Retro Game Challenge is well worth your time and well worth adding to your Nintendo DS collection. Whether you want to relive the eighties or just play some fantastic 8-bit games, there truly is something for everyone that enjoys gaming in its purest form. Now, I need to go back to playing some Retro Game Challenge, since later tonight I will be organizing my cassette tape collection while doing some other hilarious eighties cliché. Retro Game Challenge for the DS gets a 9/10

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars- First Official Trailer


Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Hands-On
While Grand Theft Auto has previously been on Nintendo's Game Boy platform, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars marks the first time the franchise has appeared on the Nintendo DS. The good news is that from our hands-on time with CTW so far, it seems the game not only captures the unique tone and flavours of the much-heralded series, but does so while introducing new and genuinely entertaining ways of interacting with the gameworld. In our hands-on time with a preview build of the game, we used the DS touch screen to do everything from nimbly racing timers to creating Molotov cocktails, hot-wiring cars, and assembling a kit-form sniper rifle.

The game takes place in the Liberty City you've come to know and love, complete with Dukes, Broker, Bohan, and Alogonquin boroughs. While the locations are familiar, you're going to be looking at them from an entirely different perspective. The most obvious change in GTA:CTW is the game's camera. It falls halfway between the classic top-down view of the original Grand Theft Auto and that of an isometric third-person action game, with the camera zooming in and out as dictated by the action onscreen. The environment initially appears quite flat, but once we found out we could twirl the fixed camera, we saw buildings and vehicles rendered as full 3D objects. Our Rockstar tour guide explained that while the city is modelled as closely as possible on the maps from its console big brothers, some minor tweaks had to be made to accommodate the new gameplay. Therefore, while you'll drive under overhead train tracks (which become transparent as you pass below) there are no split-level roads. Progressive game streaming also means that despite the city's enormity, you'll never bump into a load screen while crossing zones or driving across town to complete a mission. Pedestrians have their own individual AI routines, and following them around you'll observe them heading to and from work, eating hotdogs, and getting into fist fights with total strangers on the road. Full day and night lighting cycles and dynamic weather effects are also present here.

As the game's name suggests, Chinatown Wars focuses largely on Asian crime syndicates and rival gangs scrapping for turf control. You play the role of Huang Lee, the son of a syndicate boss who is killed during a triad power struggle. The game opens with you returning home to Liberty City to meet with your uncle, Wu "Kenny" Lee, to pass on the family's Yu Jian sword--a priceless family heirloom Huang's father won in a card game.



Animated cutscenes with accompanying text explain the backstory as you make your way home. On arrival at the airport, you meet some of your uncle's bodyguards, but before you can even get your bags off the carousel, a bloody shoot-out takes place and you're hit. Left wounded and presumed dead in the back of a car, you regain consciousness in time to find out you're being disposed of as your vehicle careens off the road and plummets into the harbour. It's here that the actual gameplay begins, and you'll immediately be introduced to some of the new stylus-driven interactions with the game. Naturally you'll need to escape the rapidly sinking car, and with doors notoriously difficult to open underwater, you opt to smash the rear window. You'll do this by rapidly stabbing at the DS's touch screen to chip the glass. Though it didn't appear to be velocity sensitive, a few strikes were enough to get us out of our waterlogged coffin and back on dry land.

Naturally, the first thing you want to do is get to your uncle's place and fill him in on the details. This is a GTA game, so there's no real surprise that since your ride is totalled you need to liberate one conveniently sitting at the docks. During our time with the game we stole some cars with screwdrivers, but we also found some with electronic security systems that needed to be hacked before they could be started. Once you get to Kenny's restaurant, Sum Yung Gai, you'll find out that the family sword has been stolen. A subplot unfolds, and though he's family, Kenny seems set on finding the sword not to rightfully return it to your kin, but to pass it on to triad mob boss Hsin Jaoming, with the purpose of winning his favour so as to assume his role when he retires.

Kenny hooks you up with an apartment that you use as your central hub for day-to-day activities. Here you'll be able to manage your contacts, take jobs, and store your drug stash. Once completed, any mission can be replayed at will using the whiteboard at your apartment. Though we didn't see the stats and scores in action, we were told that they will hook directly into the Rockstar Social Club, so you can compete with and compare yourself to friends as well as share in-game items. Given that the mission length tops out at around 10 minutes each to maintain the portability of the game, you'll also have a PDA that lets you save while out and about as well as line up missions without retuning to home base.

