Video Game Review – Nintendo DS – “Contact”

Guest Post by: MartinT

Contact is a new game by Atlas for the Nintendo DS. Contact tells the story of a professor from outer space who crash lands and recruits a young boy to recover the lost crystals that power his ship. In a unique gaming move, the professor actually acknowledges you, the player. Apparently you are receiving is distress signals through your DS, a device which quite impresses the old man. He asks you to guide the young boy through his adventure.

You do this by maneuvering him through the world around him, and by placing special "stickers" that have various effects on the boy’s environment. Some of the weirder aspects of the game such as this will either make or break your enjoyment of Contact, depending on how open you are to such oddities in your video games.

It seems that a game’s ability to make good use of the two screens and touch-screen capabilities of the DS has become a measure of a DS game’s worth. Contact both succeeds and fails in this area. First of all, it makes interesting use of the touch screen. Unlike some game, you can play this entire game using only the touch screen in most places. You guide your character around and perform all available actions by touching icons that appear onscreen.

This is a refreshing and exciting new way to play video games. It feels like what we were promised when we bought a DS. However, the upper screen is almost unused in many ways. The image of the professor who guides your adventure remains practically static on the upper screen, save for a bit of useless shuffling around that you won’t even notice. Only in a few boss battles do you actually need to look at the upper screen. This is very disappointing and feels like a waste of the DS’s potential.

The game itself is quite fun, and can be especially challenging at some points. The quirkiness of the characters and the overall world of Contact will for some gamers be reminiscent of the cult favorite Earthbound. In fact, for diehard fans of Earthbound, Contact comes highly recommending in that it may be the closest thing they will ever get to another Earthbound game.

The adventure is long and sprawling, and players will have fun.

The graphics aren’t pushing the envelope in any way. Previous DS games have proven its graphical capabilities to be roughly equal to the Nintendo 64, but nothing in Contact really goes any further than the Super Nintendo. You could tell someone that a screenshot of this game was from a decade ago, and they’d believe you.

During the more difficult parts of your quest through Contact, you may find yourself becoming annoyed at the sheer length of some of the areas. Every time you die you start back from your bedroom onboard the ship. This can be quite a distance to re-travel.

The combat system for this game is odd, and could be a turn-off for some players. It is similar to many RPGs, in that it is turn-based and makes use of Hit Points, but it is not at all text based or done through choosing commands. You simply draw near to the enemy and enter battle mode, and then your character and the enemy fight each other dealing amounts of damage determined by their stats.

It feels kind of like you are helpless to do anything and the outcome of the battle is up to fate. This is most likely an attempt to remind the player that you are not actually taking on the role of the boy, but instead you are the person holding the DS who has been sent to watch over him.

In any event, you will soon discover that this game is not really about the combat, but about the exploration, and the plot, which has enough interesting twists and turns to keep players intrigued throughout the game.

Technorati Tags: Nintendo DS, Nintendo Entertainment, Contact, Nintendo Games, Video Games

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A mix of work by writers who have written for Literary Illusions over the years.