Warning: Lots of games ahead. Many of you may have already heard of some of these.
Defense Grid: The Awakening and
Immortal Defense, both tower defense games. For those who don't know, tower defense is a sub-genre of real-time strategy games in which you build towers that kill advancing waves of enemies, which are usually confined to a set path. Most of these games are Flash-based (see:
GemCraft and
Desktop Tower Defense, a DS version of which is being released soon), but a few, such as these two, are stand-alone.
I-Fluid. A platformer in which you play as a drop of water. I don't recall if Lizard Dude mentioned this here, but it's because of him mentioning it in #tmk when the demo was released ages ago that I bought it during the Steam holiday sale.
Peggle and Bejeweled Twist. Most people here have already partially heard of at least one of these (whether via buying the Orange Box on PC and discovering
Peggle Extreme or just being aware of
Bejeweled), and I'm just here to finish the job.
Peggle is sort of a mix between pinball and pachinko, with power-ups and classical music thrown in; a DS version (ported by Q? Entertainment, of all people) containing both of the full-length PC games and new bonus levels was released a little over two weeks ago. (The PC version of the original
Peggle is available for $5 until the end of the month, and the XBLA version hit a week ago.)
Bejeweled Twist takes the infamous match-3 formula and turns it on its side, then on its head - instead of switching gems to make matches, the player rotates groups of four gems to do so. As it turns out, this and the removal of the "you have to make a match every turn" rule of match-3 are the kind of changes that turns an unfun game into a great timesuck for casual and hardcore gamers alike.
Eternity's Child. Best at sucking, anyway. To this day Lizard Dude blames me for his purchase of this steaming pile of crap (despite it being Sunbun's fault for saying to buy the game) - and also he didn't get the achievement for purchasing the game and I did. I'm not linking to it because none of you should want to submit yourselves to this torture. There was a Wii version in development, but I have no idea what happened to it.
Trials 2: Second Edition. Like the incredibly difficult racing in
TrackMania but wish it was in dirtbike form? This is the game for you. Also, go ahead and play
TrackMania Nations Forever just because it's so good and that particular version is free.
Big Bang Mini. Second-best shmup available for the DS, behind
SPAC3 INVADERS EXTR3ME (which has a sequel coming out in Japan at some point this year or next!). These guys also made
Nervous Brickdown, one of the neatest treatments of the Breakout genre I've seen.
Retro Game Challenge. Old-school gaming for the new school. Sequel came out in Japan shortly before the US version of the first was released.
These last games are for European DS owners. Unfortunately, none of them are available in the US, and it's doubtful that at least one of them will ever reach us through normal channels.
Bomberman 2. Originally titled
Custom Battler Bomberman (a much better name, in my opinion), this is the newest standard
Bomberman game. Includes plenty of awesome multiplayer modes (including eight-player WFC, as usual) and an extensive single-player game with an RPGish equipment system and a cyberpunk backstory. (On an unrelated note, I realized months back that
Pokémon is probably the closest to a cyberpunk game Nintendo is going to get.)
Freshly-Picked: Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland. Everybody probably has heard of this already, but for those who haven't, it's a game focusing on Tingle, the guy from Zelda who thinks he's a fairy. This game explains why.
Honeycomb Beat. Neat puzzle game that has a lot to do with hexagons and nothing to do with musical timing. Should be a bargain-bin title by now, since it came out a few years ago.
Colour Cross.
Picross with colors. Maybe rent it, but certainly not worth a purchase. I don't really know why I'm including it here.
Lots more I don't want to mention right now.
