Double Dungeon Review

A while ago I purchased this game from the Nintendo On-line Store as it is the only non-twitch role-playing that was available at the time. At the time of this writing, this is still the case. When you consider the huge number of turn-based RPGs that have been released for the older consoles that the Wii Store supports, there is no reason this should be the case. I am hoping that this will not be the case for much longer as Double Dungeons is not what I would call a great RPG. It is a very tie consuming game, however, but you can get much better role-playing games for free, so I am not sure it is worth 600 points.

The game is a 3D dungeon exploration game. The goal of the game is to find the key to the boss and then beat up the boss. To prevent you from achieving this goal are a variety of stationary monsters that block your path. When you defeat these monsters you get gold. Gold can be used in inns to recover your health or in stores to upgrade your equipment. Some of the monsters re-spawn so if you are backtracking you may need to re-fight the monsters. Combat is fairly simple as the only thing you can do is attack with your current weapon or use one of the eight items that you are carrying.

One of the nice things about this game is the fact that there are 22 different maps, with 21 of the maps being playable in any order you desire. To get to the final map you must enter a 21 symbol code that is discovered one letter at a time by finishing the other 21 maps. The maps are broken into difficulty levels, with the more difficult maps being larger than the easier maps. In fact, the later maps are huge! With there being no auto mapping feature, this means that you have to map by hand. Sadly, there are no coordinate information and the larger maps will not fit on a single sheet of graph paper. If you have an older laptop, you can do what I did and make your map using a tile map editing program such as Coffee Quest Construction Set.

The game is called Double Dungeon for a reason. The reason is that you have the option of playing the game with another person. It is a split screen with each player controlling their own character. Players start at different locations and it is very easy to get lost so cooperative play doesn't really happen. Besides, its hard to convince someone into playing the game with you.

Overall, unless you are desperate to play a turn based role-plying game on your Wii, I would not recommend purchasing this game. I suspect that the wait for a good non-twitch RPG will be over relatively soon. If I am lucky, in a week or two!

Wii Store

One of the interesting things about the Nintendo Wii is the online store. Actually, all three of the new consoles have online stores, though as I don't have a PS3 or an XBox 360 I can not comment on them. While it is nice that you can instantly buy a low-cost game right from the console, there are still a lot to not like. Here are my top five complaints about the Wii store:

1. Where are the RPGs? So far I have only been able to find one non-action based RPG in the store. I know the NES and the SNES had a lot of turn based RPGs released for them so why is the only turn based RPG in the store a Turbo Graphics 16 game. It wouldn't be too bad if Double Dungeon was a great game but it is 22 simple hunt the boss games combined into one. I'll review it in a future blog entry.

2. The games in the Wii store are all older games, so why do they cost so much? $5 for a NES game? $10 for a Nintendo 64 game? I think the price is quite high considering what you are getting. Had the price been half as high, I would probably be buying three to four times as many games as I am going to buy at the current prices so Nintendo is probably losing a lot of money with such high prices. Lets hope that in the future they cut the price!

3. Speaking of cost, the points system sucks. I don't know why this is such a big trend with big companies. Actually I do. By forcing users to buy their own points (non refundable, of course) they are guaranteeing that they will get a set amount of money from you. Likewise, you are probably not going to be using the points all at once, so they get to hold on to your extra money and earn interest off of it.

4. The games are stored in the small amount of flash memory that the Wii comes with and can not be transferred. If I could put the games on an SD card and then use that card to play the games, that would be great. Sadly, this is currently not allowed. Granted, you can re-download any game that you bought so if you are running out of space, then you can always delete games and then if you ever want to play a deleted game again, re-download it.

5. finally, the in-game manuals that come with the games are very poor. Mind you, this could be because the manuals that came with the games were poor, but why not provide pdf versions of the manuals that the buyers could download?

Of course, these are just my thoughts and I highly doubt that Nintendo will ever see this list.