Commando Steel Disaster (DS)

 Okay, so you might notice that all of the screenshots for this reciew are of the game's first stage, and usually, I wouldn't review a game if that's all I could see of it, but this is a special case. Most of my time playing this game was the DSiWare version which I have on my n3DS. I don't have any way of taking screenshots of DSiWare games, though, but I knew the game was released as a regular DS cartridge, so I played that too, for screenshotting purposes. It turns out, the two versions aren't the same!

 

The basic core of the game is the same, of course: it's a pretty decent Metal Slug clone. You go through stages, shooting lots of guys, and occasionally robots and tanks and helicopters. There's a whole bunch of temporary power-up weapons, destructible parts of the stages with hidden items, and most other Metal Slug things. Except that vehicles only appear in special seperate substages, not as thing you can just climb aboard in the regular stages. It's pretty good. Obviously nowhere near as good as the first few Metal Slugs, but maybe in the same league as the later entries.

 

The differences between the two versions are all related to difficulty. The stages in the cartridge version are a lot longer, to the extent that entire sections are removed from the digital version. Of course, I've only seen the first stage of the cartridge version, but the first stage is made up of three sections: one on a jetbike in a forest, one outside in the snow, and another inside an underground military base. The digital version of the first stage, meanwhile, and the indoors section is slightly truncated, as well as the larger gatekeeper enemies having significantly less HP. The enemies in the digital version generally have less HP, and they inflict less damage on the player, too.

 

Which one is better? To be honest, there's no perfect version. The cartridge version is a bit of a chore: I could definitely overlook the difficulty if the stages were shorter, and the bigger enemies didn't feel like such bullet sponges, and while I definitely prefer the digital version's faster pace, it also feels like there's no challenge at all, and most of the times I've played it, I've actually gotten bored and stopped playing the game long before I came close to dying. 

 

So I guess the only conclusion is that Commando: Steel Disaster is a game with two different versions on the same platform, both of which are terribly flawed, in almost completely opposite ways. Just play Metal Slug X instead, is the best advice I can give here.

Guru Guru (DS)

Also known in Japan as "Guru Guru Nagetto", Guru Guru is a game I found while looking up the developers of a game I covered a few months ago, Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series Vol. 3 - The Itsudemo Puzzle - Massugu Soroete Straws on Game Boy Advance. Not only are the two games by the same developer, but the main character of that game, the trainee witch Straw, is also playable in this one! It's not a sequel, though, as while that was a puzzle game, this is a golf game.

Or rather, golf is the nearest thing to which Guru Guru can be compared. Instead of hitting a tiny hard ball with a stick to try and get it into a distant whole on a massive lawn in the fewest strikes, you are instead throwing bouncy limbless rabbit-like creatures called familars to try and land them at the end of a linear path in the fewest throws. Obviously, there's complications, as the paths are full of hills, walls, ceilings, bottomless pits, and so on, to hinder your progress. You do get to pick between three routes, though, and you can switch between them when you like, as long as you're on a flat surface that's even with the route to which you want to move.

Along with being golf-like in concept, there's also some similarities with more traditional golf games. For example, on each turn, you pick one of three different kinds of throwing technique (determined by which character you picked), then decide how hard you're going to throw the ball with the use of a power meter. Of course, this being a DS game, the power meter utilises the touch screen, having you quickly draw circles to build it up, before flicking across to throw. It works okay, but it's hard to get much precision for those rare occasions when you don't want to throw the familiar as hard as you can.

I was a little sceptical when I first started playing this game, and it did take me a few goes to even figure out how to play it, but it's actually a ton of fun to play once you've got the hang of it. My advice is to ignore the various training modes and just go straight in for the tournament. The training modes make the game seem a lot more difficult than it actually is, and there's a lot of satisfaction not just in beating your tournament opponents, but in seeing their familars bouncing backwards off of walls and falling down pits, leaving them in a worse position at the end of their turn than at the start. One last thing I have yet to mention is the graphics, so before this review ends: they're great. They're cute and colourful (in a kind of pastelly way on my actual DS, though the  screenshots from the capture device look a lot brighter), and have a clean isometric pixelly look that's very appealling. In summary, this game is definitely recommended to anyone still exploring the massive original DS library.

