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Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (Nintendo DS, 2009)
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Canadian developer Big Blue Bubble set themselves quite a task in bringing Fighting Fantasy to the Nintendo DS. Unlike the famous "choose your own adventure" books, Fighting Fantasy is a first-person RPG that looks and plays very much like a PC game of the Elder Scrolls or Ultima Underworld type. The game is truly gorgeous - absolutely one of the best-looking DS games I've ever seem. Somehow, the art team and programmers have managed to pack in tons of rich detail into each map, making your exploring pretty awesome once you start checking out each new area. Movement, combat and in fact, just about every action in the game is stylus driven, so there's a steep learning curve for players more used to JRPGs or other games where the D-pad is the main means of direction. The movement controls are great (the game supports left or right-handed players), but combat will be a bit difficult until you learn to strafe, stick and move, used ranged or poisoned weapons to deal out more damage and a few other tricks. Your enemies are deadly from the start and the AI won't miss an opportunity to try and surround or flank you when it can. Magic usage also plays heavily into the gameplay, so learning and using spells is a MUST. If you try to play FF as a "tank" character, expect to die early and die often until you start whipping out the magic. In later areas, respawning creatures will give you fits unless you hit them hard and fast. Thanks to the DS memory limitations, characters in the game are presented as flat, well-detailed sprites, so you won't see flashy animations at all. Nevertheless, encounters can be frightening, particularly when you walk into a new area, hear some sort of rustling or other creepy sound and turn to see something(s) big and ugly charging toward you. Fortunately, the game saves automatically when you enter a new room, as you'll be dying quite frequently as you explore Firetop Mountain. While there's no music in the game other than the opening, this is actually a great thing. The sound design here is brilliant and you absolutely NEED to listen to what's taking place around you while you're trying to survive your trip through Firetop. Between the ambient sounds and assorted creaks, groans and other creature noises that come from different directions, you'll appreciate the lack of tunes to distract you. The game feels quite like a "you are there" simulation and is quite effective in making you too scared to go on at some points. There are a few bugs in the game that keep it from greatness, however. One allows you to loot any chest (and skipping the increasingly challenging, well-designed lock picking stylus mini-game) while another worse bug will leave you without key items if you back out of a certain boss fight. If this were a console or PC game, a patch could fix these issues. You can avoid both of them by playing the mini-game when it pops up and not running away from bosses when you first see them. Of course, some gamers will like the former bug and heck, that boss you run away from is pretty powerful and fast, so under-prepared players might accidentally run out of instinct. Despite these problems, Fighting Fantasy is recommended to those looking to play a game with a near-perfect nostalgic vibe in everything from visuals to sounds and more. It's hard to say if there will be a sequel, but Big Blue Bubble is definitely one of the best developers on the DS based on the team getting so much out of the DS hardware.Read full review
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