![]() ![]() The DS version of Yahtzee, like its rendition of Battleship, offers a variety of themes, including the classic boardgame style, all the way to a hamster cage (spinning the dice off the wheel) and a graveyard where the dice pop out of a tomb. Poker hands, like straights, three of a kind, four of a kind, and full houses net big points, as does the coveted Yahtzee, a five of a kind roll. Roll the dice three times in a turn, and try to fill up the card with as many points as you can with set outcomes. Yahtzee is also a hard game to screw up, and the Nintendo DS version works, albeit just a bit clunkier than the rest of the batch due to sloppier touch screen implementation. ![]() The gameplay's a little on the slow side since each player has to wait for the opposing person's animations to play out before moving onto the next turn. But players can customize their match with a variety of themes, from the classic boardgame ships to UFOs to marine life. The DS rendition lacks some of the updated rules, like the Speed Play that allows players to fire a shot for each ship they still have on the playing field. It works pretty well on the Nintendo DS because players simply tap on the coordinate where they want to blast the enemy. Battleship is still as classic as the grid game has ever been: lay out five different ships on a pegboard ocean, and each player takes turns guessing the coordinates of where the opponents' ships are located. There's a solid assortment of variations on the main Boggle theme to strengthen the single player experience. In multiplayer mode, any unrecognized word will be sent over to the other player for approval, but this approval interface is enormously confusing and inconsistent since it's never clear if you're approving your own words or the other player's. The in-cartridge dictionary recognizes many words, but it missed a few common ones. The developers do a decent enough job recreating the game on the handheld system, and drawing out the words as they're laid out in the grid makes everything flow intuitively. Shake the dice up in the canister, lay the playfield out on the touch screen and start spelling out words with the stylus. Boggle, a Scrabble-inspired dice game, makes a whole lot of sense on the Nintendo DS. The team did work on the surprisingly solid World Championship Poker: Deluxe Series last year, which indicates that the studio may be more comfortable with game designs that don't have a whole lot of expectations. This studio hasn't exactly made a huge splash on the Nintendo DS platform, as the company has been responsible for some of the worst titles on the handheld, namely Marvel Nemesis and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. And touch screen control? That's almost like playing the real thing! For these four different games, Atari went with Sensory Sweep for their development. ![]() Four immediately recognizable names on one box, for less than the price if you actually went to Toys 'r Us and bought the games separately? That's money in the bank right there. ![]() "Quietly" is the key phrase here, an odd action considering how much this product tailors to the "stocking stuffer" mentality. Atari quietly launched Monopoly - Boggle - Yahtzee - Battleship for the DS just a couple of days before Christmas. ![]()
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