We celebrate the one-year anniversary of Nintendo's DSiWare service with a week-long best-of feature.
Art Style: AQUIAPublisher: Nintendo Developer: skip Cost: 500 Points Players: 1 Release Date: April 5, 2009 You're a deep-sea diver and you need an air refill. What do you do? Well, obviously you match three blocks of the same color and fill it up! Art Style: AQUIA, a DsiWare launch title, is an interesting match-three puzzle game where you must flip and insert groupings of two or four blocks to make matches. It's quite difficult, but it has excellent sound design and a fantastic endless mode where you go as long as you can. You also unlock different sea creatures in an aquarium where you can look at them, which is a neat bonus typical of the Art Style games. - Neal Ronaghan |
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Art Style: PiCTOBiTSPublisher: Nintendo Developer: skip Cost: 500 Points Players: 1 Release Date: May 18, 2009 Retro-styled and rife with great music and delectable falling-block puzzle gameplay, PiCTOBiTS is one hell of a downloadable title. The goal of each level is to combine falling megabits of the same color so you can create the 8-bit character at the top of the screen. The kicker is that the 8-bit character is a Nintendo one, and each level's music is a remixed version of a class NES tune. There is plenty of Mario and Zelda to go around, but there's also more obscure titles such as Ice Climber, Baseball, and Devil World. There are 30 stages in all, including 15 difficult dark stages. - Neal Ronaghan |
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Art Style: BOXLIFEPublisher: Nintendo Developer: skip Cost: 500 Points Players: 1 Release Date: June 22, 2009 Art Style: BOXLIFE is a game all about folding paper cubes into boxes, which is a weird prospect for a video game. Using the stylus to cut squares out and fold them up, it's intuitive, peculiar, and fun. With 14 levels that ramp up in difficulty, and an endless mode that shows you a day of work for an employee at the box-making factory. There's also your garden, which just so happens to be in a box, that you add to as you proceed through the game. BOXLIFE is very weird, there's no doubting that, but even still, it's a wonderful and unique puzzle game. - Neal Ronaghan |
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Art Style: BASE 10Publisher: Nintendo Developer: skip Cost: 500 Points Players: 1-2 (one copy) Release Date: July 6, 2009 Art Style: BASE 10 is numbers game as you use the touch screen to switch around single-digit numbers around until you make horizontal or vertical lines of 10. It's simple at the start with only ones and twos, the latter of which flips to make five, but it gets dastardly when the whole spectrum of numbers comes into play. There's three different game modes: Zerosum, where you have to clear a certain amount of numbers as quickly as possible; Puzzle, where you have to figure out how to get rid of specific groups of numbers; and Endless, where, well, it's endless. Throw in two-player mode that uses DS Download Play and you have a winner as long as you're right-handed. - Neal Ronaghan |
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Art Style: ZENGAGEPublisher: Nintendo Developer: skip Cost: 500 Points Players: 1 Release Date: July 20, 2009 As is typical with all Art Style games, ZENGAGE is not ordinary. You move around Cells (blocks) so they align with Cores (balls) of the same color. It starts off deceptively simple and challenging, and throws in more wrenches as you go along, such as blocks that send balls bouncing around, or blocks that have to be moved together. It's rife with depth, and like other Art Style games, has a cool and somewhat creepy aesthetic. - Neal Ronaghan |
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Art Style: precipicePublisher: Nintendo Developer: skip Cost: 500 Points Players: 1 Release Date: August 3, 2009 In Art Style: precipice, you control a little man as he navigates a grid of falling blocks. The goal of the game is to not get crushed or fall the blocks while walking over them to color lines of them and get points. You have to avoid bomb blocks and you can push off blocks so you can walk around easily. It doesn't use the touch screen, and it has three different modes. One of them is a challenge to see how many points you can get in 10 floors of 5-by-5 blocks, and another is a 3-by-3 endless grid where you try to build the tallest tower. The third mode, dubbed Relax, features unlockable calming animations of your character. We're aware of how weird that is. Regardless, the whole package is fun and totally worth your $5. - Neal Ronaghan |
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Art Style: DIGIDRIVEPublisher: Nintendo Developer: Q-Games Cost: 500 Points Players: 1-2 (one copy) Release Date: November 16, 2009 Q-Games' debut on DSiWare is a doozy. You control the flow of traffic and put cars of the same color together in order to build up fuel, which is then used to launch your precious core away from the villainous spike. It's a bit hard to wrap your mind around at first, but the addictive gameplay shines through as you juggle multiplying your fuel cells and picking ideal times to detonate them to move the core. There are both standard and touch controls (the standard controls are much better), and a two-player mode that supports DS Download Play. It's a wonderful package, and one of the best Art Style games available. - Neal Ronaghan |
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