Sideswiped (DS)

Sideswiped, also known as Clash King V201 is a great little racing game for the DS, that seems to have gone mostly unnoticed and forgotten. You'd think a fast, fully 3D handheld racing game, that didn't force the use of a terrible touchscreen steering wheel would have got people's attention, but as far as I could tell at the time, the only people who paid any attention to this one were people paying attention to Japanese DS releases on its original release, and then when it came westwards, the few members of that previous group who were interested in racing games. (Having said that, though, I do seem to be suffering a bit of a Mandela effect moment, as various websites have both versions of this game coming out within a month of each other, while I remember playing Clash King V201 for several months before Sideswiped came out. Weird.)

It's not just a racing game, either! It's a little handheld version of the Playstation classic Destruction Derby, with you competing in three kinds of "races", only one of which is focussed on being the first to pass a finish line. There's "Destruction", in which you drive into traffic, trying to ram innocent people's cars hard enough that they fly into the distance and explode, scoring big points for causing chain reactions and "Crash Race", where you drive around a track with seven other cars, scoring points by crashing into them, with less spectacular results than in Destruction. In both of the above modes, you're given a time limit and a points quota to meet in that time. In the final mode, "Normal Race", you take part in a normal race! There's seven other cars, like in Crash Race, but this time you're all just trying to make it over the finish line first.

Most of the stages take place in places like Las Vegas, New York, and generic Seaside and Mountain locales, but there's also an Arena area, which adds a couple of its own, weird race types: "Bowling", where you drive into a bunch of giant pins, and the even stranger "Trampoline", which has you driving off of a raised platform, to bounce on a series of giant trampolines, and popping as many floating balloons as you can along the way. All in all, there's a lot of variety in Sideswiped! Though to be honest, it's only Destruction and Normal Race that you'll ever want to go back to, as the others are either stupid and gimmicky, or just plain boring. But  good stages are really good, don't get me wrong.

Sideswiped is a game that doesn't have any real problems, other than it being surprisingly hard to get ahold of (it doesn't seem to even be listed on Amazon UK!). But if you can find it, it's definitely worth getting.

Windy x Windam (DS)

I remember when this game was originally released in 2008, I was pretty excited for it! I've always been interested attempts at fitting arcade genres like fighting games, beat em ups and shooting games onto handhelds, and this wasn't just a handheld fighting game, but it was made specifically for the ds, so it wasn't a downgraded version of a "proper" fighting game, like the massively disappointing Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers. Nor was it a licensed game, which I considered a plus, as though Treasure's Bleach DS fighting games were a lot of fun, the world and characters didn't appeal to me at all. (One extra little note: why weren't there any Capcom or SNK fighting games on DS? The GBC and GBA played host to some miraculously great versions of the Street Fighter ALpha and King of Fighters games. A missed opportunity.)

Then it actually came out and I played it a little, but it just couldn't hold my interest, and I quickly forgot about it in favour of playing Last Blade 2 and Mark of the Wolves via the surprisingly good homebrew Neo Geo emulator the DS had. Playing it again a decade later, it's got a lot of charm, but I can definitely see why it didn't have staying power, and why pretty much everyone almost instantly forgot about it: that charm has to do a lot of heavy lifting to get you to look past the big flaws in how the game actually plays, and it's just not up to the task.

I'll talk about the positives before I get onto the negatives, though. Like the world and characters are pretty nice. I guess it's set in the same world as the DS roguelite Izuna the Unemployed Ninja, since two characters from that game are unlockable in it, along with a stage set in their village, plus the chharacters are part of the story like everyone else, and the village is on the map just like the other locations. The fact that the attacks have little-to-no recovery time is pretty nice, too. It means you can make weak combos just by attacking really quickly, and almost feels like a poor man's Asuka 120%, albeit with none of the impact that that game's attacks have, and also lacking the cool clash/parry mechanic from that series.

That's pretty much it for the positives, unfortunately. And some of these negatives are pretty hefty, too. Like how sometimes, jumping just doesn't work. That's pretty much unforgivable, right? Any game with unreliable controls has to do a lot of work to make up for that, but for a fighting game? It's an insurmountable barrier. It's clear that this was a problem the developers had noticed too, as they add a seperate jump button, along with the traditional pressing up on the d-pad. Unfortunately, while I'm sure with some dedication, a player might eventually get used to it, with heavy attacks on the X button and jump on the B button, it feels very awkward. Another, lesser flaw is that all the characters seem to have a ton of health, making fights seem slow and undramatic. Though that one's more an issue of preference than a game-breaking catastrophe like the controls.

