Kotaku top 12 ds games

And, yet, you got one, you old softy. Here are 12 excellent games as a nice reward for showing an old handheld some love. Making the leap from Game Boy to DS let dev studio Intelligent Systems throw more visual information at players than ever before. That's a great thing since Dual Strike packs in more depth and flexibility than its predecessors, giving you an almost boundless elasticity to thwart the enemy army in this strategy game.

The AI antagonists in this Advance Wars installments are no joke, reading the weaknesses of your defensive strategies and working around your offensive forays. You'll really have to plumb the depths of human ingenuity to win consistently against the computer opponents.

Game online through Combine all 5 codes and enjoy 5 years of unlimited access to PlayStation classics or share them with your gaming buddies and family. Not a Good Match For: Those looking for new designs. Lots of the visual elements in Dual Strike seem to be lifted from previous Advance Wars. Watch it in action. Radiant Historia , a DS game from , wouldn't be out of place on the Super Nintendo in the early 90s.

That's part of the charm—this is an old-school JRPG experience to its core, and although it eschews some antiquated concepts like random battles, Radiant Historia maintains the charm of its Golden Age predecessors. Combine a fun, complicated combat system with an interesting time travel mechanic and you've got a game that deserves to stand next to Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI.

Not a Good Match For: People who don't like high-falutin fantasy plots or turn-based combat. Purchase from: Amazon. This downloadable DSiWare game hits the sweetest spot possible on the 8-bit nostalgia map by tasking players to recreate the blocky sprites of old-school characters like Mario.

The falling blocks title isn't just rosy-eyed memory lane trip, though; it's also a challenging puzzler that will force you to re-wire your spatial perceptions. If you've still got a fannish devotion to Nintendo's old school hardware, then drawing whole scenes from retro Legend of Zelda games will hold a special warmth for you.

Not a Good Match For: Those who want more of the same. Pictobits was an overlooked gem in and it's sadly never been followed up with a sequel.

C'mon, Nintendo! Purchase from: The Nintendo eShop. Ouendan that just had to be experienced to be believed. Import storefronts in the West did a brisk business shuttling Ouendan to foreign shores until developer iNiS and Nintendo re-tooled the concept into a brand new game, as Elite Beat Agents.

And, lo, it was good. Really, any fan of song-and-dance-based storytelling should dig Elite Beat Agents for the wacky situations the operatives help out on and the twists that iNiS put on the rhythm matching genre. Not a Good Match For: Those who want to keep their hands in one place. You'll need to tap spots all over the DS's touchscreen but you'll screw up sometimes because the icons you need to hit pop under the same hand holding the stylus.

It's the touchscreen equivalent of tripping over your own feet. Purchase from: Amazon GameStop. There are so many Kirby games that play the same way. The pink puffball Kirby walks from left to right, inhaling enemies, gaining their powers and spitting his unusual form of justice.

This game is a little differently and perfectly crafted for the DS. In terms of timeline placement, think Star Wars … this game is the Revenge of the Sith , but just way better.

Professor Layton games present a mix of exploration-based, story-heavy adventuring mixed with lots and lots of brain teasers and other puzzles to solve. In this game, which you can enjoy with no prior knowledge of the others, Layton and friends are trying to unlock the power of an ancient civilization and are doing so in a game that actually plays out as a series of short adventures nestled within one grand globe-spanning episode.

A Good Match For: People who like puzzles and thinking—and who want a game that unlocks new puzzles every day for a year following its release date. Study our tips for playing the game. BoxBoxBoy knocks its excellent predecessor BoxBoy off this list by doing something very simple: adding another box. It has the same sublime puzzling as its predecessor but with more complex mechanics and some fresh ideas. Honestly, if you like this game you should also play the first one. Consider this entry a BoxBoy omnibus.

Like the first game BoxBoxBoy starts simply, asks little of you and then, soon enough, has taught you moves that would have seemed like wizardry mere minutes before. A Good Match For: People who like brain-tickling games, people who like solving puzzles, fans of boxes. Familiar monsters now have cooler Alolan variants, and surprisingly fresh Island Trial challenges have replaced tired, old gyms.

A Good Match For: People who love pets, collecting, and charming stories. Read our review, and about the new stuff in the Ultra version. Even with the gameplay as familiar as always, the mid-air blocks and moving hazards seem more dreamlike and surreal than ever, floating somewhere between the device and your brain. A Good Match For: Folks who need a little bit of help. Not a Good Match For: Those who want the rug to stay right where it is.

How has this list changed? Read back through our update history:. Oh, we talked about it! There was a whole big discussion. Somebody brought up WarioWare Gold, to name one example. But the list was just too packed with quality.

Most of the time, they will. Just a man and a dog, looking to make a delivery. But Kentucky Route Zero quickly becomes a mystical adventure through a land left behind by time, an odyssey in magical realism that feels grand and mysterious in a way that very, very few modern video games can muster. What started episodically is now, as of earlier this year, officially complete.

The narrative is really about the journey, not the destination. For that alone, you should try it. A Good Match For: Anyone looking for something different. Not A Good Match For: Those looking for a bunch of complex game mechanics— Kentucky Route Zero is a point-and-click adventure game, and a fairly simple one at that. Watch a video about why the game is great. Purchase From: Amazon Steam Humble. As a human stuck in a world of monsters, you decide whether you want to win encounters with wanton violence or clever context-based interactions talking, joking, petting, etc.

Every life you take ultimately has consequences. Despite those grim trappings, Undertale can be an incredibly warm, fuzzy, and funny game. No line could sum it up better. At the onset, your silent alien hero is given a rickety spaceship and sent off to explore the universe with a single goal: Go on an adventure. Roughly 20 minutes later, the universe explodes, and you wake up on your home planet as if nothing ever happened.

How did that ancient alien race go extinct? And is it possible to save the universe? A Good Match For: Curious gamers, anyone who loves the idea of getting into a space ship and exploring the cosmos. Not a Good Match For: Impatient people, people who need combat in their games, people who hate finicky controls. Listen to our podcast discussing tips for starting the game. Purchase From: Epic Store.

The games on this list are all great PC games. But of all the platforms in our collection of The Bests , the PC has been around the longest and therefore has the largest back catalogue. In our readers helped us make an exhaustive megalist of the best classic PC games of all time. Then in , we made our own list of the 24 best classic PC games. How has this list changed? Read back through our update history:. No cuts save for Hitman 2 , which basically exists inside Hitman 3 anyway. Rest easy, Wheatley.

You had a good run. Skyrim —which was out when this list debuted—jumps onto the Bests because of the post-release addition of Steam Workshop, which lets you seamlessly access and install hundreds of the awesome mods available for the game.

Want more of the best games on each system? Check out our complete directory:. The A. About Kotaku Store. The Bests. By Kotaku Staff. Illustration: Sam Woolley. Screenshot: Creative Assembly. Screenshot: IO Interactive. Screenshot: Sega.