 

An interesting mechanical point is that by default, you don't have a fire button. Instead, as long as there's a shell loaded, you'll fire as soon as an enemy is in your line of fire. It works well enough that there's no reason to change to the manual firing control scheme, either. Instead, your focus is to be more on strategically placing yourself in such a way that you avoid damage in those few seconds between shells being fired, and as you progress through the game, also making  decisions as to whether it's worth fighting an enemy (or a swarm of enemies), as opposed to just trying to speed past it towards your goal as the clock ticks down.

 

It's a pretty fun game! The way it handles shooting is a little annoying at first, but once you get your head around what it's trying to do, Ithink you'll come to appreciate the game for what it is, rather than being chagrined about what it isn't. It's not really relevant in 2025, but Bugs vs Tanks actually also has streetpass features, and back in the olden days when that was a relevant thing, I actually did get a hit on it once, making it maybe the most obscure game I ever got one on.

 

This is the last time I'll mention this (unless I forget), but Nintendo themselves have ensured that if you want to play a download-only 3DS game that you don't already own, you have to pirate it. Taking that into account, Bugs vs Tanks is definitely interesting enough to be worth a look for free. But, as implied above, I did actually buy this on my original 3DS many years ago, and I definitely never felt ripped off through having done so. It's not as good as those more popular Guild games I listed at the start of the review, but those games are great, there's still plenty of room beneath them for Bugs vs Tanks to be considered a good game.

WWE Brawl (3DS, Prototype)

 Long, long ago, there was concept art going around for something called WWE Brawl, a game in which superhero-like cartoony versions of WWE wrestlers would fight in somewhat fantastical environments. It was no secret that this game existed, WWE even still have a bunch of the concept art up on their official website! I remember there being some excitement for it among wrestling fans, but unfortunately, it never materialised. Until earlier this year, when an unfinished prototype of the 3DS version leaked online, being the version about which I'm writing today.

 

The game was apparently in development since 2009, with the leaked version being supposedly from around 2011, which puts it very early in the 3DS' life. It also puts it at a time a few years before WWE started caring about female wrestlers, and as such, the roster is all-male (though the concept art on WWE's site does feature the infamously useless Kelly Kelly as a member of "the resistance", she isn't in this version of the game). There are twelve playable characters, though, and they're made up of who you'd excpet from a WWE kids' game from around 2010: there's Cena, The Undertaker, Kofi Kingston, The Big Show, and so on.

 

Most are pretty much as you'd expect, though two I thought were especially interesting are Kane, who's a big, white-skinned monster-man, and Randy Orton, who has a bunch of tubes attached to him, like the Batman villain Bane. Also, looking at the concept art again before writing this, I saw that Triple H was also counted as a member of the resistance, which makes little sense, not least because the game has him dressed as a medieval king. But WWE games are infamous for their insistence on always portraying him positively.

 

As for the game itself, it's kind of like Power Stone. You fight in one of the three arenas: a blank grid world, the lobby of a fancy building (you can also take an elevator to the roof, where an Adamski-type UFO will shoot lasers at you), and some kind of cartoony sci-fi factory/lab place. There's also crates lying around, which can be broken open to reveal weapons! There's a sword, a baseball bat, a bazooka, and a giant tire. The four face buttons are assigned to jump, attack, throw (your opponent, since this is a wrestling-themed game, after all), and pick up weapon.

 

It really seems like it'd be a pretty decent game, had it actually been finished and released. All the problems I have with it, other than the slightly boring roster, are due to it being a prototype. There are only three stages, though there are spaces on the menu for eight more. A bigger variety of weapons would also have been nice. And, of course, you can only take part in one-on-one fights in this version, and after the fight ends, you're sent straight back to the title screen. Plus, the CPU opponents are all incredibly easy to defeat. Naturally, it can be assumed that with proper arcade/story modes, escalating difficulty, and maybe also group battles, the finished product would be a lot better than this.

 

There's not really much point in recommending or not recommending WWE Brawl. I've said what I think of it, and if you didn't know it was out there, you do now, and can satisfy your curiosity on your own if you want to. I do think it's a shame it got cancelled, though. Like I said, it does seem like it was going to be a good game. Still, there were plenty of vaguely similar games released on 3DS in Japan, at least. Beast Saga: Saikyou Gekiotsu Coliseum, for example.