Obviously, I can't recommend Windy x Windam, especially now that a used copy seems to cost more than a brand new copy did back when it was released. Pretty much every major handheld since the original Game Boy has a bunch of way better fighting games than this, including the DS itself. So get one of those instead.

Futari wa Precure Max Heart Danzen! DS de Precure Chikara o Awasete Dai Battle (DS)

So,there's quite a few licensed beat em ups on the original DS, and a lot of them seem to be based on superheroes: The Mighty Thor, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, and so on. This game, with what might be the longest title of any game I've ever featured on this blog, against all odds, might well be the best of them, and an actual worthy entry into the genre in general.

Of course, it's based on one of the earlier iterations of the long-running magical girl franchise Pretty Cure, and it seems like the developers decided to eschew contemporary conventions and, instead of making "just a licensed game" or "just a game for little girls", actually bothered to make a good game that happened to be based on a license for little girls. AS already mentioned, it's a beat em up, and it's firmly in the time-honoured belt scrolling style. You know how it goes: you go from left to right, fighting enemies, picking up food off the ground and occasionally fighting bosses.

Of course, it's not that simple, and PreCure brings a few new ideas to the table to help it stand out. For example, friendship is a big theme in the TV series, so whichever of the two characters you choose to play as, the other one will also be present, controlled by the CPU to help you. (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a 2-player co-op mode, which is a huge shame and one of the very few black marks against this game's name). But the friendship theme doesn't end there! There's a super meter, which can be used to perform powerful, full-screen team up moves, plus something I don't think I've seen in any other beat em up before or since: when one character gets knocked down by an enemy, if the other is in the right position on the screen, they'll catch their fallen partner efore they hit the ground, restoring a little health and gaining a little bit of super meter. It's cute, it's original, and it fits the game's theme perfectly.

Some other good points, that aren't innovative, but they do stand out from the game's contemporaries are the omission of various hated  "features" seen in many twenty-first century beat em ups. The biggest is that there's no levelling up, there's no equipment, and there's no skill shops: you actually get to just play the game, without grinding or losing interest towards the end because of a negative difficulty curve! In a beat em up released in 2005! Can you believe it? The other, lesser omitted albatross is one that I was actually only reminded of recently, when I tried to play the aforementioned Thor and Go-Busters DS games: constantly having the action stopped by text boxes telling the player "press B to jump!", after you've already spent the first two seconds of the game pressing the buttons to see what they do. This one doesn't seem to crop up in action games so much any more in 2019, and it definitely isn't missed.

Other than the lack of multiplayer, the only other real problem this game has is that it's a bit too easy. I know it's a kids game, but an optional hard mode would have been nice, at least. But besides that, this is a legitimately good beat em up, with nice sprites, that isn't thematically reliant on nostalgia for the 80s or 90s, and brings new gameplay ideas to the genre. I definitely recommend it.

Simple DS Series Vol. 31: The Chou Dangan!! Custom Sensha

As you look at the screenshots of this game, with the knowledge that it's a platform shooter about driving tanks, it would be easy to just write it off as a cheap Metal Slug knock off. It is a cheap Metal Slug knock off, but importantly, that's not all it is: it does have enough of its own qualities to justify its own existence. It's another nice little sample from the Simple DS Series, after all.

Being a Simple Series game, it does adhere to their usual design philosophy: upgradable characters, selecting the next stage you want to pay from a menu, lots of difficulty levels, and so on. It does take a few detours from the usual route, though: grinding for experience points only increases the max HP of your tank, as weapon and mobility upgrades are hidden throughout the stages as items. Furthermore, while most Simple Series games will pad themselves out with grinding and recycled stages and enemies, The Chou Dangan Custom Sensha is short and sweet, being only about an hour long from start to finish, with the aforementioned grinding never really being necessary. Completing story mode unlocks a score attack mode, which is mostly the same, to the point where I can't actually figue out what the difference is meant to be.

