From Dan Whitehead's review:
"With that Wii-chasing price drop now confirmed, it's clear that Microsoft is aiming its 360 Arcade package right between the eyes of the family market. No doubt some are already clenching their fists and scowling about casual gamers and how they're ruining games and grumble grumble swear. Personally, I couldn't give a toss about the bane of casual games. Pretty much all the early classics of gaming, the basic templates of which are still in use, were casual by definition. I mean, imagine people wanting to play games just for fun. The fools!
With that in mind, this week's Live Arcade update provides two games designed to appeal to this audience. Neither do much to help my pro-casual argument, both being largely inessential, but their flaws lie more with lack of inspiration and make-do design, neither of which are unique to the casual end of the gaming spectrum. So there."
If you've ever tried one of the many popular brain-training games on the Ds, you might understand my frustration. There are quite a few titles out there that claim to "train your brain" in just "minutes a day." Brain Age, Brain Boost, Brain Assist, Brain Challenge-the only requirement seems to be inserting the word "brain" into the title in order to instantly boost intelligence. Amy Nelson at Goozer Nation recently picked up Big Brain Academy from my kids' bottomless stash of Ds games (thanks Gramma)and thought, "Oh, I'll give this a try. Show the kids how it's done."
IGN writes: "If there was an abundance of DSiWare games on the market, then sure, I'd be all for porting older titles onto the service. But the fact is that this is one of the only games to come out this month in a catalog that is pretty weak so far. Granted, that's more of a complaint about the service, and doesn't affect the quality of the product. Still, why couldn't this have been Brain Challenge 2? If you've never ever played the game, then it's actually a pretty decent brain game, though when compared to the recently released DSiWare Brain Age, it's hard to recommend this over that".
This week, Cyril looks at a few retro titles for the Wii and DS. Some that he checks out this week are Pulseman, Secret Command, and Brain Challenge in Haiku style.