Sturat

Chu Chu Rocket is the Dreamcast game I return to the most. It's my favorite.

@jcfletcher: I would have liked to know how you control this game. Do you use the analog nub, the d-pad, the touch screen, the motion sensor, the camera, or a combination of them?

Also, this review lists Nintendo as the developer. Word on the street says Pilotwings Resort was outsourced to Monster Games in Minnesota. I would like to know who actually made it and whether it is consistent with Nintendo's quality. I generally don't like Nintendo's outsourced games like Mario Strikers and Excite Truck, so this would be the biggest factor for me to decide whether I'd enjoy this.

This is great.

I agree that this looks more like a flash-based browser game than a real arcade game.

Wow, I just assumed this was made by Nintendo and preordered it. Now that I know it was out-sourced to Northfield, MN, I will probably cancel my pre-order. I want a 3DS on day one, but something is wrong when Nikoli’s Pencil Puzzle looks like the best launch game.

It looks a lot like Sonic Adventure in a lot of good ways. The main character even sounds like he might have the same voice actor as Sonic!

I assumed the US release had been canceled. This is great news; I already have it pre-ordered.

This is really bad form: You complain that the game is too short and shallow, but never bothered to play well enough to discover that there are actually eight more levels. Flingsmash is a fast-paced yet deep game, qualities that have become incredibly scarce because reviewers seem to always mark down the games that don't consume at least 30 hours of your life.

Meanwhile, reviewers never mark down the slow-paced games. I've never finished a game and said "I would have liked that to occupy more of my time considering what I paid for it," but there are dozens of games where I've given up within a couple hours because the worthwhile parts are stretched too thin and far apart among tutorials, story, hub-worlds, side-quests, collectibles, levels lasting over ten minutes, and all sorts of other repetitious nonsense.

I think it'll come out in 2010. They don't want to hurt the sales of current models by announcing it yet, but they haven't announced enough games for the original DS to carry the holiday season without it. Plus, Zelda for Wii was delayed to 2011 so they don't really have any mass-market must-haves without it.

I know Steam is about as good as digital distribution gets, but the main reason it's so popular is you're forced to run it if you want to play Valve games, even when you buy the retail discs. I'd like to see someone come up with a distribution system compelling enough that people would choose to use it even if hit games weren't arbitrarily tied to it.