What's most interesting about this game, though, is that depite the fact that (as far as I know) tanks can't jump in real life, this is a platform game about driving a tank where the limitations and abilities of a tank are taken into account. For example, you have two guns: one that can be swivelled around in almost a full circle, and you main turret, that can't be aimed, raised, or lowered. So you  really have to take into account your height relative to the enemies when you're shooting them. Another thing relates to the tank treads: if you jump up to a higher platform, and only just about get onto the edge of it, you can keep pushing forward to kind of climb onto it using the movement of the tank treads. It's only a little thing, but it's very satisfying.

If you can find a copy for cheap, then The Chou Dangan Custom Sensha is definitely worth picking up. The only real downside it has is that it's very short, very easy, and not really exciting or interesting enough to play through more than once. But that one playthrough you have will be a fun time, at least.

Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru (DS)

This game's title translates to "I Will Protect You", and it was part of a short-lived initiative to try and lure female visual novel fans towards "proper" games. The only other game I know of that was a part of the initiative was a reskinned version of the RPG Dungeon Maker. The luring in this case was entirely thematic, having a white-haired bishonen as a protagonist, various other bishonen in the town, and a female NPC for them all to fawn over. The game itself, though, definitely doesn't feel like it was made with players new to action games in mind.

Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru is a platform RPG, or a metrovania, if you like, and it starts out being brutally difficult: even the weakest enemies will take a ton of punishment, while you'll go down in just a few hits. Despite the fact that it doesn't have experience points and levelling, there's still an inverse difficulty curve in effect, since as time goes on, you get access to better weapons and armour, and healing items become easier to get ahold of, and things quickly get a lot easier after the first hour. Still, that's pretty much a part of the genre, and all the RPG-style Castlevaniae have this problem, and I love them, so I can't really hold it against OgOwM. Though when I say it gets easier, I'm referring entirely to combat and survival.

The big problem I have with this game is the language barrier, so if you can fluently read Japanese, you can stop here: this game's pretty good, if you've played all 3 DS Castlevaniae to death and want something similar, this is the game to go for. For everyone else, though: after killing the irst boss, I got totally stuck. All I could find were locked doors and walls that looked destructible, but I had no Idea how to open them. I also found a few chests with key items in them, though those items didn't seem to open any of the doors I could find.

It really is a shame, too. I remember there being a bit of buzz around this game when it came out in Japan, a lot of people being intrigued by the idea of an action RPG designed by and for women, but it seems that interest fizzled out almost instantly. GameFAQs has the long-abandoned beginnings of a walkthrough and a map with very little annotation, and there's also a forum thread somewhere on the internet from 2010 announcing a translation patch that never materialised. Hopefully someday, interest in this game will be revitalised, and someone will write, if not a translation patch, at least a proper walkthrough, so everyone can play it. Until that happens though, you're going to have a tough time getting through if you're not Japanese-literate.

Here's an addendum to what's written above: a few days after writing this review, I had to play the game a bit more to take screenshots, and during this session, I somehow triggered a long series of cutscenes. After they'd finished, not only was my max HP increased, but I also now had the ability to break those aforementioned destructible-looking walls. So I am able to progess a bit further in the game, but since I have no idea what made this happen, I still stand by my earlier opinion that the language barrier is fairly strong for those who can't read Japanese.

Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting (DS)

Hajime no Ippo is a comic about boxing that's been running (and continues to run) since 1989, and it's had a few videogame adaptations in that time, too, some of which got brought to the west (presumably after being de-Japanified) as the "Victorious Boxers" seres. Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting wasn't brought over, but there is a partial translation patch out there for it, and, to be honest, even without the patch it's probably pretty easy to figure out.

As you'd expect, it's a boxing game. There aren't really any special gimmicks or anything, just regular old punching. You do havce a super meter, but all it enables are really powerful punches, no special powers or anything. Some mention should be made of the controls: the default scheme is a touchscreen affair, that has you poking and swiping in a bunch of boxes on the bottom screen to do different punchs. Like most touchscreen gimmicks, it doesn't really work, and you'll quickly be using the pause menu to change to some proper button-based controls, which work much better, having left punches mapped to Y and B, right punches mapped to X and A and special punches performed by pressing both button for one hand.

