The Nintendo Dual Screen, or Dos Screen as it’s known in Spanish speaking countries, was ambition personified. Two screens, a microphone, touch controls, internet connectivity and more for 2004 was crazy. But these games pushed the industry-pushing handheld even further.
C.O.P. The Recruit
Developed by Velez & Dubail and published by Ubisoft, this insanely ambitious DS game was originally meant to be an entry in the Driver series. If you watched our ambitious GBA games vid, you will know that Velez cooked up something wild with Driver 3 there, along with the still wild Asterix and Obelix.
Well, they cooked again when they turned their attention to the Nintendo DS. C.O.P. The Recruit stars ex-street racer Dan Miles, brought into the titular Criminal Overturn Program as a detective. Dan eventually gets pulled into a deep conspiracy filled with twists and turns, including having to go undercover.
This 2009 game is essentially a console-level Driver — or GTA — experience in handheld form, with a fully 3D open world city. And The Recruit does not hesitate for a second to show you this, with the title screen itself being a big fly-by of the city streets.
Oh, and it is…60fps.
The gameplay itself is rather by the numbers, with a mission based structure and gameplay mechanics that doesn’t do much new, and the animations are just not good. But The Recruit remains insanely impressive on just a technical level — Velez & Dubail pushed for an experience as close to a console game as they could, which is even more noteworthy when you consider that the actual GTA game on the DS opted for a top-down view reminiscent of GTA 1 and 2 instead.
C.O.P. The Recruit didn’t quite stick the landing critically, with some reviews citing clunky UI management, but it remains one of the most technically impressive games ever released for a handheld system. Velez really cracked the code when it came to handheld gaming.
Avalon Code
Developed by Matrix Software of Final Fantasy IV remake fame, this action RPG begins with the revelation that the world will be destroyed, and that a new one must take its place. To facilitate this, your silent protagonist is chosen by the Book of Prophecies to record anything and anyone worthy of the new world — and this is accomplished by literally smacking them with the book. Gives a whole new meaning to doing things by the book, doesn’t it?
Recording objects and entities saves the subject’s information into the book, to be seen on the bottom screen. The real twist, though, is in how Avalon Code essentially lets you play at being God (or a mad scientist?) with this data. Anything you scan is composed of multiple Codes, and it’s possible to rearrange them to your liking, altering attributes and potentially creating entirely new items. Find an enemy to be too tough to handle? No problem, just rearrange the tiles that make up their Code to alter their stats.
As ambitious as this all sounds, however, Avalon Code unfortunately fails to pull it all together to create a cohesive package, with reviews citing boring combat and dungeons, and lackluster storytelling. Even so, the ideas on display here are pretty compelling. Perhaps one day we’ll see a sequel or spiritual successor that fully capitalizes on the game’s potential? Considering how wildly unsuccessful this was, the world is more likely to end first though.
The World Ends with You
Ambition doesn’t always mean pushing the hardware to its limits in terms of raw power. Square Enix’s DS classic stars Neku Sakuraba, an antisocial loner who suddenly finds himself thrust into the deadly Reapers’ Game, forcing him to partner up with others to survive.
Unlike your typical RPG, The World Ends with You is set over the course of three weeks, during which Neku and his partner travel around different parts of Shibuya to complete assigned tasks. The Underground — the plane of reality that the game is set in — is also fraught with danger, as creatures called Noise wander across the city.
Out of the many eccentric design choices this game has to offer, the combat shines the brightest. Most JRPGs will feature multiple playable characters with unique abilities, but this game has you controlling two characters at the same time, each of which has completely different control schemes. Neku is controlled with the stylus on the bottom screen, while his partner is controlled on the top screen with the D-Pad. Characters and enemies each share health across the two screens, meaning you’ll have to pay attention to two battlefields at once to survive.
The combat has a high learning curve, but stick with it, and you’ll experience one of the most unique RPGs ever made — it’s so unique, in fact, that none of the game’s re-releases (all on platforms that only feature one screen) can truly capture what made this classic so special. Hunt it down wherever you can.
