Top 5 Must-Play Nintendo DS Games: A Nostalgic Journey Through Gaming History

5. The Legend of Zelda: Ghost of the Hourglass

It’s arguably the best portable form factor for gaming ever, and the most popular. It wasn’t easy to boil it down to five games, but if you read my Gamecube list you know how much of a fan I was of Wind Waker, a game that Nintendo built on by delivering an adventure which built around the Nintendo DS hardware. . The result was a completely magical adventure that would not have been possible in any other form.

4. Advance Wars: Dual Strike

The single Nintendo series I miss the most is Advance Wars, and nowhere was it better than in 2005’s Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS Everything was that we loved about the original, but again with a clever use of the dual screens and a number of new features that improved playability. It’s one of the few games that time can’t do anything about, and it’s just as fun today, nearly two decades later, as it was when it was first released.

Here’s a hint:

3. Elite Beat Agents

Of course it should be called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, but it was never released in the West and instead became Elite Beat Agents, one of those games that would not have been possible without the Nintendo DS, and which was not a -only taking full advantage of the shape, but also offering something entirely. new in the form of wacky Japanese humor. The basic concept is to make people happy while doing things – and this rather strange idea captured the entire gaming world at the time. And with good reason.

Here’s a hint:

2. New Super Mario Bros.

By this time, Nintendo had moved on to making 3D Mario games, but after more than 15 long years, many people missed the 2D adventures. In 2006, Nintendo decided to listen to this and released New Super Mario Bros., showing that they still know how to make platform games in a way that affects its everyone else. The classic Super Mario formula received so much gameplay innovation that the concept felt new again, and since then Nintendo has regularly returned to two-dimensional versions of the plumber brothers. A must have in your Nintendo DS collection.

1. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Just like with the Gamecube, the best game for the format didn’t come from Nintendo itself. Instead, it was Rockstar who offered this in an unexpected raw adventure of Huang Lee, which contained all the ingredients that made the world love Grand Theft Auto so much. Rockstar quickly avoided the trap of trying to pack in so many heavy graphics, creating a unique action adventure designed specifically for the format’s hardware that took full advantage of the capabilities and its graphic features. In this way, the pen became an essential part of your drug smuggling and burglary operations. In addition, other activities were used in clever ways, such as whistling for a taxi using the microphone. It was and is a mystery how an adventure like Chinatown Wars even ended up on a small Nintendo DS card, although it seems to be forgotten today (except for a small mention in Grand Theft Auto IV ), it stands as one of Rockstar’s finest moments.