Phoenix Wright 2: Justice For All was one of the most highly anticipated sequels on the Nintendo DS platform for quite some time now, and I am happy to say that the game does not disappoint. Of course, having a two-bit lawyer who specializes in turnabout cases at court while saving the lives of many makes for an interesting read, and it is no wonder Mr. Phoenix has already developed quite a cult following here in America. For those of you in the dark, the Gyakutan Saiban trilogy (also known as the Phoenix Wright after the localization process) consists of three episodes (d-uh!), so here’s to hoping Capcom will not rest on their laurels and bring the third instalment across the Pacific.

One of the best ways Capcom can be persuaded to complete the trilogy would be to persuade them with plenty of dollars, and we don’t mean through underhanded means. What you need to do is snap up every single copy of Phoenix Wright: Justice for All and let your dollars do the talking. If Capcom manages to reap a handsome profit from this outing, this could move the suits in power to bring over the next instalment without us resorting to picking up a Japanese version (with the option to switch over to English).

The fever for more Phoenix Wright goodness shows a very positive vibe to all this, as even a recent post at the official Capcom message boards has introduced a new contest entitled “Plead Your Case”. You will have to harness the power of your imagination to fill up the comic and speech bubbles in an effort to tickle Capcom into fulfilling your greatest current wish. Phoenix Wright is one of the more memorable franchises in recent memory, so to miss out on the third instalment would be heresy.

Source: DS Fanboy

Donkey Kong was entirely the work of one man, that being Shigeru Miyamoto, who’s often cited as being the main creative force at Nintendo both now and in the past. Of course, he’s not the only game designer Nintendo has, but his track record his hard to beat, being responsible for the Zelda series and Pikmin amongst others.

Anyway, back to Mario. The game that really put Mario on the path to stardom was Super Mario Bros., where Mario (and his brother Luigi in two player games) tried to negotiate a series of horizontally scrolling platform levels to rescue Princess Daisy from the claws of Bowser. This started off as an arcade game, but the home version on the NES was when things really took off. Lots of staple platform gaming conventions were started by Super Mario Bros. or one of it’s many sequels.


For many, the pinnacle of this style of game came with Super Mario World on the SNES. This was an absolutely huge game, with tons of secret worlds to discover and multiple exits from certain levels. Mario could run, jump, swim, fly and ride Yoshi the, the, well, dinosaur is probably the best description of whatever Yoshi may actually be. The sequel, Super Mario World 2 : Yoshi’s Island, was odd in that you actually played as Yoshi. Mario was present, but in the form of Baby Mario, who Yoshi had to guide safely through the levels on his back. If Baby Mario was dislodged, Yoshi would have to run after the screaming infant before he was carried away by an enemy.

The SNES also started another long running gaming series, this being Super Mario Kart. Just about every popular (and not so popular) gaming character seems to end up with a Karting game now, but Super Mario Kart started it all off, and the SNES version is still immensely playable today. Mario Kart has also appeared on N64, GBA, Gamecube and DS, and there’ll probably be a Revolution version too.

Yet more innovation came with the release of the Nintendo 64 console, and Super Mario 64. Even today, with the remake on the Nintendo DS, Mario 64 stands up as one of the most finely honed platform games ever. It single-handedly convinced everyone that analog control was a Good Thing, as before the Nintendo 64 came along we were still playing with purely digital joypads.

Super Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube was the next “proper” Mario game, but many found it to be little of a progression from Mario 64. The addition of FLUDD, a backpack which could be used both as a jetpack and a water cannon, wasn’t enough of an interesting feature and many people were left cold, expecting another groundbreaker like Mario 64 and ending up a bit disappointed.

These days, Mario seems content to star in various party (Mario Party, Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix) and sports games (e.g. Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, Mario Baseball). Will Mario make another breakthrough in platform games on Revolution with the much speculated upon Mario 128? Time will tell, but I for one hope so.

That concludes our gaming advent calendar for 2005. We hope you have enjoyed it, even if your particular favourite character didn’t appear. Merry Christmas!