Metroid Prime Hunters
Even with the DS’s technical improvements over the GBA, you wouldn’t really expect the system to tread into genres that are normally console or PC territory. And yet the handheld was capable of doing just that, with several full-blown first person shooters released for the system. While the DS saw a handful of Call of Duty games created specifically for it, Nintendo Software Technology beat n-Space and Activision to the punch with Metroid Prime Hunters.
Released in 2006, Prime Hunters is set between the events of Prime 1 and 2, and sees Samus fending off other bounty hunters as they all try to claim an ultimate power hidden in the Alimbic Cluster. Though the story is weaker than other entries, and the single-player campaign is repetitive and formulaic, Prime Hunters is nonetheless an incredible achievement for how well it translates the Prime subseries’s gameplay to a handheld format.
Prime Hunters uses the L and R buttons to shoot, while the stylus controls your aim. The single player campaign as a whole also has simpler level design than the other Prime titles, with the game’s online multiplayer, yes, online multiplayer with voice chat on handheld , clearly being the main focus. With 26 maps and several game modes to choose from, Prime Hunters was built as a multiplayer experience first, and single-player second.
Though now somewhat forgotten, Metroid Prime Hunters remains an impressive spin-off, and another step towards handheld systems being able to handle console level experiences. The next game Ni No introduction.
Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn
In the west, Ni no Kuni is known as a PS3 classic made with the help of the legendary Studio Ghibli. But did you know that the series actually began on the DS? Well, now you do.
Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn is the true first game of the series, and largely follows the same story beats that we in the west would eventually see on PS3, and even features the same anime cutscenes.
There are some key differences. For one, combat in this version of the game is entirely turn-based. The story, meanwhile, features entire towns not seen in the console releases. The White Witch and her related story arc from the PS3 version are absent — something that at least a few people would contend is actually a good thing.
But perhaps the biggest distinguishing feature of the DS version is the Wizard’s Companion. This book contains the many spells, guides, and mythological stories of the game’s world that Oliver acquires early on. While the console versions feature this book in a digital format where pages are gradually unlocked, the DS version actually came with a real, physical copy of the tome, and actively required players to pull out and refer to it in order to cast spells.
It’s a genius way to immerse the player into the game’s world, one that doesn’t require any fancy development tricks or cutting edge tech. It’s a shame, then, that while a fan translation for the game and book exists, Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn was never officially localized. Let’s keep it dark for the next one.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
Years after the GBA’s Golden Sun games, Camelot would eventually return to the series on the DS with Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Set thirty years after the events of The Lost Age, the game shifts focus to the children of Issac and his friends, as they investigate a new phenomenon known as Psyenergy Vortexes.
As with past entries in the series, Dark Dawn features traditional turn-based RPG gameplay, and an overworld filled with puzzles to overcome with the power of Psyenergy. The series’s defining combat gimmick, however, is its Djinn. Djinn are elemental creatures that can be equipped to party members, and how you allocate them affects your character’s stats and available abilities. And just like past Golden Sun games, you’re able to use these Djinn to summon powerful elemental creatures at the cost of losing those stat bonuses and abilities for a few turns.
But what makes Dark Dawn’s summons special enough to earn the game a spot in this episode is in the animations themselves. JRPGs are no stranger to overly flashy effects, and Golden Sun is no exception. Some of these attacks are full, 3D animations on both screens — which doesn’t sound too impressive, until you realize that the DS nominally can’t render 3D graphics on both screens at the exact same time. To bypass this, the developers had to use an interesting trick: the game swaps rendering engines every frame on both screens.
Though certainly not the only game that uses tricks like these, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is an example of the ingenuity that goes into making games, and you should triad to play it wherever you can.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
For as massively popular as Grand Theft Auto is, the series hasn’t made all that many appearances on Nintendo’s systems. The games that do show up don’t exactly have the best track record — which makes this gem stand out all the more. Released in early 2009 for the DS (and later that year for the PSP), Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars brings Liberty City to handheld systems.
