Fun in the sun

by ERIK LEIJON

A recent stretch of nice weather forced me from the confines of my dark, cluttered gaming/S&M dungeon, so I decided sunny portable games with flashy colours, cartoonish graphics and ebullient soundtracks were in order. Rhythm Heaven (DS/Nintendo) and Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (DS/EA, EA Tiburon) are a couple of challenging, unique Nintendo DS games that although they have issues—sort of like how this time of year incites my seasonal allergies—are like an antihistamine shot to my congested, over-stimulated nasal pathways. It’s good to remove the shackles of the bulky console for the great outdoors.

Say what you want about Rhythm and Hatsworth, but no one can ever accuse them of misleading titles. Rhythm is a series of short music-based mini-games that will either have you tapping, flicking or sliding the stylus to match the typically metronomic beats. Hatsworth’s puzzling adventure is half-puzzle game, half-platform adventure game played at once and divided by the DS’s dual screens.

To put it simply, Rhythm Heaven is a hyperactive Wario Ware for those don’t get all the subtle gaming pop culture references. From timing ping-pong returns to the beat to catching refuelling robots coming down a conveyor belt, the games are less than a minute long and each have their own set of monkey-see-monkey-do call-response movements that require pinpoint timing.

They’re deceptively simple, and early plays will have you tossing the DS in frustration as keeping time is harder than Ringo Starr makes it seem. Unlike Wario Ware, for the most part the games are played individually and not in random succession, so there are occurrences where you’ll keep failing at the same mission and be unable to move on (damn iguanas).

The game will cause anger and expose your lack of musical ability, but keep at it because once the medals and rhythm toys start rolling in, the number of fun diversions will actually reveal a steady learning curve to understanding the nuances of every mini-game. That and the rapid-fire remix mini-games are as jarring to the senses as some of the better Wario Ware marathons.

Hatsworth takes two really simple, dependable gaming concepts: the generic Mario-style platform game and the Connect Four-style item matching puzzler, and mashes them together uncomfortably. Occasionally during the boss stages there are moments when both dramatically different styles of gameplay converge into one wild mess of fun, but usually players will do a few minutes of platform jumping on the top screen, followed by moving to the puzzle screen below and eliminating blocks as the always rising stack of items begin to encroach on the action.

Everything you do in the main game, such as killing enemies and collecting items, affects the types of items you’ll see on the puzzle screen, but in reality the two halves exist as equally cool, largely separate entities. The erudite Brit explorer Hatsworth’s antics are worth the price of admission alone, as his witty ripostes are as deadly as his mesh armour suit (referred to as “tea time”).

Hatsworth is the deeper, tougher and better experience, but Rhythm Heaven is another strong entry in the ever-expanding Nintendo catalogue of simple yet layered DS titles. They’re both great accompaniments to a summer of slamming 40s on the front porch.

Noisemaker updates

Also, A2M’s formerly homeless acrobatic shooter WET has officially found a publisher in Bethesda. The game is scheduled to be released this year.