Though I'm not a fan of the old cliche that handheld games are best when they're playable in short bursts (because I personally like to play long handheld games while watching TV), I have to say that Hajime no Ippo really excels at that sort of thing. Obviously, each bout is a few minutes long at the most, and the game saves automatically after each one. So even if you just played one fight everytime you sat on the toilet, you'd still be making a little progress each time. The fights themselves are enjoyable enough, too. It never feels like there's as much precision or as many options available to you as in a fighting game, but punching is very satisfying, and not only does the game never seem unfair, but there difficulty curve is smooth too, and your opponents not only get harder very gradually, but they also each seem to have their own fighting style and tactics.

Between fights, you can also participate in little touchscreen "training" minigames. Your trainer will tell you that these increase your stats, but I can't actually find any mention of these stats anywhere else, and I think he might be lying just to shoehorn in another touchscreen gimmick, as developers were wont to do on DS games, especially licensed ones. I still attempt one before every fight though, because what if he's not lying.

There's not much more I have to say about this game other than to describe the cool little touches there are, like how your face gets swollen as it receieves punches, which manifests-ingame as the edges of the screen getting slightly darker, and you can have your trainer put an icepack on it between rounds to lessen the swelling. Also between rounds is the only time you get to see your own face, and just how lumpy your opponent's made it, which is cool too. Anyway, I have to admit that I haven't played a lot of boxing games in my time, but this is probably my favourite of the ones I have played, and that includes Super Punch Out.

Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS (DS)

Like Binary Land, I also received a physical copy of this game as a kind gift from a patreon subcriber, this time Justin, of the excellent (though sadly seldom updated) site, Tinpot Gamer! This time, it's a cute puzzle-platformer that was ported to DS from the Playstation. Unfortunately, I haven't played the Playstation version, so I can't tell you how they compare. I can only tell you about this version on its own terms.

Anyway, the biggest thing that will hit you about this game is the presentation: there's lots of art in the cutscenes and on the title screen and in the backgrounds of the stages by prolific artist Izumi Takemoto (who has appeared on this blog before, back when I reviewed the Saturn adventure game Dinosaur Island). I don't think any of his work in any field has ever been released in English, though if I'm wrong, please tell me. As well as that, each set of stages has a theme, like cake, medicine, sleeping, and so on, and the player character has a different sprite for each theme! And that's not all, either: each set of stages has its own background music, with not only vocals, but also karaoke lyrics on the bottom screen!

It's already the third paragraph, and I haven't even mentioned how the game plays yet! Each stage has various differently coloured cubes that you can push around. They disappear when three or more are touching, and the aim of each stage is to get rid of them all. Like you'd expect from a game like this (that doesn't hide it like certain other games that have recently been on this blog, rassum frassum), your movement and jumping is all very precise: jumps always reach the same height and cover the same distance, and you always move one block's width at a time.

The problem with a lot of these games is that they're either so easy as to be a boring timewaster, or so hard that I get a few stages in and give up. Loopop Cube is a rare case that falls somewhere in the middle! I've gotten slightly stuck a few times, but I've managed to get over thirty stages in so far (out of 120) without totally giving up yet, so that's pretty great.

In summary, Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS is a very cute, well presented game, that's also alright to play. Obviously, it doesn't have the kind of superfast action I usually crave, but as the ancient philosophers said: a man cannot live on bullet patterns alone.

Unknown Soldier - Mokuba no Houkou (DS)

There were probably three big audiences for the original DS: there were the little kids, who had piles and piles of licenced shovelware based on CGI movies thrust upon them, there were the anime nerds, who had piles and piles of other licenced games, along with a ton of RPGs and visual novels and so on, and the old people, who were enticed with puzzle compilations and IQ tests. Not much was done to entice the types of people who were, at the time, playing a lot of first- and third-person shooters based on real-life conflicts on the PS2 and XBox. Tamsoft saw that gap in the market, and made two attempts at appealling to it, first with The Simple DS Series Vol. 21: The Hohei ~Butai de Shutsugeki! Senjou no Inu~, and again with Unknown Soldier, which is a sequel to The Hohei in all but name. Oddly, neither game was released outside Japan, despite the obvious appeal they'd both have in the west.

Unknown Soldier, like its predecessor, is a full-3D third person shooter set during World War II, with a simple mission-based structure. The missions are about 10-20 minutes long each, and they all pretty much consist of the same thing: walk to the next checkpoint, killing nazis along the way. Simplicity in this case is a good thing, though, as it means there's no barrier at all to players who lack Japanese literacy.

