#pictobits

[voltdamage]

Thought about pictobits smb castle theme for the first time in a while. vgm that permanently altered my music taste

[ytpmvs]

[beekirby]

Can I just....

talk about

the fact that they made a 3-minute song

out of a 5-second fanfare

and it still sounds good???

[kzvgmusic]

Visit Original Link

[kzvgmusic]

Visit Original Link

[sporadicbeepboops]

Arriving in Style

I think I’m coming around on Nintendo making mobile games. It’s early enough that Iwata could completely let me down a few years from now, but he’s saying all the right things in interviews, and Nintendo has built up an extraordinary amount of goodwill in this fan’s eyes. And while I appreciate that it’s not shoe-horning existing 3DS games onto our phones, it has enough forgotten properties that could be smartly repurposed for touch interfaces. Specifically, I hope Nintendo and Skip Ltd. are considering rebooting the Art Style series.

Never played an Art Style game? That’s a shame, but I don’t blame you. They were largely ignored due to their status as “DSiWare,” a service that felt years behind the times when it debuted and seems practically prehistoric now. (Anyone griping about the eShop doesn’t realize how good we have it.) DSiWare became a magnet for the stinkiest of shovelware, so I think many just dismissed the whole library completely.

But that would be a mistake! The Art Style games were so wonderful, and more importantly, inventive. Anyone can make a match-3 clone; Making a truly original puzzle game is considerably tougher. And Skip (with some help from Q-Games) managed to do it a dozen times. There's the beloved pixel-dropper PiCTOBiTS (above), which as a nice bonus features some of the best Nintendo music remixes ever. BOXLIFE managed to redeem the maligned box industry after years of ridicule. And I’m not even going to try to describe DIGIDRIVE, but trust me when I say that it’s magical. I swear, it will just click eventually!

Not every game in the series was a gem, but Skip’s batting average was incredibly high here. That they were designed with a touchscreen in mind means they’d lend themselves well to mobile, but I’d love to see the team chart new territory. Either way, the Art Style games could show the world that puzzle games can be so much more than Candy Crush.

[aerifth]

Visit Original Link

[hooplays]

SOME DSIWARE RECOMMENDATIONS

Man, most of it’s shovelware, but Dsiware has some really good games that constantly get overlooked. Here are my recommendations.

Mighty Flip Champs/$8: OHHH MAN THIS GAME ROCKS. The first game in the infamous “mighty” series that Wayforward created. You control Alta, a sorceress who can only walk and climb (not even jump), but holds the Warp Wand, a staff with the power to flip the pages of the world around you! You control Alta on the top screen and see the next “page” and where Alta will land on the bottom. The goal is to flip through each elaborate set of pages to reach the goal of each level. Each level also has an S-rank you can achieve.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again/$8: This one’s cool. If you’ve never played an M v. DK game before, let me explain. Mario runs some kind of theme park with his ex-girlfriend Pauline in his spare time apparently. And the one day that DK decides to show up, they sell out once he gets up to the admission booth. In a fit of rage, DK steals Pauline and escapes into the theme park. Having better things to do than save his ex (kart racing, golf, princesses), Mario sends his lemming-like army of wind-up toys after the big ape. Your goal in-game is to start the minis and manipulate the world around them to get them to the goal. This is easier said than done though, because once you start a mini, it can’t be controlled. It’s a very neat puzzle game that also features a level creator (but no more online functionality).

Link N' Launch/$4.99: Link N' Launch is a game where you flip tiles around to fuel a rocket's thrusters and reach your destination ina reasonable time frame. Sounds easy, right? WRONG. Flipping the tiles around takes some quick thinking and strategy, because depending on which thrusters you fuel, the ship could also go careening left or right, or you may want to go into a special fuel zone. It gets complicated fast, but if that's not your taste, there's also a time limit free Puzzle mode with 100 preset puzzles to solve at your leisure.

Aura-Aura Climber/$1.99: This is a really weird game. You play as this miniature sun? and you have this arm? that you extend? to grab moons? Strangeness aside, This is a really nice game that's pretty cheap, has 10 score attack stages, followed by a marathon stage, and an endless mode. It's pretty fun, but I enjoy it for its fast paced challenge and weird charm.

Art Style: PiCTOBiTS/$4.99: Lots of people will tell you that if a Nintendo game called "art style" comes out, it's great and you should buy it. This is definitely the best one though. You match three or more colors of blocks as they fall, and the the colors you get fly up to the top screen to fill in an 8-bit image, all while hearing remixed NES music still using the same soundfont. It's much deeper than that though. You can also purchase the music in-game to listen to at your leisure, buy and challenge "dark world" stages (THAT WILL KICK YOUR ASS), and go for high scores.

I'm sure there's even more out there, but these are just a few that stand out to me.