Not sure if you remember, but I’ve started, since a month and a half ago, trying to relax myself by playing with the Nintendo DS. When I bought I also bought Mario Kart DS (provided with the unit itself) and Pokémon Sapphire (for GBA, but that was needed also to protect the GBA card slot, as the pre-Lite version doesn’t have a dustcover for it). I’m the nerd kind of guy who actually like the Pokémon series, and I was pretty happy to play it through the end; I’ve played emulated the previous generations, this was the first time I could afford a game myself, and so I took the chance.
I don’t actually like racing games, I got Mario Kart just because it was sold together with the unit, but I enjoyed it, especially to try out the Nintendo DS graphic which was quite nice. Of course after a while, playing only two games starts to be boring, so when I had the last cold I asked my syster to pick up Lego StarWars II for me.
Nice game, nice graphic, nice ideas… too bad that starting from Episode V (the second of the three movies reproduced in the game), it starts to feel buggy.. there are times when you can end up stuck in a wall, requiring to end the mission and then restart from scratch. The game is nice so even if bugged, I continued playing, till in Episode VI I got stuck in a big bug and I needed to search for the solution of the game to find how to pass that mission… the solution also referred to the bug, so I did a bit of search, and I found that LucasArts admitted that the game, in its DS version, was shipped incomplete and unfinished. Nice one.
Oh well, as I said the game is interesting on its own so I don’t feel like I totally wasted my money (I also got it relatively cheap), still I would have liked if Nintendo paid more attention to the title that are published worldwide, maybe putting a “Notice: might contain annoying bugs” on the package… okay I know it won’t ever happen, but let’s say that this game didn’t relax me that much.
Then finally the game I was expecting was released, Yu-Gi-Oh Championship 2007, a nice game after all, although I don’t play the TCG, I found it quite interesting to play emulated before, so I gone for it as soon as it was available (via Amazon, as the local suppliers don’t carry it), I received it last Saturday and I started playing around. The nice thing about this game is the online challenge, which finally allows me to play against human opponents: playing against the computer becomes just a run to a better deck every time until you can beat the next opponent.
So there I go, I try to get some decent cards and start getting beaten up by human adversaries, I wasn’t expecting anything different, but I wanted to see some more strategies before working out a deck that might work against the computer but not against an human.
The online play is a nice thing, really cool especially since it’s WiFi-based so you don’t have to stay put while playing, and the stylus control in the game is well designed; but then I’ve started feeling bothered by the repeated “communication errors” I started getting during games.
First I thought it was truly random, then I’ve seen it happened mostly when I was leading the game.. I thought of a coincidence, but when it happened after I did win the game, the opponent coming to 0 life points… I was sure the thing was not that random.
Now, of course Konami can’t disallow people from closing their connection, or powering off the DS when they see they are losing, but… they could at least assign you the bonus points for the match, or at least the 10 match points you get for playing online, when the adversary fails to complete the game!
Even if I like the game, I’m tempted to ask Konami my money back, online playing is poorly designed.
