| paleface [sys=DS; cat=Shooter_4way; loc=NA] |
| | | Geometry Wars started, I think, as an arcade mini-game in Bizarre Creations' "Project Gotham Racing 2" (see entry 846) on Xbox. It was a lively, colorful, and agreeably challenging old-school two-stick 2D shooter there, very much in the Robotron vein. Since then, it seems like about half the Western releases on Xbox Live that I've seen have been two-stick shooters, and someone's trying to keep riding that overplayed wave by bringing out a GW for DS.
DS, of course, does not have two sticks (one to move, one to aim/shoot), but hey! some ingenious developer or producer must have said, we can use the touch-screen as the second stick! So, you move your little geometric wire ship around the screen with the d-pad, and aim/shoot by touching the touch-screen at a position relative to the center. This didn't work at all well for me at first, being a lefty, but I found that there was really nothing preventing me from flipping the system over, so I could handle the pen with my left hand, and the d-pad with my right. Harder to read the score that way, I suppose, but that doesn't really matter that much anyway.
Still, the relative touch-screen control is simply a bit of a pain in the ass, and doesn't feel very natural or fun; why would you be struggling with this input scheme when there are plenty of perfectly fun shooter out there that aren't saddled with awkward controls? So, while as a port it seemed relatively competent, and the little colorful wire ships and all that were still there, I didn't bother trying to play this for long. |
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