Safecracker DS really does have no plotline to it, no one interacts with you to a degree that it’s worth a sentiment of comment and at all times you are in a first person view point, so you can never roam around free around the large mansion. The fact that you are not a burglar also means that you’ll be devoid of doing anything that exciting, like hiding in the shadows from Uncle Barry who ate too much Turkey on thanksgiving as he runs to the toilet. In fact, the game has you just pressing directional arrows on the bottom screen to navigate.

Navigation defies logic in so many forms, in some sections you will often need to push the forward arrow, left arrow, right arrow and left arrow again just to get around a piece of furniture. Bizarre. To best describe the way this game operates in visual and movement would be old PC logic games such as Myst and Riven. Graphically everything looks pretty average and the sound compression is pretty bad also, you’ll often hear crackles as the samples have been squeezed to inch of their lives to get on the cart.

So unnecessarily awkward navigation aside, does this game actually play well? No. In fact JoWood the makers of the game (not to be confused with Jedward, the squeamish reality TV sensations) have left the game extremely inaccessible for the average player. One look through the thin instruction manual and you’re still left without a clue on how to solve any puzzles. The game has no hint system to help the player if they get remotely stuck and for most people this is a big stumbling block. The puzzles themselves involve sliding blocks, meddling with alphanumeric characters and rotating dials to gain access to safes. Had JoWood spiced it up by giving us an insight into the lives of the uber-rich with some rather seedy and embarrassing items left behind by the old man, it would of made it enjoyable indeed but as such just items that offer nothing to the enjoyment of the game.

Where the game could have improved was to provide us with a third person free roaming movement and some interactivity with other characters in the game wouldn’t have gone a miss. You could be mistaken for being in the mansion completely alone, none of the graphical detail has anything to relate to, nor does it create a sub-plot so in essence you could have played this title in a wireframe world for all the lack of any content to buffer up the experience.

If you do happen to stem through the game and enjoy some of the puzzles, there is an additional puzzle mode whereby you can play through all of the different safes and items you are hacking into. In some respects the game should have just given us 50-something of these puzzles and remove the story mode out of it completely, it would have provided more value for money and by throwing in a reward system it could have been a rather unique game and marketed at a lower price. As such this decision wasn’t made and we’re back to where we started, inside a mansion with 35 safe’s with presumably impatient money grubbing relatives tentatively waiting to see who’s got the keys to the Jaguar sitting in the car porch.

Safecracker DS is marketed as the “Ultimate Puzzle Adventure” but we can tell you that it’s the “Ultimate Bore fest”. We’d go as far as saying that Sudoku is more of a thrill ride. Play it ‘Safe’ and give this one a miss.

Activision brings us the video game instalment of the current box office buster, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightening Thief. It’s currently out in the cinema as we speak and oddly enough my significant other and niece is actually seeing it as I write this. Yes, the game reviewing world sometimes deprives you from cinematic delights if there is a work load to do. Nevermind, I shall sit here with a coke and a smile instead. So what’s it all about? Well, it’s probably the US equivalent of Harry Potter except instead of Wizards it’s replaced by demigods and Greek Mythology. In Riordan’s epic adventure (author) these Greek gods are alive today and living amongst us. Percy is accused of stealing Zeus’s lightning bolt which just happens to be most powerful weapon that resides in the universe. With Percy having to prove his innocence and attempt to stop an all out war with the gods his work is most certainly cut out.

So you get an idea of the plot line and the game does a good job of gently introducing you into the world almost as if you are Percy yourself, he doesn’t know any more than you do and soon he is sent into a tumbling world of confusion as he finds out his dad is Posiedon. Not exactly your average day then? No, especially when your maths teacher turns into a monster and your disabled principle turns into half beast, half human. You could be forgiven for snorting a little bit of the white stuff and totally tripping out on the outlandish plot line but Riordan’s world is most certainly inventive and interesting. Unfortunately, Activision lacked the attention needed to make the game that interesting. The plot line is executed with a lack of animation and instead slide based screens with static text and this isn’t helped with the hand drawn characters that lack any real recognisable features. A shame, as the plot line should have spoken for itself.

