The best of the three Sonic Advance games. While I'm still not big into the basic gameplay here and the level design is just whatever, this game uses a fantastic character combo system in which the two characters you pick gives you a unique set of moves, which is really fun to mess around and experiment with. The game is also structured a lot more interestingly than the previous two games. In other words, it's better than average.

The most polished and successful of the DKL games, it's a pretty fun standalone adventure that works pretty well given the Gameboy's constraints. While the game does use the same archetypes as DKC3, the world and levels this time are original to the game, which is good enough for me. The game isn't too janky, and I enjoyed playing through it. Not enough to 100% it, but still. It's solid.

While this is a fair bit tighter and more successful than the first DKL, it's also rather unambitious. Unlike DKL both the worlds and the levels share the same names and ideas as in the original DKC2. To me, this makes this game feel awfully half hearted, and like it doesn't have a soul of its own. While the level designs are distinct, I still expect a little more originality in my games. Of the three DKLs this one is the most forgettable.

A messy Gameboy installment of the DKC series that doesn't work so good, but delivers on charm for me. I love that the game takes a lot of big swings, going for a bunch of new enemies, mechanics, and environments all new to this game. This all makes the game very memorable to me, despite it's clunkiness. The translation to Gameboy didn't go so well, and the gameplay isn't as tight as on the SNES and it can also be very hard to read. Still, I appreciate its daring.

While it's aged poorly, at the time the writing of Conker made up for gameplay that varied from bare bones to rather sloppy. I still like the character of Conker, and find Chris Seavor's voice acting to be very endearing. That said it doesn't carry the experience nearly as well as it once did. The gameplay is something to be tolerated. It's as complicated it needs to be to support whatever parody the game is doing, and as a result it often doesn't work very well.

If you're looking for a game where you can pet and walk virtual dogs this is exactly that. The dogs look really good, and when you pet them you can tell they enjoy it. You can play with them, take them on walks, wash them, and even do a few silly side activities with them. It's not much more than that, but for what it is it's really good.

One of the first kickass touch screen based games, they took a really good idea and fleshed it out into a fully fledged game. Touching the screen to create paths that Kirby speedily rolls along works great, and combined with a healthy amount of copy abilities makes for a lot of good solid gameplay. The levels are fun to explore and find your way through, and there's a lot of them. Full marks!

This game is an absolute gem with polished gameplay, great design and a wonderful gimmick. It's extremely cool how there's two sizes this game operates on, the regular human scale, and the small small world of the Picori. It's super cool seeing all the spritework of regular sized things blown up to massive size. On top of that, the game has great dungeons, items, and side content. It's a very refined 2D Zelda, and I loved every minute of it. <3

Yeah, so this is a mediocre beat em up based on a mediocre movie, but at least it has a space combat mode which is okay. The beat em up gameplay is pretty clunky, but isn't the worst thing in the world. After clearing the single player mode I would occasionally return to play the Skirmish mode idly Flying around, shooting down dudes, while it's extremely basic it looked pretty good for the DS and was mild thoughtless fun.

Pretty dull puzzle game. The challenge mode is just tracing pretty basic paths, only they come at you fast enough to overwhelm. Not really fun, even if you got good at it. The puzzle mode can be a bit more interesting, but there's only 100 of them and even at it's best or most complicated it's still extremely bland. The game has no depth, and no excitement either.

This game does a lot right. The day/night system is a good gimmick and is used well in the various boards. There's also the single player boards, which are faster paced than previous single player campaigns, which is nice. Beyond the single player boards, the regular boards are also pretty inventive. Most have a brand new way of distributing stars, which keeps the game interesting for longer. It's a great Mario Party that took things in great directions!

An execution heavy combo based platformer that, if you wrap your head around it, is pretty rewarding fun. The bongo controls are a bit of work to get down, but they work well enough once you do. The actual platforming might seem basic at first, but if you're trying to chain together super long combos throughout the levels it can be pretty satisfying. Last note, it's a shame the game didn't use any of the DKC cast besides DK. The replacements just don't compare.

To say this is a tech demo is to give it too much credit. It's a crappy arcadey minigame masquerading as a full price DS game. The only reason anyone bought this was because the DS line up was very thin in the months after launch. The game is slow paced, annoying and unforgiving, the most charitable I can be is to say it was a bad idea for how to use the touch screen that only made sense in these early, early days.

This is a creative and fun microgame pack that I finished on day one. I think that sorting most of the microgames based on the type of touch gameplay they have was a bit of a mistake - made the microgames a bit too predictable within the set. Regardless, the game is still charming fun and most of the microgames work well. There's also still a good amount of side minigames to mess with even beyond the main game. This one is by no means bad.

Wonderfully tight and polished metroidvania with a wide variety of abililties and weapons. Can't emphasise enough how good to play this one feels - it's snappy and perfectly tuned. The souls system introduced here is brilliant, both allowing for a lot of cool abilities that get you into new areas, as well as a ton of optional ones that are just for fun. This was the first of the series, or even the genre, that I played and it's still one of the best.