I recently got a Nintendo DS for my birthday. I have to say I really have not put it down since I got it. I say this entirely due to one game. New Super Mario Bros. I haven’t actually enjoyed playing a game this much since…well I can’t ever remember enjoying a game this much. I have already beaten it, but now I am going back to every level and collecting all the Star Coins I missed. There are three in every level. Once I have ‘collected them all’ as it were, I will be satisfied that I have finished the game. I have completed about 5 of 8 worlds so far.

But what comes after this? I am a very casual gamer. I find most games today severely lacking or overly involved. I would like a game that is thoughtfully challenging and not just something along the lines of Brain Age (which I will be picking up eventually). I want something thoughtful and fleshed out. When I was much much youger, my sister had a PC game. It was called Under a Killing Moon. I never had the opportunity to play it, but I watched her play a number of times. It was a detective style game and you played the role of a Private Investigator brought on to solve a mystery. Most of the details escape me, but I remember you investigated the crime scene thoroughly in a point and click fashion interacting with the environment. I also seem to recall the P.I. getting trapped or something and he had to figure a way out of the room with only what was present in the room as tools…or maybe he found some piece of evidence noone else found doing that. Like I said details are fuzzy to me and I very well could have added to the memory over time not realizing it. Anyway, my point is that this was a very cool cranial type of game with a story behind it. There is nothing like that out on any console, state-side, that I am aware of. I’m told God of War requires thought to work out puzzles, but at the end of the day its still a hack and slash. I, personally used to have a Star Trek: TOS game for the PC that was very similar to what I’m talking about as well. When on a mission on a planet, you went from setting to setting solving mysteries or helping inhabitants out by figuring out a number of puzzles. Granted the red shirt died on every away mission possible, but that just added to the realism of a Star Trek game.

Reading through all my RSS feeds the other day, I came across this interview. The interview is with the person in charge of localizing a Japanese game called, Touch Detective. From what I can gather, this game seems to be along the lines of what I am looking for. The pictures I have seen seem a bit kiddy, but that doesn’t usually reflect game difficulty and playability. After all Super Mario Bros. looks kiddy and everyone loves that franchise, myself included. The interview even mentions the ability to use the touchscreen on the DS to point at things in rooms to get more information about them. It made me realize that the DS is perfect for this sort of thing since it has the touchscreen. I can only hope that this will be the next extended source of entertainment for my DS and not something I’ll finish in under 2 hours.

The game comes out in early October. I’ll most likely be picking it up, assuming it doesn’t get awful reviews.

Until then, I might try to dig out that old Star Trek game and see if it will install on my computer…