Not a Gamer, Part 2

As I discussed back in January am not much of a gamer. The only redeeming feature of the Wii was watching Laura and my friends play Wii Sports

Nat recently convinced me to get a Nintendo DS, he said something like, but not necessarily "This stuff is great while waiting for your next flight, and going through all those security checkpoints". He strongly recommended the brain training games for the Nintendo DS.

So I went and purchased a DS and just like in January, I asked the sales guy to give me a bunch of the best games for the DS he had on store. I figured, maybe am the kind of gamer that could get used to the DS.

Like January, I did not really get into any of the games.

A few observations:

• The Internet Destroyed the Fun in Puzzle/Adventure Games: I still fondly remember playing Space Quest: one hour every day, then discussing with friends the possible solutions and eventually solving it.
  The Internet makes it so easy to get solutions to most of the problems that it has taken the fun out of it.
• Stories: The stories for the games I have tried so far (on the DS and the Wii) seem incredibly dull and there is a linearity and lack of interesting challenges.
• Game Play is Not That Different: Until this year, I had spent about 15 years not playing games (with a short stint for about nine-twelve months playing Quake) and the games are not significantly different.
  But at least the graphics are superb (uh oh, hope Slashdot does not come after me), the animations are very gracious and some of the details are incredibly well taken care of.

I got some mistery game (Hotel something or other), a remake of SimCity, some cooking game, some Lego point-and-shoot and some others that were not worth remembering.

The only game that I liked was the brain games. I like the practice exercises and most importantly, the Sudoku which I play every night before going to sleep.

So I spent about 300 dollars in hardware and games to end up playing Sudoku. A better investment would have been to buy a 5 dollar Sudoku book.

So all of the above was just an excuse to blog about my good friend Jordi Mas' brain games for Gnome.

He has been working on a set of pretty cool games for the desktop. He wrote GBrainy which comes with an assorted collection of mind games that are quite fun in the same way that the Brain Games for the DS is:

Anyways what are good games for the Wii and the DS for aging software developers? (And am not really a fan of Quake derivatives; I got Metroid, and its passable).