Once upon a time, before there were GameBoys and Game Gears, DSs and 3DSs, PSPs and Vitas, and long before the smartphone/tablet app boom, single-game LED handhelds sparked the popularity of portable gaming. Ah yes, the Game & Watch days, I remember them well. Donkey Kong and Green House carried me through many car rides as a youngster.

Retro Pocket is a DSiWare/eShop compilation of eight different games designed to emulate classics from the era of Game & Watch and Tiger Electronics. Whether you’re putting out fires and catching falling victims in Fireman, delivering mail while avoiding patrolling guard dogs in Postman, rescuing a friend from the prison cell of a whale’s mouth in Whale Escape, or picking up candies from a series of conveyor belts and placing them into bins in Candy Factory, these games are simple reminders of where modern gaming came from, requiring nothing more than quick taps of the directional buttons to move and maybe the occasional press of another button to deflect a projectile or light a fire that scares away a snake threatening to snatch your basket of collected eggs.

Each game offers ‘Game A’ and ‘Game B’ modes, with the A option serving as an easy difficulty and the B option offering a harder alternative. Whichever option you choose, the games start off easy, but the gameplay speed gradually increases the longer you survive, which means memorizing the layouts and mastering the movement timing is the key to posting a high score worth bragging about.

A few of the games are overly similar, to the point of almost blurring together and cancelling each other out. Candy Factor, Egg Drop and Watch Your Head for example are all slight variations on the mechanic of catching a falling object and placing it into a container. But with eight games to choose from, each with a distinct theme, there’s ample variety to ensure that at least two or three will sink their “just one more game” hooks into you. Personally, Kung Fu Hero and Fuel Drop have done that for me. In the former, you protect a girl by karate chopping thugs and thrown bottles swarming after her from all sides. In the latter, you tap the L and R buttons to rotate oil drums to match the colors of falling drops of fuel. These are a blast, especially once the speed and difficulty ramp up.

Retro Pocket’s single greatest achievement, however, is how well it replicates the presentation of an old LED handheld. The emulation is absolutely spot on, complete with appropriately bleepy-bloopy chip sound effects and the pre-printed ghost images in the background which represent the gameplay animations and serve as a visual map cluing you in on the paths of character movement and falling objects. With the greater might of the DSi/3DS compared to the older technology, you also don’t have to deal with the delayed movement response that always made Game & Watch games more difficult than they actually were. These games run fast, smooth and responsive, without dampening the retro impact. I only wish this were a built-for-3DS game, as it would have been neat to see how the 3D effect worked with the old LED look.

If you grew up in the 80s and have fond Game & Watch memories, you are the primary audience for Retro Pocket. But that doesn’t mean nostalgia alone is the only selling point. Yes, the compiled games are very straightforward, perhaps too much so for the modern gaming hipster, but they’re also incredibly fun in a quick pick up and play style that often leads to compulsive high score inner turmoil. For only $5 (less than a dollar per game!), Retro Pocket deserves a dedicated spot on your DSi or 3DS.

Pros:
+ Perfectly emulates retro Game & Watch presentation
+ Old school pick up and play high score gaming
+ Great value at under $1 per game

Cons:
– A few of the games repeat the same gameplay mechanic

Game Info:
Platform: Nintendo DSi and 3DS via DSiWare/eShop
Publisher: UFO Interactive
Developer: UFO Interactive
Release Date: 9/20/2012
Genre: Arcade
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1
Source: Review code provided by publisher

If you own a recently manufactured Nintendo portable gaming device (i.e. a DSi or 3DS) and enjoy word/number/picture puzzles, like crosswords, wordsearches, Sudoku, hangman, and spot the difference, there are two new titles to vie for your gaming dollar. Both come from the same Puzzler World brand and the same developer, Ideas Pad, but have different publishers and are available through different channels.

What’s the difference between the two? And which one is the best buy for you? Well, read along, and hopefully I can answer those questions.

From Ubisoft, there’s Puzzler World 2012 3D, a Nintendo 3DS exclusive retail edition, offering more than 1,200 unique puzzles for $19.99. (I think there may be a non-3D DS version as well, but only in Europe from what I can tell.) Then there is Puzzler World XL, a budget-priced DSiWare version available for DSi and 3DS, which stuffs more than 1,800 puzzles into a $4.99 digital download package.