In order to avoid all the Lemmings perishing, the player had a number of skills available on each level that could be applied to a Lemming by hovvering the mouse cursor over one of the little fellers and clicking. Diggers, Miners and Bashers allowed vertical, diagonal and horizontal tunnels to be carved out of the landscape, climbers could scale vertical cliffs, and Droppers were given an umbrella to allow them to fall great heights. Blockers would stand still and make any Lemming which touched it turn around and walk in the other direction, whilst Builders could build a short diagonal bridge. Finally, the funniest skill was the Bomber. On giving this skill to a Lemming he would clutch his head and shout “Oh No!” in a squeaky voice. A countdown then appeared above his head, and when it reached zero he would explode, with a great popping sound, leaving behind a trail of pixels and a huge crater in the ground. Funnier still was the Armageddon button. If you had messed up a level, clicking on Armageddon would blow up every single Lemming on the screen, generally causing most of the level to become a mess of craters!

Despite being so small (little more than about 10 pixels high!) the little critters were very well animated, and despite their stupidity you felt really bad when you weren’t able to save them. The game was pretty big too, with over 100 levels to complete. Also worthy of mention was the music, being a collection of twee, irritating tunes such as “How much is that doggie in the window?”.

Oh No! More Lemmings was an expansion pack with another huge set of levels, and there was even a Christmas themed game called Holiday Lemmings, which gave all the little guys Santa suits.

In 1993 a proper sequel arrived in the form of Lemmings 2: The Tribes. Whilst the game was still a lot of fun, some of the magic was lost with the addition of far too many new skills. Whilst some were great fun (Super Lemming was really cool, flying around after your mouse pointer), too many were similar to other skills. The levels were also split into 12 graphically themed sections, each represented by a different tribe of Lemmings, such as Egyptian, Circus and Sports. The number of Lemmings you saved on each level dictated how many Lemmings you had on the next level, and gold, silver and bronze medals were awarded to show how well you did.

The third Lemmings game was entitled All New World of Lemmings (or Lemmings Chronicles in the US) and centred around just three of the 12 tribes from the previous game. The number of skills was cut right back, with pickup boxes containing tools that could be used by the Lemmings once they had been collected. It was originally planned to create expansion packs for the remaining 9 tribes, but these never arrived.

The Lemmings have had a bit of a rough time since then. Lemmings 3D on PC and PS1 was a doomed effort to bring them into the third dimension. The basic gameplay of the original Lemmings game didn’t transfer well, because it was too difficult to keep track of where the little blighters were, and digging tunnels and holes was hard to see also. There was also The Adventures of Lomax in Lemming Land, which was a simple platform game very similar in style to the first Rayman game.

A second attempt at a more 3D Lemmings game was Lemmings Revolution, where the levels were wrapped around a tower, much like the old C64 game Nebulus. This was pretty much the same game as the original Lemmings but with a harder to understand display method. Finally, there was Lemmings Paintball, which had so little to do with Lemmings I wonder why it was even released…

The Lemmings games have appeared on just about every home computer and console you care to mention. There’s even a version due for the PSP soon. As a footnote, there was a failed attempt to update the game for the PS2, but that’s another story…

This entry nearly brings us to the end of our Advent Calendar, but there’s one more entry left as a special treat, despite tomorrow being Christmas Day. Call in tomorrow to find out who it is!

Starting the game with just a body suit and laser gun, Samus soon learns lots of new techniques to progress around the world. Several weapon power ups and the addition of missiles are available, as well as the most unique improvement, the morph ball. This allows Samus to become a ball, funnily enough, which allows her access to small tunnels and so onto otherwise unreachable sections of the game. The suit also gained a gravity jump, allowing tall vertical sections of levels to be easily scaled.

The first game involved tracking down the Mother Brain, a huge brain in a jar (game developers just love the old brain in a jar, and this was one of the first games to feature such an enemy). The Mother Brain has been busy though, creating the fearsome Metroids. These are horrible floating brain creatures, who home in and lock on the player unless they are quickly dispatched, and killing them was not simple, involving freezing with an ice ray, then pumping missiles into them!

It was 6 years before Metroid 2: Return of Samus followed on the Gameboy, with the gameplay moved to the Metroid’s homeworld, the snappily named planet SR388. This planet was a dangerous, lava filled place, but the basic game play was the same. The body suit and morph ball received further upgrades, allowing the lava to be safely negotiated, in the quest to find the Queen Metroid and eradicate the species entirely. Unfortunately for Samus, she let one Metroid hatchling get away.