All the vehicles we came across included GPS to help point you towards where you need to go. There's also the option to turn on a giant yellow arrow indicator so you can stay focused on the road and not your minimap. The GPS will calculate the fastest legal path to your objective, but you can always take your vehicle off-road through parks or back alleys. The system is also smart enough to redraw on the fly if you deviate from the suggested path or take a wrong turn. Burnouts make a return, and by holding the B and Y buttons you'll streak fire and whip the rear of the car around with a temporary speed boost. It's incredibly useful for getting out of a pinch in a hurry or to take out errant rival gang members who are in the way. Multiple radio stations make an appearance in each car, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding cruising or fleeing tunes to suit whichever situation you find yourself in.



Controls are handled using the face buttons. X will let you enter or exit vehicles, B accelerates, Y reverses, and the right shoulder button locks up the handbrake to perform tight turns. The D pad is used to steer. When you're on foot, the A button shoots your selected weapon (chosen by opening a submenu on the touch screen), which can also be fired while inside cars for drive-bys. The right shoulder button locks onto targets. Like the gameplay, the city is interactive, and if you take the time to search red dumpsters scattered around the capital, you'll often find weapons and other goodies.

We saw several missions during our time with Chinatown Wars. The first, Streets of Rage, introduced us to a crooked cop named Wade Heston. Trying to both crack the Korean Wonsu Nudong crime family and keep the Internal Affairs department off his back, he seeks out your help. A hot tip tells you the gang might have your family sword, so it can't hurt too much to team up with Wade even if you have different agendas. After finding his apartment abandoned, we got an e-mail from Wade telling us that he was caught in an ambush. Once we located him, we faced a miniboss fight of sorts that saw us pinned down behind a wall in an alley as a guy with a minigun ripped the place apart. Since running out would get us shredded, we used grenades to stun the guy before scampering between cover and eventually taking him out. It's not the most complex puzzling we've seen, but it's a nice addition to straight run-and-gun shooter gameplay.

The second mission we played had us protecting a shopfront from a firebomb attack by rival gang the Spanish Lords. After barricading the street by stealing cars and parking them strategically at the choke points, we waited for the gang to turn up. The action kicked off pretty quickly after their arrival, and we were involved in a heated gun battle. Setting cars on fire with a hail of bullets proved to be particularly helpful to keep them at bay. It was then simply a case of picking them off from range with our assault rifle.

The third mission, One Shot, One Kill, saw us driving a limo to a hotel to perform an assassination. Once we had parked and entered the building, we found a briefcase. Inside was a rifle in pieces and in need of assembly. By dragging and dropping the pieces together with the stylus, we got the basics assembled, but we still needed to rotate the stylus to screw in the barrel, insert the cartridge, and attach the scope. Moving into a first-person perspective, we were given instructions on acquiring the target--a man in a white shirt--and lining up our shot. Naturally, once we had completed the deed we attracted a little unwanted attention. We were immediately awarded a three-star wanted rating and needed to find a car to get the hell out of Dodge.



The wanted system for CTW has been changed up a bit. Instead of outrunning cops until they get bored and go away, each star rating you add increases the number of police cars you'll need to destroy before you can get away. Running them off the road or into oncoming traffic to cause head-on collisions usually does the job, and you'll be off scot-free soon enough.

Drugs play an integral role in this game. They're your primary source of income, and by buying and selling them across the city you'll build up your cash reserves, which you can then use for buying weapons. Illegal trafficking isn't without its dangers, though, and the game features its own mini-economy. Buying low and selling high has never been easier, and by following the upwards-pointing green arrow when trading one type of drug for another you can turn a tidy profit. Video cameras scattered around the city make trading near them risky and increase your chances of being caught but also up your profitability. Like with GTAIV's pigeons, you will need to destroy the cameras to achieve 100 percent game completion, and while doing so reduces your risk of getting busted, you'll also bring down your ability to earn. Trading with other dealers is never smart when within eye line of the police, but wherever you do a deal there's a possibility it could go sour, forcing you to flee if you want to keep your wares.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars looks to be a unique take on the well-worn franchise while adding a new twist to the control system and interactivity with the city itself. You don't have long to wait now, with the game due to hit shelves in mid to late March this year.