The controls are somewhat similar to yet another Tamsoft DS game that I've covered here before, The Simple 2000 Series Vol. 39: The Shouboutai: you move around with the d-pad or face buttons (depending on your dominant hand, of course), and you turn and aim by dragging the stylus around a box on the touch screen. The touch screen also has buttons for looking down your crosshairs, changing or dropping weapons, reloading, and situational commands, like planting bombs or crouching behind sandbag walls. The shoulder buttons are both used to shoot.

Though the genre and setting wouldn't usually appeal to me, I have to say that Unknown Soldier is still pretty good. It's as technologically impressive as Tamsoft's other DS releases (I don't know how or why, but this small company mainly known for budget games consistently managed to get really good 3D graphics out of the original DS), it's pretty fun to play, and the sniper rifle is as satisfying as spiner rifles often tend to be. Though it is a little too satisfying, maybe: once you get access to sinper rifles a couple of stages in, you'll find that they're a lot more effective than your other weapons, at both long and short ranges, with or without using the scope.

Though the game has it's unrealistic touches, like your own character's regenerating health, or enemies suddenly appearing out of nowhere when you get to a checkpoint, it does also have one little bit of realism, that's usually ignored in 3D shooters: if you manually reload before finishing a clip, the bullets in the unfinished clip will be lost. Another nice little detail is one that reveals that there was at least one wrestling fan on the development team: you can pick from three playable soldiers, and they're named (despite the game's title suggesting otherwise) S. Austin, A. Anderson, and F. Goodish. The first two are obvious references, the third is a little less well known, referring to the real name of Bruiser Brody, Frank Goodish.

Unknown Soldier is a game I feel pretty safe in recommending. It's a competent entry into a genre that doesn't have much representation on the DS, and popping off nazis with the rifle is both fun and satisfying. As an extra note, there's a PS2 version of this game's Simple Series predecessor, Simple 2000 Series Vol. 102: The Hohei ~Senjou no Inutachi~ did actually get a PAL release under the title Covert Command. It's a bit simpler than Unknown Soldier, and it obviously doesn't have the novelty appeal of being on the DS, but you might be interested in having a look at it.

Pang: Magical Michael (DS)

So, Pang (also known as Buster Bros. and Pomping World) is a series that was once fairly well-known, but seemingly got completely forgotten once the 32-bit consoles came long in the mid-90s.  For those of you who don't already know, it is, at its most basic, a kind of mix between Space Invaders and Asteroids, where the player (or players) run around the bottom of the screen firing upwards at malevolent balloons, that split into smaller balloons when shot, until they're at their smallest size, at which they just pop. The aim of each stage is to get rid of every balloon without any of them hitting you.

2010's Magical Michael was the first new Pang game in ten years, and in the years since, there haven't been any more of them. It's a shame, because it's easily the best in the series. The two main modes in the game are tour mode, which is the traditional stage-based affair, themed around visiting famous landmarks from around the world and freeing them of their inflated spherical oppressors, and panic mode, introduced in 2000's Mighty Pang, which is an endless survival mode with no platforms, items or ladders, in which balloons endlessly fall from the sky, with the player just popping them, scoring points and staying alive as long as possible.

The reason that this is the best version of Pang is mainly down to its host hardware. The two screens of the DS allow for a wider array of stage designs in tour mode: single-screen stages, stages in which the balloons have the height of both screens to bounce in, and split-level stages, where the player has to judge when and how to climb the ladder from one screen to the other.

To be honest, though, I don't particularly care for tour mode. Panic mode is a lot more enjoyable, being a pure score-based game of skill. There are two main scoring mechanics: one based on which order you pop balloons (more points for consecutively popping same-sized balloons) and a bonus that gradually increases as long as you don't fire off a shot that hits nothing. Panic mode doesn't really gain anything massive from being done on two screens, though, other than the fact that it takes place in a series of extravagant high-ceilinged halls that look amazing, despite being heavily stylised static artwork. It does, however, benefit greatly from being on a handheld. It's just a great game to have on hand to play for a few minutes while waiting for something else to happe, and a handheld console is a lot more convenient and logical towards that end than an arcade cabinet.

Pang: Magical Michael is a good game and a worthwhile (though simple) update to an old series. It's also available for practically nothing, so I definitely recommend seeking it out.