One you become acquainted to basic combat you’ll be whisked off to camp half-blood where you’ll meet other demigods that want to kill you. Nice. Fortunately combat is relatively forgiving and unlike many turn based RPG titles, you’re not required to grind and level up to progress. This in turn can appeal and put off some people. There is no real freedom in terms of where you want to go in the game, it has a grid based path system that keeps you on the straight and narrow and whilst there are some optional battles to get additional items and up your skill level, you’re not engaged into forced combat, you’ll walk into it knowing a battle is ahead thanks to its distinctive symbolism on the map. Now in terms of strategy there is quite a depth to it, to equip your Demigods which will include your protector Grover, a girl called Annabeth amongst others, you can never be overly attacking minded. You will need someone in your team that can heal as enemies come in different variations and can put you on the back foot. Stick one of your healers into the mix and you’ll have a well rounded battle that in theory you should be able to win without having to retry at all.

So what about the powers that they possess? Well Percy gains the power of the sewer early on and that does not require a degree in scatology. His poison magic will cause constant damage to the enemy for a set number of turns, other highlights include pick pocketing, making your enemies blind and the ability to raise your accuracy levels for a team attack. The team attack itself can be extremely powerful, but you’ll need to build the power meter to ever see it used, charging this up on spare turns can be devastating in boss fights, so it’s worth using it. Now, obviously this game is on the DS. So you would expect some stylus type gestures and in the game you’ll come across a few of them. Each time the enemy attacks you, you can tap the bottom screen to activate your shield. This can be incredibly tricky, especially when you first play the game. Each enemy has a different attack speed and animation, so it’s very difficult to avoid plenty of damage on each go, thankfully that’s the case otherwise it just would have been overly easy. One of the other gestures is using swiping motions to build up an attack strength on a single shot, this seems to randomly happen in battle and once again it’s utterly devastating and can win you battles at times.

So the combat system sounds pretty intuitive and for the most part it is, the stylus doesn’t have the most fantastic registration however it’s a game that won’t punish you for not having a 100% response rate. My other gripe with the combat system is the magical powers themselves, the animations are simply woeful. You may see a colour emit from your sword, or a cloud of smoke appear over a characters head and considering that the DS has pretty much a 64bit engine you would of expected Activision to at least put some extra polish into these areas. Oh, you’ll also notice that if you are in a given area the same background textures are used all the time. Not very fun when your stuck inside Camp Half Blood for easily over an hour. Luckily though, the monsters are pretty cool in this game, from Fury’s to Skeletons although sometimes repetitive there is a new enemy thrown into the works often enough to make it visually interesting. It’s not until later in the game though that you’ll start using certain magical elements like fire and poison to affect your enemies to the optimum amount. Most of the time you’ll be swinging your sword and using melee attacks as it seems to deliver the most HP punch.

For your RPG fan, this game isn’t going to interest you mainly because it’s RPG elements aren’t too deep enough and the narrative simply isn’t engaging enough. Couple this without a free roam system and it just cannot stand up to any of the Final Fantasy games. For the casual gamer, there may be somewhere in the marketplace for this title, it’ll no doubt sell pretty well like all movie licensed titles do however, I can’t see many going past the three hour mark before they lose interest in the constant battles and lack of variation to the gameplay. Not amazing, not bad either. It sits nicely in the mediocre category much like the movie.

You may think that the above headed title is a sign of myself going through early signs of madness, but I can assure you I am not talking to myself. The release of the Amazon Kindle was a breakthrough in pointless technology coined by environmentalists who jumped on the Green Industrial Complex. It was something that book publishers lapped up like cat nip because the production costs of sending a book to print was considerably less. However, EA have actually come up with a range of DS titles called FLIPS which aims to get kids back into reading by offering interactivity at the heart of its goal. Our first venture into this series is with the release of the Percy Jackson book series.