At first glance, Big Bang Mini doesn't seem like a traditional shoot-'em-up. Given that the genre is best known for tiny spaceships blasting their way through thick fields of alien fire, you'd be forgiven for wondering where fish skeletons, pirate snowmen, and fireworks fit in. But don't let the charmingly oddball presentation fool you: Big Bang Mini is an evolutionary step forward for the genre. Ship movement and shooting are completely independent of each other. You can launch shots from anywhere on the touch screen, regardless of where your ship is positioned, and this innovation breathes new life into the frantic action. The smooth learning curve makes the game very accessible, but later levels and extra modes provide a tough test of your stylus mastery. Bound together with wonderfully vibrant visuals and an infectious soundtrack, Big Bang Mini earns its shoot-'em-up stripes and a place among the top games on the Nintendo DS.

The unique controls are at the core of Big Bang Mini's appeal. Unlike traditional shoot-'em-ups in which projectiles are fired from your ship, Big Bang Mini lets you launch fireworks from anywhere on the touch screen. Simply flick the stylus as if you were lighting a match, and a shot will light out along that trajectory. As your foes appear on the top screen, you are free to bombard them from any and all angles with fireworks galore. Shots that destroy enemies will explode in a colorful spectacle; however, shots that don't hit anything will explode when they hit the edge of the screen, raining down dangerous debris on your vulnerable ship. This danger pushes you to make more accurate shots, a goal easily accomplished thanks to the responsive and accurate stylus controls.



In fact, the controls are so responsive that errant strokes can get you into trouble. In addition to launching fireworks, you control the position of your ship with the stylus: just touch it and drag the stylus to move it wherever you like. If you try to launch a shot too close to your ship, you may end up moving it inadvertently. Likewise, a desperate swipe to move your ship out of danger can result in a badly aimed shot and a dangerous explosion. Big Bang Mini demands precision in both firing and maneuvering, two separate but equally important tasks. And you won't just be moving your ship to avoid danger: each destroyed enemy releases a falling star. If you collect enough stars to fill up the meter, you pass the stage. Balancing the necessary firing, dodging, and collecting is engaging and exciting. It can also be tricky, but fortunately the first few levels provide a smooth ramp-up in difficulty, ensuring that Big Bang Mini doesn't have the difficult point of entry that many of its genremates boast.

As you progress through the nine levels of the Arcade mode (each with nine stages and a boss), you'll encounter new power-ups and hazards. In one level, you can create a vortex that will absorb enemy shots by swirling the stylus around, but stiff winds will affect the trajectory of your fireworks. In another, you can lay down a reflective mirror shield with a horizontal swipe of the stylus, but certain clouds (which normally absorb your shots) will reflect your own projectiles right back at you. The beauty of these power-ups and hazards is that they are complementary, so as you become more powerful, the level becomes more dangerous. Big Bang Mini gives more as it demands more, and this makes each new level freshly challenging.



In addition to new challenges, each level brings a new, wildly different presentation. From the neon techno pixel landscape of the Egyptian-themed Luxor, to the bawdy colors and trippy musicians of Rio de Janeiro, each level in Big Bang Mini is a treat for the eyes. Attractive backgrounds scroll by smoothly, and the unique (often bizarre) enemies and explosions are a pleasure to look at when you can spare a moment. Underscoring these impressive visuals are some excellent musical tracks that range from snappy electric beats to mellow atmospheric melodies. The level of artistic quality and variety in Big Bang Mini is truly impressive, and the presentation alone is reason enough to recommend the game.

As if stellar presentation and exciting core gameplay weren't enough, Big Bang Mini offers a number of extras to keep you interested. At the completion of each stage (bosses excluded) you'll get the chance to complete a bonus stage. These are connect-the-dots minigames that will light up the top screen with a firework constellation should you succeed. Each level features a different twist (some quite clever), making these bonuses a pleasant palate cleanser between stages. Completing the Arcade mode is no easy feat, but doing so will earn you access to the Mission mode. This mode imposes tough challenges on stages you've already played, so you might be charged with clearing a certain stage within a time limit, using a certain number of shots, or never missing a shot. These conditions force you to adapt your well-honed strategy, so even skilled players will find a challenge here.



