Super Mario 3D Land
3DSProfessor Layton & The Spectre's Call
DS *NEW*
Trip World
3DS VC *NEW*
Professor Layton & The Spectre's Call is another good game in the Layton series, but I have to say, story wise it was definitely the weakest of the series (although 1 is pretty bad too, so maybe its second). Even for a Layton game it required you to suppress your disbelief at the 'real' solution to the games puzzles. The puzzles in the game were actually pretty decent, with very few horrible ones such as the godawful solitaire and Knights Tour puzzles in Layton 2, but there seemed to be less variance in puzzle difficulty - they started a bit harder than normal, but didn't really increase in difficulty much, meaning on average it was one of the easiest in the series. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed this one a lot, but it's certainly not comparable to the fantastic Professor Layton & The Lost Future. It is, however, the start of a trilogy and ends with some stuff unresolved, so perhaps it'll improve over the course of the 3 games. I like the new Emmy character, and Luke managed to not be too annoying in this one, so there are some positives to the story
Finally (and with BIG SPOILER warnings) the ending to this one was pretty weak.
Trip World is an interesting little Sunsoft game for the original Game Boy that I've been wanting forever, but have never even seen on UK eBay. I downloaded it as soon as it came out on Virtual Console and I was mostly happy with my purchase. It's very short (about 10-20 minutes long for a full run through) and mostly easy (with the exception of the second last boss who is a bit of a tosser), but the game offers great musicand impressive graphics for the game boy and creates a really interesting world to play through - most enemies in the game literally only appear ONCE ever, and you'll find a lot of unique and funny enemies - one turns into a harmless mushroom as you pass, some are only a few pixels high and in one section, a cow thing and a otter thing both just crawl along harmlessly behind you. Most of these 'enemies' actually won't attack you at all, and the ones that do often require you to attack them first, but the games bosses can sometimes be challenging and offer the main chance of you dying. The game gives you 3 lives to play through the game, and you cant get more. You can take 4 hits per life, which is easy for the levels but challenging for some of the bosses.
Finally, you can transform into different forms, either with a button combo or by picking up a berry. Pressing down + b transforms you into a fish who flops uselessly on land but swims underwater with a long range attack, and up and b makes your ears become wings to fly about with, but you cant attack at all. Also, you can only fly in one direction because you fall if you turn, and you cant swim. The normal form attacks with a small kick, and you'll use that form the most. Berrys transform you into a ball to bounce about, or make you mini, both of which are fun but useless. Some berries make you grow a flower on your head, allowing you to paralyse enemies by shooting seeds at them, or grow a tail for a longer range attack. Getting both of these at once transforms you into a logn legged form that throws instant death fireballs, one hit killing even bosses, but you can only do this at one point of the games 5 levels. Overall, the game is pretty fun, if not particularly challenging, and is definitely worth a play for it's uniqueness.
So we got Pauline back from the old DK Games. I also love the use of sound in this game. There's a series of beeps when you raise or lower the volume on the 3DS, and whenever you close the 3DS you'll hear Mario say something funny like, "Hey, where are you going?!"and when you open it back up you'll hear some random thing like "welcome back!" or "I love this game". I like little things like that.