By the numbers, Puzzler World XL clearly has the edge. Obviously the value is stronger when you’re getting hundreds of extra puzzles at a fraction of the price, in addition to multi-platform availability and the convenience of digital download. Looking deeper than sheer quantity, however, reveals that for 3DS owners there is legitimate reason to pay the higher price tag for the retail version.

Puzzler World XL has a lot more puzzles sure, but the discrepancy in volume is only there because the game provides a bonus allotment of nearly 600 wordsearch puzzles. When you remove those bonus puzzles, Puzzler World 2012’s puzzle collection is the same size, plus it offers 10 additional puzzle types not found in XL. Puzzles like crosswords, Sudoku, Link-a-Pix, Silhouette, wordsearch, jigsaw picture sliders, hangman and chain letters are shared between the two, but in Puzzler World 2012 you also get spot-the-difference puzzles, spiral crosswords, Pathfinder (wordsearch variant in which you link the words together in a single continuous line), Mix-Up (crosswords with anagrams for clues), and number puzzles like Takegaki and Suko.

To be fair, XL also has a couple exclusive puzzle types, including Picture Quiz, which has you studying a picture and then answering a series of questions from memory, and Hide & Seek, another picture challenge in which you search for certain shapes hidden within an image. But by comparison, Puzzler World 2012 still scores a decisive edge in puzzle variety.

Beyond the varying amount and types of puzzles, the two games are pretty much identical, save for minor alterations in presentation. Both share the same general stylus-based interface and menu structure, along with other features, including a virtual trophy shelf for showcasing in-game achievements you’ve earned and a currency system of hint tokens that allows you to buy hints/cheats to help you clear puzzles that may be posing a mental stumbling block. The only difference is in how you acquire these tokens. In XL, once you’ve completed a puzzle and the subsequently unlocked bonus puzzle, you get to spin a prize wheel to determine how many tokens you’ll bank. Puzzler World 2012 carries on the ‘Price is Right’ game show vibe, but does so with a Plinko-like mini-game in which a ball is launched into a pegged board with holes of different token amounts waiting to catch it at the bottom.

The only other difference is how XL requires the DSi/3DS to be held in vertical book orientation, while Puzzler World 2012 plays with the 3DS held in its normal position. Puzzler World 2012 is also a tad brighter and more vibrant in terms of picture quality, but despite the ‘3D’ tacked onto the end of the title, having the 3D slider on adds absolutely nothing to such graphically simplistic puzzles.

My favorite feature in both titles is the handwriting training option. The handwriting recognition can be sketchy with certain letters and numbers (for me 7 and 4 tend to get mixed up, as do P, R, K and D), but to help with this you can actually train the game to recognize your personal handwriting style. With the training menu open, you can select any letter or number you want, and then after writing in that letter/number five times the system saves it for more accurate recognition. The recognition still isn’t always perfect, but it’s far better than other crossword puzzle games I’ve played on the DS family of portables over the years.

If you enjoy the type of puzzles that have traditionally been printed in newspapers, magazines and activity books and normally require a real pen or pencil over a stylus, you really can’t go wrong with either of these games. They are both great for daily brain exercise, and they are indispensable gaming companions to have on hand for road trips or plane rides. But to return to the original question: which one is right for you? Well, if you want cheap and convenient with a beefier supply of wordsearches and other basic puzzle types, go with Puzzler World XL. However, if you want a broader diversity of puzzles to choose from and don’t mind paying a retail premium, I think you’ll be happier with Puzzler World 2012 3D.

Pros:
+ Over 1,000 puzzles is a lot, whichever version you choose
+ Handwriting trainer helps clear up most text entry mistakes
+ Puzzler World 2012 3D offers tremendous puzzle variety
+ Puzzler World XL is much cheaper and has hundreds of extra wordsearches

Cons:
– Text entry isn’t always accurate
– Puzzler World 2012 3D has fewer puzzles and is more expensive
– Puzzler World XL has less overall variety

Puzzler World XL Game Info:
Platform: Nintendo DSi and 3DS via DSiWare/eShop
Publisher: UFO Interactive
Developer: Ideas Pad
Release Date: 10/18/2012
Genre: Puzzle
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1
Source: Review code provided by publisher

Puzzler World 2012 3D Game Info:
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ideas Pad
Release Date: 9/25/2012
Genre: Puzzle
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1
Source: Review copy provided by publisher