Dangerous Road (3DS)

 I had big hopes for this one. The title made me think it might be some Destruction Derby-style racing game, or maybe something topdown like Action Fighter or Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile, Raising my hopes higher was how I discovered it: on a list of works by SIMS, those tireless stalwarts of the Master System and Game Gear in the early nineties, and I was excited to learn that they were still around and active as recent as 2016. They even worked on the most recent Ape Escape game in 2023!

 

Unfortunately, actually playing the game dashed all of those hopes. As Tak Fujii once said long ago, while toiling in the Konami shovelware mines: "It's a Frogger". I think the last time I saw a Frogger knockoff was on the Atari 2600, but here's one that came out in 2016 on the 3DS. It has a couple of new ideas, though! There are four playable characters, each with their own special ability, like being able to slow time for a few seconds or having slightly faster movement than the others.

 

The aim of the game is very slightly different to traditional frogger, too. Instead of just crossing the road to get home a few times per stage, you've instead got to go back and forth seeking out numbered flags (in order), before getting the stage clear flag. That's in the main Goal Run mode, at least. There's also that insanely irresponsible Survival Run mode. This one sees you trapped on a busy multi-lane highway (with a few train tracks to mix things up too), and your only aim is to survive for sixty seconds. It didn't really hit me how crazy it was for a game that seems to be aimed at kids to literally have a "play in traffic" mode until after I'd stopped playing. 

 

I think what really hurts this game is the lack of scores. Especially in Survival Run: there's a star item that appears occasionally that gives you five seconds of invincibilty, destroying any vehicles that hit you in this time. It's a mildly amusing effect the first few times, but they might as well have just made it an item that reduced the remaining time by five seconds. If there was a score, and you got points for destroying the vehicles in this way, there'd be some point to this. I guess you'd score points when not invincible by playing chicken, and moving out of the way of vehicles as close to being hit as possible. But then I guess that would also exacerbate the irresponsibility of the mode.

 

This is a game that exists. It's not terrible, but it's not particularly good, either. There's nothing about it that I can recommend, as it's just completely unremarkable. I played it because of the title, and to see what SIMS had been up to in recent times. Through reading this review, you've now got that information, and don't need to bother.

SubaraCity (3DS)

 I discovered this game while trying to find a city building game for 3DS. I didn't find one, so if anyone can recommend any, please let me know. Well, it is about building cities in a literal sense, but it's not a city building game like Sim City or something. It's a puzzle game, like Zookeeper or Sega Swirl, that is themed around buidling a city. 

 

How it works is that there are buildings/people/trees/etc. in a few colours on a grid. If they're the same colour and touching, they can be fused together into a higher-quality building. You pick which of the multiple squares the buildings being matched together go into, leaving empty spaces where the rest of them are.Then more buildings fall down to fill the empty spaces. Or, since the game is played looking down from above, the new buildings fall southwardly. It doesn't really make sense either way, so don't worry about it. Once a building reaches level ten, its colour changes to white, and it can only be fused with other level ten buildings. When you do this, the level of the new building is determined by how many level tens are being fused: two of them become level eleven, three become level twelve, and so on. 

 

As you're doing this, two numbers are going up. The first is population, which is your score. It goes up depending on the levels of the buildings you create, and gets a massive boost every time you make a ten plus building. The other number is the year. It starts at the year 2000, and goes up a year for every action you take. You've also got an expendible resource called mayor marks, which let you destroy one building. You start with two mayor marks, and get another every time you pass another century, and every time you make a building that's level fifteen or higher. The game ends when you've got no buildings of the same colour touching each other and you have no mayor marks with which to make space.

 

The presentation is kind of interesting, too. Visually, it's pretty much exactly how you'd expect: cute little buildings and people, all very clean and toy-like in appearance. But the music is completely bizarre. It's good, I'm not denying that, but it's also incredibly ill-fitting. You're playing this cute little puzzle game, all while the 3DS is playing this dramatic, doom-laden apocalyptic score that almost sounds like it could be made up of castoffs from the Akira soundtrack! 

