I began my diary this week with a story about my unhealthy obsession with Take Two's "Civilization Revolutions" on the DS. Literally "unhealthy," you may recall, because the game motivated me to stay underground, sitting in a subway station, breathing subway station air, for 45 minutes more than I needed to a week ago today. So I quit the game. Last night a friend opened his DS and showed me that he's now hooked.
In the middle of this week, THQ sent me a new preview build of "Lock's Quest." I think they're subtitling the game as "Construction Combat," which fits. "Lock's Quest" is an isometric real-time-strategy game that puts you in control of a hero named Lock who can be manually controlled to fend off armies of bad guys. These bad guys attack in timed waves. The main way you hold them off is with towers that you build from pieces of walls and turrets bought from a budget of points earned in combat. This essentially makes the game a tower-defense title, like "Desktop Tower Defense" or "PixelJunk Monsters," but with story and character action mixed in. I've played it through many of my subway rides this week. (This build, unlike the last one, let me get past the tutorial.) It plays well, it's fun. I'm hooked.
The headline here is that in 2008 my DS gaming has been almost completely driven by games not made by Nintendo. How odd is that? The two mentioned above, along with "Space Invaders: Extreme," "The World Ends With You," and "Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword" have all come from companies other than Nintendo. And aside from Nintendo's "Professor Layton" game, they have been the highlights of my DS gaming this year.
I can't recall another year when third party publishers and developers dominated my time with a Nintendo platform. And looking to the fall, I see that it's another third-party game, "Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars" that will probably be my main DS game of interest for the end of the year, along with BioWare's "Sonic" and EA's "Zubos" reserving spots on my calendar. It's just about all third-parties for my DS now. (Caveat: I do say this on a day I'm expecting the Japanese version of Nintendo's "Rhythm Heaven" DS game to arrive in the mail.)
Did Nintendo just take the year off? They have been doing "Pokemon" games, but they have been a little quiet. Someone think there's a good explanation. I'm just fascinated to see how third parties stepped up.
Next: This weekend I will try to play something other than "Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2," but it won't be easy.
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