Video game review by ERIK LEIJON

Never say never in Montreal, but it seems like spring has finally arrived. Now I’m not suggesting you turn off your PC and console and go outside, but if you do have to spend some time in the “great” outdoors, you may as well pack your portable. I like Nintendo’s strategy of engulfing the market with DS games right now—commuting downtown every day coupled with no longer worrying about freezing my hands off means I get at least an hour or two a day to play.

It was November 2004 when the DS originally came out, bundled with a highly innovative Metroid FPS demo that did a good job proving the DS wasn’t just a ridiculous looking Blackberry for kids. Now in ’06, the full version is finally out, and it ushers in the second generation of DS titles.

Metroid Prime Hunters (DS/Nintendo, NST) is a different take on the 20-year old series in more ways than one. The obvious change is the stylus-based control scheme. Your left hand uses the directional pad to move Samus and the L trigger to fire her weapon; the right hand uses the stylus to swivel her head around and to aim at enemies. By tapping on various positions on the bottom screen, you can quickly change weapons, switch to morph ball (a staple of the series), use your scan visor and jump.

It works, but the DS’s lack of shapeliness proves to be a minor problem. For one thing, using the stylus continuously, especially when standing up (I had to play while standing in the packed 211 bus), does feel uncomfortable. Chances are you’ll also beat the snot out of your stylus screen too, because you’ll be using it constantly to evade attacks and for aiming.

Your bottom screen might look like it was clawed by a cat after a few hours, but the top screen is where the action occurs, and Hunters’ graphics are exceedingly colourful. Hunters looks like a PS1 or early N64 title, but the environments are huge and vibrant, capturing the open-ended exploratory elements common to the Prime series and previous Metroids as well. Hunters finds Samus in a race for a lost civilization’s rarest artefacts, competing with her rival space Indiana Jones-equivalents. The enemies don’t have much detail to them (beyond the cool CGI cutscenes) and the generic enemies look like flying colour splotches, but the boss fights are elaborate and worthy of the likes of Kraid and Mother Brain.

Metroid Prime Hunters takes full advantage of the DS’s Wi-Fi capabilities. You can play up to four players using your wireless network or a hotspot around town. Concordia University’s Wi-Fi security prevented me from playing in the school, but there are plenty of hotspots in the city for you to try out the seven multiplayer modes and tons of levels.

The best compliment I can give is that I twice missed my elevator stop because I was so engrossed. What was problematic was the long spaces between save points, which became annoying when I only had about 5–10 minutes to pick up and play. Hunters doesn’t act like a portable game, but it’s still one of the best the DS has to offer.

Samurai jacked

Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams (PS2/Capcom, Capcom) promised a new direction in the popular samurai hack ’n’ slash series, yet somehow it felt like the same tapping gameplay I was familiar with.

The bosses look decent, the slashing and killing is relentless, but the graphics on the whole don’t look too impressive compared to similar titles on the PS2 (like God of War).