 

This is a fun game, and incredibly addictive. After installing, I immediately played through an entire charge of my 3DS' battery in one sitting. Apparently, it's also available on pretty much every other modern platform, so if you want to give the developers some money (that they definitely deserve, and which I'll be doing as soon as possible), get one of those versions rather than (or in addition to) the 3DS one.

Savannah Gurashi no Cheetah-san (3DS)

 That title traslates to, I think, "Mrs. Cheetah's Savannah Life", or something like that, at least. It's a pretty descriptive title, too. You play as a mummy cheetah, and you live you life on the savannah. That life consists of chasing down prey to feed yourself and your kittens, scaring scavengers away from your freshly-killed meat, and suffering high-speed head trauma until it kills you. Or maybe you starve to death. Or maybe your kittens starve to death. The problem with a cute game about wild animals is that animals don't really live cute lives in the wild, I guess.

 

So, the game puts you in the savannah, and you've got to run around looking for the small brown animals to hunt down and kill. There's two types, which I think might be some kind of meerkat and some antelope-type creature, too. The antelope-type ones are slightly smarter and more annoying to chase down. There's other animals around too, like wildebeast and zebra, but they're bigger than you, so if you try to pounce on them, you'll just get your face smashed in on their muscle mass. To further explain how the game's played, I should talk about the controls. The d-pad steers your cheetah, tapping B makes her run, a makes her pounce, Y puts on the breaks, and the shoulder buttons do a little sideways step.

 

The X button is a context-dependant button that only comes into play once you've killed one of your prey. If you're stood over the meat, X will eat a bit of it, replenishing your hunger meter. If you're not, it'll should for your kittens to come and eat, which is essential, as the aim of each stage is to fill their hunger meters before the time runs out. And when the hyena comes to steal your kill, X can be used to scare them off. So, you know the win condition, but there are several lose conditions. First, you can die from head trauma, as you lose health every time you run into something face first. Second, you can starve to death, as your own hunger meter depletes as you run around. Third, your kittens can starve to death, which works in the opposite way, as this happens if time runs out before you've filled all of their hunger meters. There's apparently lions who'll attack you from the fourth stage onwards, but I've been unable to confirm that.

 

Mechanically, the game is pretty fun. It's repetetive, but it's cute, and mildly satisfying. The problem comes in something that might be a programming error, or it might just be a bad design desicion, it's hard to tell. The stages are only a few screens across in each direction, and they also loop in each direction, too (meaning that these savannahs are all torus-shaped). But you can be running and running and running, and never finding any prey animals to kill. It's both boring and frustrating when this happens, seeing you hunger meter and the timer both running down, with nothing you can about it. Because of this, I've never seen past the second stage. I'd love to play more of this game, and I'd love to recommend it, but this one issue completely ruins it.

 

Now, the interesting thing about this is that it's a digital-only 3DS game that (I think) you can still obtain through official channels! Because it was made using Petit Computer 3/SmileBASIC, a program/programming language that was an officially-supported way of making homebrew for the 3DS (and the DSi before it, and the Switch after it). I believe that at the time of writing, if you already have Petit Computer 3 installed on your 3DS, you can still use the seven character codes to download people's work. If you're interested in Savannah Gurashi no Cheetah-san, the code for it is 2ZDQ83Z4.

Drancia Saga (3DS)

 Apparently, this is an enhanced port of a phone game, and though I don't know what all the enhancements are, I'm going to assume that the most important one is the fact that the 3DS has buttons on it. There's very few types of game where a touchscreen isn't to the detriment of the experience, and though the controls are very simple in Drancia Saga, I can't see it being one of them.

 

What it is, though, is a kind of simple single-screen, single-plane beat em up. Each stage places you in a little one-screen location where enemies will keep spawning. The enemies die in one hit, and you don't need an attack button, as you attack by just walking directly forwards into them. Touch them with any part of you other than your weapon, and you take damage instead. Like in the first two Ys games! After you kill enough of the enemies, a boss will appear for you to fight. Beat it, and go to the next stage. I think there are eight stages. I've got to the eighth stage, and it had the air of finality about it, at least.

