101-In-1 Explosive Megamix Review (DS)

After I saw Atlus’ trailer for this DS minigame compilation, one of their PR reps was quick to point out that twenty bucks for 101 games amounted to about $0.20 per game. That’s funny, because after playing through them I’m convinced the folks at Nordcurrent spent about twenty cents developing each game. Starting with ten very basic games, you’re allowed to unlock the others as you go.

There’s quite a variety to be had, ranging from sports like tossing a basketball at the net or bouncing a soccer ball around, to guiding a skydiver or throwing darts at a target. There are even some pattern recognition games and puzzles, so they manage to cover a lot of genres. The problem is that just about every single game on here is terrible. Some of them are just bad ideas to begin with, while others would actually be okay if the controls weren’t buggy. Keeping the soccer ball bouncing turned out to be ridiculously hard since half the time the game wouldn’t even register that I’d tapped the ball. Throwing darts and curling stones onto a bullseye mostly worked, but required so much precision that you’d honestly be better off playing the real world versions of them. And strangely enough, some of the puzzle games, such as picking the object that doesn’t have a matching pair on the top screen, demanded absurd speed from the player.