DS Daily: Recommendations

Let's kick off this fine Tuesday with a hypothetical scenario or two. If someone asked you for DS game recommendations, which two would you pick? Wait, let's make it more difficult. Which two would you recommend for:
- a gamer under the age of twelve?
- someone new to the DS who was a longtime gamer?
- someone new to the DS who was not a longtime gamer?
Of course, answers would likely depend on the person, but let's be general. We spent a lot of time recommending games to people in the last year, particularly around the holidays (when it seemed that everyone who didn't already own a DS bought one) and often ended up pushing a lot of the same titles.
Dragon Quest games came up a lot,
Clubhouse Games was bandied about, and we tried to push
Contra 4 onto as many people as possible. How about you?