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Classic games come boop-boop-booping their way onto DSiWare.

If you have fond memories of lazy Saturdays taking turns with a friend’s Game & Watch, the possibilities for recreating those experiences have been pretty sparse in the last decade. Today, the primary way to get your hands on LCD-style games is through Nintendo’s own Game & Watch collections for the DS and, strangely, in this summer’s Deadlight on XBLA. Outside of those cases, though, the LCD game is essentially dead.  Or so it seemed, until Retro Pocket swooped onto DSiWare and packed several Saturday afternoons’ worth of LCD-style games into a package that will have some peering over the top of their sunglasses to take in something so rad.

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A simple game is not a classic game.

The trend of retro style games the last several years is something I can normally support, at least when game makers actually figure out how to capture what made old games so great.  99Seconds tries to harness the magic that kept early gamers rolling quarters into cabinets, constantly vying to get their name in the top ten.  Although 99Seconds appears to be on to something at first, spending time with the game reveals that there is no real hook and it fails to instill the desire to wear your thumb raw for the sake of a high score.

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Yuji Naka and Prope deliver solid gameplay with an incredibly charming presentation.

Prope, founded by Sonic creator, Yuji Naka, is quickly becoming know for their low budget, simplistic games on the Wii. They originally came to market with the quirky Let's Tap, and its equally weird brother, Let's Catch. Since then, Naka had a son and was subsequently inspired to produce a game that would appeal to the toddler. The result of that effort is the undeniably cute, Ivy the Kiwi?.

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The latest from Gameloft is a surprisingly adept Castlevania clone.

Soul of Darkness is the latest mobile to DSiWare port from Gameloft, which can most easily be described as a shameless Castlevania rip-off. If you spend a few minutes with the game, you will see that it features similar character art, gameplay, graphics, and sound to the famous Konami franchise. The game does incorporate some arbitrary use of the system's cameras, which sets the game apart to some degree.

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A unique puzzle title blasts off!

Intelligent Systems is well known for their Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Paper Mario series, but as it turns it out, they are quite capable of producing many different types of lower budget games. Puzzle games are one of the more familiar genres for these types of games for the company, and Link 'n' Launch is their latest. The DSiWare title is a solid and unique puzzle title with elements that aren't very common for the genre.

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