For those players who prefer to match their skills against human opponents, Big Bang Mini offers two ways to do so. The Challenge mode harks back to Big Bang Mini's shoot-'em-up roots and is the only mode in which you'll earn points. The core gameplay mechanics are the same, but the enemies, visuals, and music are completely new. Once you perish, you can post your high scores to online leaderboards and see how you stack up. If you prefer a more immediate competition, the Versus mode lets you challenge another DS owner to a shoot-out with only one game card. In Versus, you hold the DS sideways and shoot volleys of fireworks at your opponent on the other screen. Various power-ups and environmental hazards spice things up, and battles can get very heated, especially given that players can tap each other's projectiles to send them rocketing back where they came from. These extra modes provide great opportunities to flex your competitive muscle, while the unlockable Relax mode (watch and control fireworks displays) and Alarm Clock (actually cool, thanks to the stellar music) offer fun rewards for dedicated single-player play.

Big Bang Mini is an excellent shooter with an innovative control scheme that will please newcomers and veterans alike. To fully experience each level's uniquely awesome aesthetic and face the delightfully clever end boss, you simply must play the game all the way through. Once you've done so, there is plenty more to do whether you thrive on competition or just want to live it all again. Add it all up, and you've got one of the most accessible, most entertaining, and most attractive DS games in recent memory. Then consider the $19.99 price tag, and it's a no-brainer: Big Bang Mini is a must-buy.

Review By Chris Watters, GameSpot

The Final Fantasy franchise had never been one to hold continuity close to heart. Until recently, it used to forsake the idea of direct sequels and instead focus on creating entirely new universes that share similar themes, names, and icons. However, the world of Ivalice has been one visited several times, and with Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, we return once again to follow the adventures of Vaan and his friends in the skies above. Their latest adventure is--in a drastic departure from the norm--an RTS game that manages to successfully blend the potent storytelling and signature style of Final Fantasy with the lightning-quick action of Command & Conquer, and the result is one of the more unique and memorable outings in the series' history.

One year after the war with the Archadian Empire, Vaan has fulfilled his dream of becoming a sky pirate and flies through the heavens in a ship of his own with Penelo as his trusted navigator. When he and his friends Fran and Balthier uncover a treasure known as the Cache of Glabados, the legendary sky continent of Lemurés is unveiled, and it's up to them to protect the winged inhabitants of that floating world from the sinister Judge of Wings and her illusionary armies. Along your journey you will encounter friends and enemies both old and new, and experience an adventure that becomes surprisingly introspective and questions what it means to truly be alive.

Revenant Wings is divided up into 10 chapters, each of which consists of roughly five missions. Each mission will provide more detail on the deep and engrossing story with both in-game and prerendered cutscenes, and between them you'll be free to travel across Lemurés and beyond in an airship of your own christening that serves as your base of operations. You'll be able to take side quests from Tomaj and his notice board, engage in skirmishes with local fauna or other sky pirates, craft new weapons from materials gathered in your journeys, and look at trophies earned through battle. You will also be able to spend crystals called auricite that you earn through missions to forge pacts with summoned monsters known as espers. Though your main characters will take to the battlefield themselves, your espers will make up the bulk of your combat forces, so it's important to forge as many pacts with as many types of espers as you can to bolster your army.

At the beginning of a battle you are given your mission goals, which can vary from defeating all enemies, to sneaking to a specific spot, and more. At that point you're presented with the chance to analyze your enemy's strengths and weaknesses and tailor your army accordingly. Characters and espers are classified as ranged, melee, and flying units, each of which is part of a rock-paper-scissors relationship. These relationships, along with elemental resistances and weaknesses, are vitally important to pay attention to when selecting which party members and espers you will use, given that you can only field up to five characters and summon from a troupe of up to five types of espers.

When combat begins, your selected characters will each become the leader of a group of espers. Though Revenant Wings is an RTS, there is no resource gathering or management to speak of, and as long as you have control of a summoning gate, you can call forth new espers which are added to existing groups and makes unit organization a snap. However, enemy leaders can also summon espers in this way, and you'll have to work diligently to capture their summoning gates to help you control the flow of battle. Combat is extremely fast-paced, and as such it's important to make sure that your ranks are constantly refilled if the need to do so arises.

Beyond their normal attacks, espers have special abilities that are automatically used whenever they come available. Your characters themselves will learn a slew of their own as they gain levels, one of which can be assigned at any time to be their gambit, which shifts it into automatic use in the same manner as the espers. Each character will also learn a super ability called a quickening that can be used to turn the tide of a battle. Micromanaging in Revenant Wings is essentially reduced to keeping track of which character abilities and quickenings are ready and making sure that they're effectively used. This streamlines combat and makes it much more action-oriented, while keeping it easily accessible to those not well-versed in the RTS genre.