Now, you maybe thinking that reading something from a small dual screen would be an impossibility. You would believe that it would be uncomfortable, cumbersome and slightly stupid. However, you are completely wrong because you’ve never even tried have you? No, I didn’t think so. Don’t feel ashamed though, because these were my exact thoughts too. The reality is, reading a novel using FLIPS is very easy and the navigation is easier than turning a page. Sweeping the stylus against the page turns it, keeping the stylus to the page whilst moving flips you through the pages at speed, with no load times and minimal fuss. You can also navigate to pages manually using the d-pad and a guided system but it’s not as fun as the animations look superb. As you will see, the pages are meant to look straight from the book, the typography is very classic looking and the pages have a rustic sense of history about it, but historic they aren’t because they boast features that turns reading into a whole new experience all together.

FLIPS is all about interactivity and this is the fifth release of the series. Throughout reading all five of the Percy Jackson books you will be able to collect coins which can be spent to unlock the historical time lines and information and drawings about the methodical creatures featured in the novels themselves. There is also a dictionary of Greek Mythology in the book as well, with its ‘links’ feature which will teach children certain discussed items within the book. Combining these features gave me the same impressed feeling I had when I booted up Encarta Encyclopedia for Windows for the very first time and that was eleven years ago. Now, imagine bringing all five of Percy Jackson’s books around with you. You would look like a hunchback in no time! Not only do you get the five Novels, you also get two bonus reads that expand upon the universe created by Riordan. These can be unlocked alongside interview footnotes. Players get rewarded from reading the book and collecting the coins and will be required to do this to unlock the additional content. This is a good way to ensure that your kids get the best value out of this title.

The big pies de la resistance is the fact we have WiFi available. How is this used? Well, you can send the novels temporarily to other DS players in your local vicinity, meaning they can read the adventure series as well without having to pick up a copy of FLIPS DS cart. This is a fantastic feature as there are so many children around that have Nintendo DS hand held gaming systems that it would definitely get a use. It was certainly not an after thought. Now, what about price? Well, depending on where you shop you can get it from anywhere between £17.99 to £24.99 now tallying up the price of the 5 books, your looking at £20.00 for the books themselves and considering that the FLIPS series has bonus content and the additional features, it really weighs up to be a good purchase.

I would have like to have seen a little more reward for reading through thousand of DS byte-size pages and given that EA are at the helm for this, some little mini-games to unlock would of really have topped it off. The ability to get some fun mini-based games that could be played over WiFi as the reward through reading through the series would have been awesome and is definitely something worth considering for future releases. Overall, would I recommend this? Absolutely, no doubt about it. It not only provides good value for money, it also gets children into reading in a more modern way and the ability to share the book really puts the cherry on the trifle.

The aim of the game is to match coloured runes and clear them from the game grid, each time you do this it produces a concrete block that is transported by a pulley to builders that are building some of the most memorable architecture wonders in history. Wonders of the Forgotten World that need to be built are Stonehenge, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, the Shwedagon Pagoda, Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China and the Moai Statues. Some constructions take several grids to complete, all with varying sizes to increase or decrease the opportunity of matching runes. At the end of each grid, you get the opportunity to pick a piece of the famous building you wish to construct, some of them contain special powers that will aid you throughout the levels as you progress. Once completed you are taken to the world map to start construction on another legendary architecture.

Rather than make 7 Wonders a continual rinse and repeat affair it does throw in a special stage on each map, which needs to be accessed by matching a rune over a particular coloured square. Special stages require you to drop a star out of a grid full of runes in a set number of moves. This is enjoyable as it’s more of a mental challenge than full paced action, though you are still against the clock to complete. The other element of strategy to this game really builds from the third wonder construction onwards. More pieces of stone are required to complete stages, which in turn really pits you against the clock and more often than not you are having to, strategise your choice of power-up in order to complete the level.

What sets 7 Wonders apart from your standard match 3 affair is down, to the power ups itself. Clear 4 runes and you’ll have an ice enabled stone which will freeze and destroy all runes in a horizontal line, clear 5 runes and you’ll have access to a fire stone which will wipe out runes vertically and horizontally. In addition to this, every now and then a dice stone will appear which will randomly destroy a set number of runes and these are just the prefix power stones that appear on the map. When constructing the 7 wonders, you will uncover powers which can be used at your disposal as mentioned, these vary from lightning strikes, being able to freeze time, increase your multiplier and change the colour of set stones to keep the rune clearing going. These power-ups need to be charged along with the shuffle feature which enables you to shuffle the grid when solutions look limited. I don’t want to give anymore power-ups away but there are over 10 of them which can really pack versatility to the play.

