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News 
More DS impressions!
- Posted By Lander
Clinton, 05.14.2004
Okay, I was going to do the honorable thing and wait in the two-hour line because the DS is cool enough to do that, but a very nice Nintendo rep saw my media badge and invited me to skip the line and just go play.
This time I tried out the third-party games that were on display... and then Metroid and Mario just because.
Sonic DS: This is really just a tech demo. There was almost no game here. The graphics were as good as Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast, but the whole thing was on rails. Basically you rub the bottom of the DS screen as fast as you can, and the faster you go, the faster Sonic runs through the pre-determined path. You could hit the top of the screen to make him jump for rings, but that was it. There was never any chasm to jump over, or multiple chasms. Hey kids! Read that last sentence, now go past the comma you see, and switch the first and second words!
Pac-Pix: Namco had two Pacman games on display, and this was easily the cooler of the two. The other one had you rolling Pacman around a maze by touching the screen. In Pac-Pix, the ghosts are on a blank screen. Then the player draws Pac-Man, and then a constantly changing maze to guide him to the ghosts. You can make Pac-Man any size you want, so if you want to eat the ghosts quickly, you can make him the size of the screen, but then it's really hard to control him from going off the screen. You can control the direction Pac-Man travels by drawing lines in front of him. Draw a vertical line from up to down, and he'll go down when he hits it. Draw from down to up and he'll go up.
Needless to say, I got a bad score, but the guy in front of me couldn't even figure out how to draw Pac-Man, so I felt good about myself. True story.
Baby Mario Balloon drop, or whatever it's called, DS: Apparently the stork got laid off and decided not to bring a baby to an island populated by dinosaurs, so he just dropped baby Mario randomly in the sky.
While Mario falls on the top screen, you must quickly draw clouds on the bottom screen to guide his descent. I came up with a pretty good strategy for playing this game, draw clouds in a funnel to guide Mario to a path of coins, then draw clouds on either side of the line of coins to keep Mario collecting them. The only problem is there are usually enemies at the end of a row of coins, and Mario only has three balloons that can be popped before he falls to the big Mushroom in the Sky, which is not the same sky he's falling from. You can encircle the enemies with clouds so Mario won't touch them. Just make sure the path he's following doesn't trap him resting over a cloud-blocked enemy. The clouds only last a few seconds and then he'll fall through.
Source: NGenres
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