The SNES game Super Metroid arrived in 1994, and again further upgrades were available, though as with most of the Metroid games you had to relearn all the moves again, starting off with just the basic gun. This is kind of infuriating, since the games tend to follow on from each other. It also means there’s a lot of backtracking around levels where you’ll find a section that you can’t reach yet because you don’t have the required ability.

Another long wait ensued for the next game, with Metroid Fusion appearing on the Gameboy Advance in 2002. Again the gameplay was pretty much identical to the earlier games, and this game is well known for having some incredibly difficult bosses at various stages in the game. Also on the GBA was Metroid Zero Mission, which was a kind of retelling of the first game, remade with nicer graphics and also extended with some new areas and enemies which didn’t appear in the original.

Metroid Prime was the first step into the third dimension for the series, appearing on the Gamecube, also in late 2002. The game had a first person perspective when running around, seamlessly switching to third person when entering the morph ball state. The game was huge, and despite rather too much backtracking and getting lost, a great success. Only the incredibly tough end part of the game, when the Metroid’s get released, spoiled the enjoyment of this great game.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes also appeared on the Gamecube, which added multiplayer gaming to the mix, and the 3D engine has also been successfully shrunk down for the DS with Metroid Prime: Hunters, which allows the touch screen to be used as a really simple and effective way of aiming at the various enemies in the game.

Trying to stop him were a number of enemies including a coiled snake and a bouncy ball, who if they caught Q*Bert would cause him to utter an expletive by way of a speech bubble of the form @!#?@!. He would then plummet off the bottom of the screen.

Q*Bert was an arcade game released by Gottlieb in 1982, and was one of their most popular games. An interesting fact about the prototype arcade cabinet is that when Q*Bert fell off the pyramid, a plunger was supposed to strike the inside of the case to make it sound as if Q*Bert had fallen inside the cabinet!

As with most 8-bit era games, the gameplay was pretty repetitive, but back then that didn’t matter, as the main draw was to try and beat your high score. The game screen was very simple, with three platforms floating in the air. Aliens would bounce around the screen for you to shoot, whilst you reassembled and fueled your spaceship. Parts of the spaceship would drop from random positions at the top of the screen, and you would have to fly over, pick them up, then deposit them one on top of the other on the launch pad. Once the rocket was assembled, fuel pods would drop down and you would have to repeat the same mechanism as for building the ship with the pods. Once enough fuel pods had been collected, the spaceship would flash, signalling it was time for you to enter and move on to the next level, where the process began again.

Lunar Jet Man returned in a sequel, also called Lunar Jet Man. The graphics were much larger and you now had a moon rover vehicle to drive around the horizontally scrolling levels. I remember playing this game once only in the local branch of WH Smiths, and not being able to fathom what it was you were supposed to be doing. Obviously nobody else could work the game out either, as it failed to make as much of an impact as Jetpac did. The idea was to blow up an alien base by transporting a giant bomb on the moon rover to it. To do this, craters had to be filled in along the way in order to let the moon rover continue it’s journey.

The character made one more appearance in Solar Jet Man on the NES. This game was again a horizontal scroller, with you having to collect objects and return them to your mothership. The game was set to appear on the home computers of the day as well, but the game performed badly on the NES and plans to release it were shelved, despite most of the different versions being complete! If you’re interested in emulation though, the C64 version has been rediscovered by the Games That Weren’t C64 website.

The story behind the game was that Donkey Kong had kidnapped Mario’s girlfriend, and it was Mario’s job to rescue her. Donkey Kong may have only had four screens, but they were all very different. The first involved reaching the top of the screen whilst jumping over barrels that DK rolled down the platforms at you. A hammer was available which allowed you to smash the barrels for some bonus points. The second level was a custard pie factory, with conveyor belts that would keep switching direction to confuse the player. Third level was an exercise in jumping with lots of small platforms to be leapt between whilst avoiding the girders being bounced down the screen at you. The final level involved removing rivets from the platforms by jumping over them, and when all had been removed, Kong would plummet to the bottom of the screen. Then it was back to the beginning to start again with an increased difficulty level.

