Unskippable:
Advance Wars: Dual Strike - Lasts well over 100 hours even with just single-player, and among the most entertaining 100 hours of your life at that. I thought I hated strategy games before I played AW2, and this is even better. If there was any justice in the gaming world, this would be to the DS as SSBM is to the GC, but apparently more people like fighting games than strategy. Their loss.
Not unskippable, but still classic:
Animal Crossing: Wild World - It just never ends. It's odd since I hate MMORPGs for being huge exercises in time-wasting and power-levelling, and the money-making in ACWW has a lot of that feel to it, but for whatever reason, I just like this game. Maybe it's the funny dialogue, maybe it's the music, maybe it's the fact that it's the only game I've ever played that I can call "relaxing," or maybe it's just that I like ripping off anthropomorphic animals by sending them 30 Bell seashells which they put in their house, making room for them by throwing away 10,000+ Bell furniture which I then steal out of the recycling bin. I don't know.
Meteos - This would make the below list just by virtue of the stylus play adding so much to the frenetic, hurried pace of puzzle games, but what pushes it into the "classic" category is how complete it feels thanks to the way they fully realize the gameplay mechanics via all of the varied planets. Perfect music and sound effects and good unlockables don't hurt, either.
Not classic, but still great:
Mario Kart DS - You either like Mario Kart or you don't, really.
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - Only drops below Mario Kart due to these particular uses for the stylus feeling incredibly tacked-on, and the fact that most of the best music in the game can't be heard until you're going through it for (at least) the second time, in Julius Mode. I think it tends to be somewhat overrated; this isn't absolute top-tier, to me, but being a few minor notches below it isn't at all a bad place to be.
Super Mario 64 DS - Better than the original due to more characters, more levels, and some fun minigames (albeit amongst a sea of less fun ones).
Not great, but still good:
Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time - It's fun once, but too linear to warrant another play. It astounds me that even a 2D game like this one, mostly free from lame unskippable storyline sequences and completely free from lame unskippable CG cutscenes, can suffer from the "FFX" effect.
Kirby: Canvas Curse - See Mario and Luigi, except that this lasts about ten fewer hours.
Metroid Prime Pinball - I could actually argue this is better than both of the above games. The pinball physics are pretty spot-on and the music is absolutely beautiful; it's just that I can't help feeling like it would be so, so much better if they had just included two more "standard" tables.
Haven't found it yet:
Phoenix Wright - I want to play it, but it seems to have ceased to exist in the US. Still... I've played text adventures before, and I have to imagine that a text adventure with some of the great animations that get made into GIFs so often can't be a bad thing.
To keep an eye on:
Super Princess Peach (February 27th) - Looks like it has potential to be as good as any other Mario game. At any rate, it should have more replayability than Kirby.
Tetris DS (March 20th) - It's Tetris. Besides that, it looks kind of like the upper screen will play sequences in NES games depending on how well you score, which seems interesting.
Metroid Prime Hunters (March 20th) - Could be a decent FPS. I haven't heard enough about the single-player mode yet.
Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers ("early Spring") - The Guilty Gear engine should theoretically work well with the DS' vertical orientation.
Jonnyram said:
I'm in the desert at the moment, but everyone seems to bitch about the final boss [of M&L2]. Is it as cheap/bad as everyone says?
Yes. Tedious without actually being challenging.