Graphically, 7 Wonders II is adequate, its nothing to shout about, but there’s enough detail here to stop it looking bland. The animations of the workers on the top screen are a charm, however cannot be enjoyed due to the nature of all the game play taking place on the bottom screen. The game falters when it comes to sound. Its background music is extremely limited and soon becomes annoying through continual play. It’s themed nice, but some variation should have been included as such we had to turn the music off in the end. Playing 7 Wonders II is very intuitive, the stylus seamlessly scrolls across the playing grid, everything runs smooth, just without the gloss of the PC version. At £20.00 or £14.99 on Amazon (wink, wink) 7 Wonders II is a trusty travel companion, it’ll cure boredom in short spurts but it’ll never captivate enough to keep you ploughing through the campaign. If you manage to get all of the secret map pieces, you will even get an 8th Wonder to build and for those that have completed the standard play mode, the added Free Play functionality is if you literally only have two minutes to spare.

Is 7 Wonders II an essential purchase? No, but it makes the likes of Zoo Keeper, and Bejewelled seem like boring counterparts. It’s an ideal casual gamer piece and a boredom killer.

Mario Kart is a kart racer using Nintendo’s franchised catalogue of memorable characters. Mario is the flagship to an enormous plethora of Nintendo based sports games but his name is adorned upon Mario Kart as one of its stalwart in the series, rather than one pulling the cash cow. The DS title is bespoke and fans of the series throughout will be getting some much familiar tracks from the racing series. In the game you’ll come across recreated versions of classic SNES and N64 tracks whilst seeing some new courses coming to the fore. Everything is colourful and vibrant and with tracks set in the snow, desert and up in the clouds it gives you a fine example of the imagination Nintendo went to when designing these courses.

There are 3 classes of GP courses within Mario Kart all with increasing levels of difficulty, your competitors become smarter and your karts become faster. Speaking of karts there are 36 waiting to be unlocked, two of them unlocked upon starting the game up for the first time. To reward you further you’ll progress to a 150cc mirror version GP and also get to use new characters in the game as you progress. Along with the GP there is a time trial mode that allows you to receive and send ghost times over the Nintendo WFC network. Battle mode which brings new and classic battle maps into the fray, these can both be enjoyed offline and online, just don’t let your balloon get popped or it is game over. To throw down even more value for money you have a 6 level mission mode where you attempt to beat set times, defeat course enemies and use varying degrees of skill to complete each task set. Each level is coupled off with an end of level boss where strategy is the key.

In terms of game play and strategy Mario Kart has it in droves, from it’s weapon system which includes squid ink and homing missiles straight through to the ability to snake and draft your way past opponents. The difficulty levels are nicely set, you never feel like you’ve won a race until the last minute in the later GP modes. The vehicle classes are insane. You can drive a digger, an aeroplane and even sexy Cadillac’s when you get to unlock them, sadly though they do not offer any real degree in difference of play.

In terms of online Mario Kart comes is in its own league. You can take on random people online, share friend codes and play them or actually send a stripped down version of the game to a friend locally via Wifi. This is great because the whole idea of portable gaming is to give you the option of choice on how you want to play the game at any given time. The same can be said for the way this game is structured. Mario Kart’s GP’s take around 15minutes each to complete depending on courses bundled within the GP itself, which is great for gaming on the go. Audio wise Mario Kart has all the whistles and rings about it that remind you of its classic roots, sounds are familiar with old tracks keeping its music to its nostalgic state.

If we were to be critical about Mario Kart in any shape or form it would be that the mission mode is pretty boring and generic the whole way through. You’ll only really sit through it just to unlock new cars to drive. All in all Mario Kart DS is a polished experience with a nice dual screen set up, an absolute essential purchase.

10/10