Push Button B

I like adventure so this week I tried something new and downloaded a DS game demo to my DS through the Wii’s Nintendo Channel. There were plenty of demos up there, but the only one that seemed to not be a puzzle game was a game called Battle of Giants: Mutant Insects. The title of the game will make you think of a horrible movie with cheesy special effects that you could probably find on SyFy. Battle of Giants: Mutant Insects was used by Ubisoft before SyFy got a hold of it thankfully. The game description mentions that it includes four mutant insects to choose from to duke it out with other mutant insects with a new and unique control scheme. Before we forget, this is a demo and unless I somehow missed something, you can only play as the scorpion in this demo. Funny, seeing as scorpions are arachnids and not insects. I don’t even know what the other three mutant insects in the game there are.

From the title screen I picked Adventure. What an adventure it was! I walked around a destroyed city as a giant scorpion and killed two other scorpions. While in the “field” you move your scorpion with the stylus and like most DS games that have you do this, you just place the stylus on the screen and the scorpion will walk towards the point where the stylus is touching and keep walking in that direction until you lift the stylus or change directions. When you happen upon another mutant (in the demo’s case, another scorpion) the screen will change.

This is a battle. When the battle starts you have a aerial view of the two mutant brawlers with one on the bottom left corner and the other on the top right corner. They are facing each other and that’s where they will stay throughout the battle. The first battle in the demo’s adventure guides you through the battle and teaches you how to play. This new and unique game-play style that the game’s description discusses is a system involving tapping and sliding the various body parts of the insect to make him strike, charge, or sting the opponent (I would imagine there will be different attacks with the other insects in the game). In order to dodge you tap the scorpion and then drag the stylus to the right or left (the scorpion’s right or left that is). In order to block you tap the scorpion and slide the stylus toward the back of the scorpion. To jab with the pincers you tap one and slide it toward the opponent. You can do the same with the scorpions head to charge or with the tail to shoot poison from the stinger. After landing two consecutive hits you can initiate a Supercombo. To do the Supercombo, you need to draw a line from dot to dot. The quicker you do it, the better the combo. If the opponent is trying to land a Supercombo on you, you can minimize the damage by erasing the lines between their dots. The game did not lie; the fighting system was new and unique. It is to me, however, but I haven’t played every game in the world.

The bad part of the demo is that I really can’t tell if the game has a plot or if it’s just a giant insect version of Rampage with a different control system. This game must have been under the radar because the day I played it and wrote this is the first time I have ever heard of the game but I did research and discovered that is in a line of other Battle of the Giants games. All I can say is that its game-play style is kind of neat and maybe it deserves a try before the exterminator or Starship Troopers are called.