Chinatown Wars stars Huang Lee, a Triad member who loses a family heirloom sword — with his efforts to retrieve it dragging him deeper and deeper into the power struggles of the criminal underworld.
To accommodate the DS’s screen size and hearken back to all previous major GTA games, Chinatown Wars plays something like a cross between the original two entries, while drawing modern elements from the formula that newer games at the time had successfully established.
Of course, Rockstar Games is known for meticulousness, and even on a handheld system, they spared no expense in bringing Liberty City to life. Though the visuals are tailored to fit the hardware, Rockstar still saw fit to squeeze in as much visual detail as they could, and the final release — featuring “over 900,000 lines of hand-optimized code” — remains one of the most critically acclaimed DS games ever made. Make tracks to your nearest online emporium to give this one a shot.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass/Spirit Tracks
With every new system, Nintendo is keen to incorporate the hardware’s major gimmick into their beloved first-party IP. Case in point, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are full-length Zelda adventures that rely almost entirely on DS’s touchscreen. All of Link’s actions, from attacks to using items, requires touches, taps, and drawing on the touchscreen in some fashion.
Beyond expertly translating Zelda mechanics and staples to touch screen controls, both Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks stand out for their stealth segments, as both feature massive central dungeons that Link finds himself constantly revisiting throughout his adventure. The Temple of the Ocean King and the Tower of Spirits both feature nigh-invincible enemies to be avoided, safe zones to hide in, and gimmicks (a time limit in Phantom Hourglass, and Zelda’s ability to possess and control the patrolling Phantoms in Spirit Tracks) to manage.
Both games also further expand on the sailing introduced with Wind Waker; Phantom Hourglass featured an upgradable steam boat, while Spirit Tracks, as the name implies, features a sacred train. Though the latter proved to be somewhat divisive among fans, both Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are overall fantastic DS games that mark a point where Nintendo started to experiment with the series much more compared to past entries.
As is usual for the franchise, Nintendo’s creativity paid off, with both games being beloved by critics. These are two Zelda games dement to be played on the DS.
Dementium II
Did that segue work? Not the best was it, anyway.
Originally pitched as a Silent Hill entry for the DS, developer Renegade Kid would go on to release Dementium: The Ward, a survival horror shooter. Set in an abandoned hospital, it featured solid, if rudimentary gameplay for the genre, with relatively simple puzzles and an emphasis on combat.
Dementium II is a direct sequel that makes some rather straightforward improvements, like jumping and crouching, save points, and more varied environments. Combat in both games works like you’d expect from a first-person shooter: L is used to shoot, and the touch screen is used like a mouse or analog stick to look around.
But where both games truly shine, however, is in their technical aspects. Both games look quite good for the hardware they were released on. And while both games run at a smooth 60 frames per second, Dementium II in particular pushes the polygon count close to the DS’s limits, features high quality textures, and even particle effects.
Though neither game pushes any boundaries in the horror genre, the Dementium games still proved to be impressive releases for their time, with a surprising amount of technical polish.
Super Mario 64 DS
Don’t have a new, highly anticipated and groundbreaking game ready for the launch of your new system? Then there’s no better way to show off what your system is capable of with a full remake of an all-time classic. This is still absolutely crazy to me. I remember going over to my friend’s house with his shiny new DS and the N64 game we’d played together just a few weeks prior was now in his hands. Crazy!
Not only are character models significantly more detailed than their Nintendo 64 counterparts, they’ve all been updated to match the modern Mario art style. And as soon as you start the game proper, the other headlining features of new playable characters, as well as new mechanics and content to accommodate them, will blow your mind even more.
You begin the game in control of Yoshi instead of Mario, and can unlock him, Luigi, and Wario as playable characters as you track down the special keys needed to unlock them. Complementing these new characters is a bunch of extra content, from new Stars to find, rabbits to catch, and a handful of new minigames.
Though it may pale somewhat in comparison to later remakes of Nintendo 64 games, Super Mario 64 DS is still an incredible achievement, being a full remake of a revolutionary classic that added new content, all while being available day and date with the DS’s launch in every region.
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