 

Though the game itself is very simple, there's a lot of meat in what I'll reluctantly call the meta-game. While playing, various numbers will go up. Killing enemies scores points, and they also drop coins. Collecting coins also scores points. Furthermore, if you kill lots of enemies without taking damage, treasure will appear (and are worth points), and the amount of coins each enemy drops will also increase. Coins themselves have a use as they're used to level up, but I'll get back to that later. When your game ends, you'll be awarded a gem for every hundred points you scored. In the main menu, there's a bar! In the bar, you can listen to the sound test, pointlessly talk to various bar patrons, and most importantly, there'll be a randomly chosen character to buy, for diamonds.

 

It seems like every non-boss enemy is unlockable. Maybe boss characters are unlockable too under certain conditions? I don't know. There's also a bunch of guest characters from other games published by Circle, unlockable by having their host games installed on your 3DS. The game manages to have so many playable character by having them all essentially play the same, with only a few small, but important, differences. Which means it's time to explain levelling up!

 

Every character has their own grid of sixteen squares, connected by a little maze of paths. Each square has something in it: a sword, which expands the length and width of your weapon (oo-er missus), a shield, which reduces the damage you take from enemies, a heart, which (i think) increases the amount of health restored by collecting coins, a show, increasing your movement speed, an orb, giving you a limited-use magic spell, or a burger, restoring your health to full. Some of the squares contain nothing, which does nothing. 

 

To level up, you buy these squares with the coins you've collected. But once you've bought your first square, you next have to buy one connected to it by a path, and so on. Some of the weaker characters have their power ups spread out with lots of blank spaces between them, the strongest characters have a power up in ever square and a path layout that means you can almost always pick whatever you want. Each character also has a magic spell assigned to them, from a small selection. They're all offensive, but some are more useful than others.

 

Drancia Saga isn't a mechanically deep game, and you'll probably figure out the optimum way to tackle each enemy type and boss fight seconds into your first encounter with them. But the absurdly huge amount of characters to play as, along with the general charm of the game and the satisfaction inherent to the super-simple mass-murder of enemies make it a go-to game for me when I want to keep my hands busy while watching TV or whatever since I installed it a few weeks ago. If you like the sound of what I've described here, well, it's a 3DS game that didn't get a physical release, so there's unfortunately no way for you to get ahold of it any more. No way at all. (Wink.)

@Simple DL Series Vol. 13: The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utensha (3DS)

 I recently made an exciting discovery: there's a 3DS branch of the Simple 2000 Series! Well, I already knew it existed, but for ages, I thought it was limited to a small selection of escape room games. Turns out, there's a whole bunch of the Simple Series' trademark weirdness to be found on the most-modded handheld. This game is even developed by Z-game studio extraordinaires Tamsoft! I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was to find this.

 

The most succinct way of describing the game is "Sane Taxi". At a basic conceptual level, it's a lot like SEGA's arcade classic Crazy Taxi, in that oyu drive around a small city, picking up passengers, and dropping them off, being paid a bonus based on how quickly you get your charges to their destination. The difference being that there's very little in the way of craziness present this time around. 

 

You drive at a normal speed, there's no expectation that you perform stunts, or even any opportunity to do so, and the whole city seems to be built on completely flat ground. It's also structured in a more joblike manner, with each stage representing a day's shift, starting at 8AM and ending at 1PM, with a quota of fares to bring in by the day's end. I played eight days, and though the quota increases every day, it's still possible at the point I reached to fill it in about half your alloted time. I'd hoped that maybe after a week, the game might give you a new map to drive around, but nope: it's the same map, with a slight increase in quota every day. Maybe there are more cities later on, but the game's worn my patience out by asking me to drive around the same map eight times in a row.

 

It is a Simple game, and there's plenty of Simple tropes on display, to please those cultured connoisseurs among you. As I already mentioned, it's developed by Tamsoft, and it also takes place in a comfy, mild-weathered low-poly representation of modern-day urban Japan. Furthermore, despite being about a car instead of a person, there's a whole bunch of costume parts to unlock, including normal things like paint colours and custom licenseplates (including one that has a picture of old-school Japanese internet meme Monar!), and less normal things like a giant viking helmet, a bumper shaped like a piano keyboard, and so on.

