Game & Watch Collection

The Good
The number one quality this game has going for it, is it's addictive nature. It's easy to get caught up in the speed and score-wrangling in each of the three retro-retro-retro titles reborn in the Game & Watch Collection. Better yet, the game automatically saves high scores.

Graphically, the game is designed to perfectly emulate the look of the classic LCD games, and little else--complete with the "shadows" seen in classic LCD screens. While not exactly impressive by modern gaming standards, or for that matter, even DS standards, it's never-the-less charming. For younger gamers, the graphical style will likely do nothing for them. That said, for us old farts, it's going to be a delicious retro flavor and will likely bring back fond memories of hovering over various little LCD games, be it Nintendo's Game & Watch titles, or those Tiger LCD's that reigned back in the day. The upside, of course, is that the gameplay here is generally deeper than those things.

Play control is sharp and responsive, as is to be expected of typical Nintendo-produced titles. Each game has a "regular mode" (Game A) and a "hard mode" (Game B), and high scores are saved separately for each. Menus are clear and easy to navigate.

Essentially free from Nintendo... so long as you buy and register enough Nintendo stuff through Club Nintendo. Will likely one day become a much sought-after rarity.

The simple design makes for great pick-up and play gaming. Perfect for brief moments of travel. All three games are fairly different from each other, and require different focus and strategies to play.

The alarm clock is a strange addition. For what is essentially a freebie from Nintendo, it certainly doesn't feel like a freebie.

The Bad
The games haven't been upgraded in any way, except for the saving of high scores.

There's really no music, just the standard bleeps and bloops of the olden days. The only music is during the menu screens, and it's fairly generic Nintendo stuff.

For the size of the DS game cards, having only three games on here isn't very impressive. Granted, there probably weren't a million dual-screen G&W titles (according to Wikipedia, there were 48 total in both single and dual-screen), but it would be nice to see more than just three games stuffed on here--even if a couple of them were to be single-screen only.

The biggest down-side to the title is that it's pretty shallow. Once you've played it for half an hour, you've played it. The only thing left is to one-up yourself in scores.

The major down-side to classic LCD games is their generally repetitive nature.

The Bottom Line
Aside from the addictive nature of the games, there tends to be a bit more complexity than one might expect from ancient LCD games from the early 80's. Donkey Kong, for instance, is arguably more complex than the original arcade game. Rather than just getting to the top, the non-Mario hero must make his way to the top, activate a crane, and jump to the crane to remove supports keeping DK at the top of the game field. This must be done four times to dethrone Kong just once.

Oil Panic requires the player to collect up to three drops of oil in a bucket in the top floor of an apartment building, and then with careful timing, drop the oil to a large drum held by a different CPU-controlled character outside the building. Oil Panic is the only game of the three where the player is allowed to screw up four times instead of two (a third time in any game means game-over). Two chances to miss drops of oil (dripping from an apartment ceiling for some reason), and two chances to miss the oil drum--which then drops the oil onto customers beneath the apartment building.

Green House is the most frantic of the three games. Whereas there are moments in Donkey Kong where patience matters, and careful planning is required in Oil Panic, Green House is all about frantic movement. The gardener must spray inchworms moving in two directions in the top screen, and spiders from either side of the screen on the bottom. No calm moments, no strategy, just hectic movement.

Finally, despite the generally shallow nature of the title, the three games inside are never-the-less fun. Even if they are repetitive and the DS card seems to have a lot of unused space...

But then, it's not a super-common title, it's not released in stores, and if you like showing off your games online and registering products, it's essentially free--so it's not like we're getting ripped off by owning it. It's like a free gift from Nintendo, for supporting the crap out of Nintendo. And it's easily one of the better deals from Club Nintendo. You can have hanafuda cards, lame cases to hold Wii Remotes, or a DS game.

(Choose the DS game.)