Control during battle is handled using a simple and intuitive combination of touch-screen use and button presses. The top screen displays a map of the entire area for quick reference of the positions of both your units and your enemy's, and the bottom screen is a close-up view of the action shown from an overhead isometric view. Leader portraits, which indicate the status of a particular character and his or her grouped espers, can be tapped to select the entire group. Individual units can be selected by tapping them, and you can also tap the screen and drag across to select a large group of units. You can then use a single tap to order those selected units to move to a specific location or to attack an enemy unit. Tapping and holding down the stylus will let you move the screen around, or you can use the directional pad to do the same thing.

Graphically speaking, Revenant Wings is one of the most impressive-looking games on the DS, and the prerendered cutscenes that play at times are of the same level of quality that one has come to expect from Square Enix. The assorted locales you will travel to are vivid and lively, and the unit sprites, however small, are highly detailed and expressively animated. For the most part, battlefields are designed to complement the fixed isometric camera, but there are times, however rare, that units or monsters may be concealed behind tall environmental objects, though this is a minor complaint. Likewise, there is some graphical slowdown when massive groups of units gather onscreen and enter combat, but not so much that it becomes even remotely unplayable.

Fans of the music of Final Fantasy XII will feel immediately at home with the soundtrack of Revenant Wings because the style is completely identical. In fact, many of the songs, such as the theme of the Rabanastre Lowtown, are straight-up ported across. This sense of familiarity that fans of other Final Fantasy games will feel is not limited to the music, either. There are many other throwbacks to older games in the series, such as the return of Namingway, and all in all, fans will be pleased with the game's self-referential nature.

Ultimately, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings successfully takes the role-playing game flair and style that the franchise is known for into the RTS realm. With an excellent combination of game design and control-scheme implementation, the fast-paced battle system is easy to keep up with and difficult enough to challenge you for roughly 25 hours, not including all the extra time you could put into completing side quests, forging pacts with espers, and earning all of the trophies. Revenant Wings is easily one of the better games on the Nintendo DS, and whether or not you're a fan of Final Fantasy games or the RTS genre in general, it's a worthy purchase if you're looking for a fun and entertaining experience.
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is the second direct sequal to a final fantasy game. Final Fantasy XII, on Playstation 2 (released March 16 2006 in Japan) was a major hit for the FF series selling 1,764,000 copies in the first week in Japan. The story of FF12 follows a young orphan named Vaan as he becomes involved in a war to fight the empires rule over the world.

Well in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, set a year after the events of FFXII, you again play as Vaan. Vaan is now a fully fledged Sky Pirate with his own ship and Penelo as his navigator he flys across the sky as free as he had once dreamed. He meets Balthier and Fran at an old ruins, and after finding a mysterious stone, things start ti get heated. They rush out of the colapsing ruins but Vaans ship is lost.

After returning to town, the others console Vaan, but he hasn't a care, for he has adventure in his eyes. When a strange ancient ship arrives in Rabanastre, Vaan jumps at the chance to steal it. With Kytes and Filo tagging alone, Vaan enters the ship and just as Penelo and Tomaj jump onboard, the ship auto takes off. The ship takes the crew, as well as a unwanted visiter, to the Floating Continent of Lemurés, where they meet an undiscovered race of people called Aegyl and a deadly foe. So its up to Vaan to stop this new evil from taking over Lemurés and the rest of Ivalice.

The gameplay in FFXII:RW is different to FFXII but mixes with it to create the effect of FFXII on the DS. The touch screen is used to control Vaan on the map or in the ship, and it is also used in battle to control your team. Similarities to FFXII includes a gambit system, where a single skill can be used automatically and espers from FFXII are included in RW. The characters do not need to be told to attack, just sending them near an enemy will initiate an attack. On the world map, going close to a place will allow you to choose a mission to complete. There is also synthesizing, where you can not only buy weapons, but make them to be more powerful. Although you play as 2D characters, the game features stunning movies that bring the DS to its limits with its graphics.

This game should be a definite buy for any final fantasy fan, and if you loved FFXII's story, then this game will contiune the much loved story and is a must get. The touch screen provides a new level of interaction that other final fantasy's have not. This game will provide a good 30 hours of pure entertainment and an incrediable story that will make you never wanna put your DS down.
By gamespot

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings - NDS Trailer