Game & Watch Collection for DS Review.

Many thanks to Vipp from RetroGaming RoundUp as he gave me his spare copy of the Club Nintendo exclusive Game & Watch Collection for DS. So I sent him a game on Steam, and I received this in the post a few days later!

The name "Game & Watch Collection" is a little misleading as you can download Game & Watch games onto the DSi and 3DS. But this game is a little special as it only has the Multi Screen Game & Watch games on it, which you can't download from the DSi/3DS eShop. They should have called this the "Multi Screen Collection", then again, I'm not Nintendo, and they are, so I better stop whining.

Let's boot up this baby!

There are three games on the Game & Watch collection, these are the first three Game & Watch Multi Screen games that got launched in Japan in 1982. These are Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House.

Oil Panic is the first game in the collection, and it's a simple game that plays a lot like Activision's Kaboom on the Atari 2600. However, it's not as simple as Kaboom. Not only do you have to catch droplets of flammable oil falling onto a stove at a petrol station (do they really have kitchens at petrol stations?), but you bucket can only hold three units of oil, and once you have filled your bucket, you have to empty it by throwing it out the window and into your college's bucket (who you don't control) outside below you on the bottom screen, who is aimlessly walking left and right and not being any real help to you. It's an OK game, maybe a little bit too simple, but enjoyable non the less, I found out a trick where you don't have to fill the bucket all the way before you go and empty it. In fact, sometimes it's better to empty the bucket when you only have two units of oil inside. It's a good game on the collection, but it's not the best.

Next we have Donkey Kong. Well, I own Donkey Kong on the Game & Watch in physical form, so an emulation of it isn't going to excite me too much. But for those who never played it before, here's the gameplay. The game itself plays a bit like the arcade, with barrels heading for you, but what makes this different to the arcade game is that there are now moving suspended girders that pass by on the bottom screen where if Mario hits his head on it, you lose a life. Taking out Donkey Kong himself is a little different too as he's standing on a platform suspended by four hooks that can be removed when Mario grabs a different hook from another crane to remove one of the hooks holding up DK's platform. Remove all four hooks, and DK falls over and injures himself that cost 30 points.

You can read more about this on a previous blog post where I talk about the physical version of the game.

Finally we have Green House, the only game I haven't played before I played this collection. I'll have to say, out of all the games in this collection, this is my favourite. You simply play as a gardener working in a green house looking after flowers, as menacing worms and spiders appear that want to ruin your little garden. You have to protect the four flowers that appear in the four corners of the game, in this case as it's two screens, two flowers on the lower left and right hand corners on the bottom screen, and two flowers on the upper left and right hand corners on the top screen. The worms appear on the top screen, starting from sprouting out of a plant pot, and head towards the flowers by inching across a vine. You need to climb up the ladder to the top screen, get under the worm and shoot insecticide at it to kill it before it eats the flower. The Spiders appear on the bottom screen from a web and crawl down a strand of web towards the flowers at the lower corners of the bottom screen. The Spiders are stronger against the insecticide, they move back a frame each time you shoot insecticide at them, so you have to push them back into their web, and they won't come back out for a little while. Now the trick in this game to earn more point is to spray the insecticide just before they try to eat the flower, this will earn you 3 points instead of the typical 1 point. Do this to the spiders, not only do you earn 3 points, but you kill them out right, the insecticide works on them at close range, not long range.

Out of all the games in this collection, Green House is my favourite!

So, thanks to Vipp for giving me his spare copy of the Game & Watch Collection on the DS. It's a good collection, though only one of the games got my seal of approval, but it's still a great little compilation of Game & Watch Multi Screen games. The emulation of the games are pretty good, though you're not going to get those smooth LCD sprites on the DS's low resolution screen. The sound, well it's a Game and Watch collection, the most sound you're going to get are bleeps and bloops, you're not really going to get a full blown symphony out of this, but the sound does what it has to do, and does it well it indicate movement, when you earn points and when you lose a life. There's an added feature in the game to treat your DS as if it's an alarm clock just like the alarm feature on the original Game & Watches, but what sucks is that it doesn't work if you close the DS, meaning you'll be kept awake as the glow from your DS's screen fills your bedroom, not practical in the slightest, play the game, don't use the alarm clock!

It's worth getting if you earned enough stars and coins in your Club Nintendo account. Though it's worth trying to get all those stars and coins for that Game & Watch Ball reproduction! :D

I so want this! But it's so expensive!