 

The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utenshu is far from being a great game, or even a good one. But it's not really fair to call it a bad one, either. It is a nice, comfy thing to keep you occupied while watching tv for an hour or so, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to play it for any longer than that.

Arc Style: San Goku Shi Pinball (3DS)

 In 2006, Nintendo released a strange samurai-themed voice-controlled pinball/strategy game called Odama. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to play Odama, but it was in my mind the whole time I was playing San Goku Shi Pinball. It doesn't have any voice controls, and it's setting is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, rather than feudal Japan, but still: olden times battlefield pinball. I doubt it was made as a deliberate mockbuster anyway, coming out six year later than Odama, and Odama not being the kind of massive hit you'd bother mockbusting anyway.

 

That doesn't mean it's just a generic pinball game with a Three Kingdoms coat of paint, though. Instead, you go through various differnt stages, each followed by a boss. The stages are all different, though they all consist of a small battlefield area, littered with soldiers, battlements, and so on. The goal in the stages is to defeat all of the enemy officers who are commanding the endlessly respawning troops, while also lighting torches and finding hidden treasures and bonus stages to score more points. 

 

The boss fights are slightly different, and all take place in a little castle courtyard area. in that courtyard, there'll be a prominent figure from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and you have to defeat them by repeadly hitting them with the ball (the one exception to this that I've ecountered was Zhang Jiao, who is defeated by extinguishing his magic purple bonfires dotted around the place. Bosses can fight back by attacking your flippers and disabling them for a couple of seconds, which is something I always hate. Taking away the player's input just seems like a cheap copout form of difficulty.

 

San Goku Shi Pinball isn't one of the greatest pinball games you'll ever seen, and it has some stiff competition on the 3DS in the form of Pinball Hall of Fame, which contains recreations of Taxi, Pinbot, and a bunch of other real-life tables. But those are recreations of real tables, and San Goku Shi is a whole new pinball videogame with all the advantages and possibilities that brings. So it's fine. If you already have Pinball Hall of Fame, and want more, less realistic pinball on your 3DS, then you wouldn't be too disappointed if you went with this one.

Arc Style: Girls' Soccer 3D (3DS)

 This is a game I'd long thought I'd never get to play, but it seems that there are almost no lost 3DS games at this point, which is nice. It's a mostly normal soccer game, and it's also the Japan-only sequel to Arc Style: Soccer 3D, so you know, the series now covers both genders: default and girl. In seperate games, for some reason. It's also a nice, simple game, played with just directional controls (you can use the D-pad or the analogue stick), and three buttons: pass, shoot, and special move.

 

It's pretty fun to play, too! The game itself is just regular old soccer, and there's no superpowers or items or any kind of fantastical elements to make things more exciting, but it's still well-crafted and fun to play, and it doesn't fall into a trap I've seen in a lot of team-based sports games. That trap is the binary difficulty curve: in a lot of sports games (the ones I've played, at least), it seems like you can easily get through a few matches in single player mode against teams who put up a pathetic amount of resistance, until at some point a switch is flipped, and you face a team with all-powerful attackers and an impenetrable defense. Arc Style: Girls Soccer 3D, though, does things a little more smoothly, and the teams you play against in tournament mode gradually get more competent, and if you do get beat, it geels like you were beaten by a better team, not annihilated from orbit by cosmic sport gods.

 

The real draw, though, is the creation mode. It's no Soul Calibur VI or Fire Pro Wrestling, but it is a lot more versatile than I had expected, and there's not much competition on the 3DS for creation modes. You get to create your team's uniform, choose an emblem from a small selection, and then make the appearances and choose a special move (stuff like powerful shots, headbutts, overhead kicks, etc.) for each of your players. You'd expect a sports game to be limited to "normal" items and settings, but you can totally make a team of demons, robots, aliens and other demihuman types. It was also a nice surprise that there's a few body types to pick from for your players, too.

 

I'm not sure if it's even still possible to buy this game, and it was only released in Japan on the one handheld that Nintendo made the insane decision to region lock, but if you want a cute little sports game with a surprisingly decent character creation mode, this is a game that fits that description pretty well, and I'm sure most people still regularly using a 3DS can figure out a way to get ahold of it.