The basics of chess can be taught in an hour, but learning to play well takes much longer. I gave up after about a half-hour, but that reflected less on the game than on my lack of patience and understanding.įor me, the best war strategy game is still chess, a stylized version of war that presents strategic elements without making you broker a trade with Persia. " I am not one of those people, and my strategy of randomly accepting trade deals and occasionally sending a ship toward Japan to be sunk proved I am qualified neither to rule a country in wartime nor to play this game. This is a game for people who have shelves of books on military strategy and begin sentences with, "If I had been in Eisenhower's shoes in 1941 I would have. The interface is utilitarian, with a world map and various screens with graphs and statistics.
Fritz chess ds review how to#
The detailed game lets you influence and be influenced by the policies of other nations, assign specific teams of engineers to work on technological advances, offer trade deals with other countries, and decide what weapon systems to build, where to place bases and when and how to attack. Hearts is a war strategy simulation set during World War II in which you control all aspects of warfare where to send troops, where to build factories, what countries to ally with. Paradox Interactive's Hearts of Iron II is the opposite: a complex game for the thoughtful, somewhat obsessive player. Touched! is the ultimate in fast-paced, virtually brainless arcade action. At this point the framing sequences can all be skipped, and there are special sections that allow you to play the entire range of minigames within one section, decreasing repetition, or even to begin at a higher level of difficulty.ĭespite its flaws, Touched! is the first DS game since Feel the Magic XY/XX that exploits the potential of the DS touch screen, making it a necessity for DS owners. Things pick up after you have won once at each section. I got through the section devoted to microphone games simply by blowing the same way for almost every game. Touched! underscores its repetitiveness by giving each section a theme, like twirling or sliding. While annoying, this was quicker than letting the cartoons play out, and preferable to watching them. You cannot skip these the first time they appear, so I turned off my DS when each cartoon started, then turned it back on, at which point I could restart the section and click a newly added skip button. Nintendo apparently does not fully realize the appeal of Touched! to impatient players, as each section of the game is framed by an incoherent and unnecessary cartoon. The game's simple, colorful graphics and the witty half-second animations that appear when you achieve your goal are consistently entertaining. Some minigames involve little more than tapping the screen a few times, but others are imaginative, as when you must reshape a mountain range or use paper fans to blow a falling man onto an island. The balloon-popping minigame is just like the Bubble-Wrap-popping game, which is similar to the soap-bubble-popping game, and the same motion is required for cleaning a window or a chalkboard.
Sometimes you will play the same minigame a few times in a couple of minutes, but they become faster and trickier as you progress (you might have to slice three watermelons instead of one).Īccording to Nintendo, Touched! has more than 180 minigames, although many of them are similar.
Minigames are about five seconds each and appear randomly. In Touched! you slice flying watermelons in half with a quick slash across the screen, poke a turtle to make it withdraw into its shell, or blow on the DS microphone to make a fan spin.
Fritz chess ds review series#
Touched! is the first game in the WarioWare series made for Nintendo's DS, the hand-held game console with two screens the lower one is a touch screen that allows you to control the game with a stylus.