The sequel Donkey Kong Junior followed, but this time it was DK that had been captured by Mario. You played Donkey Kong Junior, who had to traverse the four levels of the game by climbing vines and jumping across platforms to reach his father at the top of the screen. This must be the only game where Mario has been cast as the bad guy (excepting Super Mario Sunshine of course, which doesn’t really count).

Donkey Kong then took a rest for a few years before reappearing in the 1994 SNES game Donkey Kong Country. The game was developed by Rare, and is well known as being one of the first games to feature graphics that were completely computer generated. All the landscapes and character sprites had been modelled and animated in a 3D package, then rendered out and put into the game, rather than each frame of animation being drawn by hand. DK was portrayed as being a bit dim, but very strong, and he was accompanied by Diddy Kong, his younger, smaller chum. Interestingly, DK was presumably meant to actually be Donkey Kong Jr, since there was an old grandad ape called Cranky Kong, who delighted in informing DK and Diddy that in his day you only got 3 lives, and were lucky to have more than a handful of colours.

Donkey Kong Country did well on the SNES and later the Gameboy series, but it was the N64 that saw DK thrust into a full 3D world with the unimaginately named Donkey Kong 64. Again developed by Rare, this game was similar in style to Super Mario 64 and Rare’s own Banjo Kazooie. There were now 5 playable characters, with puzzles in the game only being solvable by a particular character.

Most recently, apart from appearing as a playable character in games like Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., DK has starred in games using Nintendo’s unique bongo controller! There have been two iterations of Donkey Konga, a rhythm action title where you have to bang the bongos and clap as a sequence of icons scrolls across the screen, in time with a selection of well known songs and Nintendo game themes. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat also use the bongos, but this time for controlling the ape around a platform game. Banging the drums moves DK around, and clapping makes him jump. When you get close to an enemy, the game zooms in and frantic bashing of the drums allows you to pummel the enemy into submission.

The story to the game went as follows. It had been a cold winter, so Monty Mole breaks into a South Yorkshire pit to grab some coal to keep himself warm. After overcoming picket lines, coal crushers, drills and man-eating fish (Yorkshire is famed for it’s man-eating fish!) he emerges into Arthur’s castle. Still with us? Here he seizes his chance to topple Arthur infiltrating the heavily protected castle and stealing some ballot papers. And that’s exactly how the UK coal miner’s strike happened

Monty’s first outing proved very popular, and the sequel Monty on the Run was released the following year. This was a much bigger game, with loads more rooms. Monty is wanted by the police for his antics in the previous game, and so is trying to make his way to Gibraltar to evade capture. An addition to this game was that Monty could also choose 5 objects from a set of 21 to help him on his quest. The game was quite harsh though, and some of the objects were totally useless, so you had to choose wisely. The Commodore 64 version particularly is fondly remembered for it’s incredibly long Rob Hubbard tune. Rob was a hero to many in those days, and it was not unusual for people to by games purely because Rob had created the music in it!

Anyway, back to Monty Mole. Auf Wiedersehen Monty was the next game in the series, and guess what, it was yet another platformer. This time, Intermole have tracked Monty down, so he must travel around Europe collecting money so he can buy his own island and escape from the police once and for all. In order to speed up travel between countries, Monty could find airline tickets, which allowed him to skip sections of the game in his quest for cash.

The series of games ended with Impossamole, and unfortunately ended on a bad note. The biggest change was that the game landscape now scrolled rather than being a flick screen affair, but gameplay wise it was pretty tired. Monty did have one little known further adventure, in Moley Christmas, a game given away on the cover tape of Your Sinclair magazine. Here, Monty’s job was to convert code into a game, put it onto a tape, then get the tape onto a magazine and finally the magazine into the shops. It was a simple, short game, but nice to have as a freebie.

Anyway, Xed was a grey alien working as a Terraformer for the Terracon, a giant brain in a jar. Unfortunately, the Terracon turned evil, and after wiping out the rest of Xed’s race, started blasting the newly terraformed planets to pieces. Xed’s mission is to try and stop the Terracon once and for all. He’s not totally alone in the universe however, as he is kept company by the hologrammatic form of the Doc, his old scientist pal, who offers help and advice throughout the game.


The game was a free roaming third person adventure title. Xed was equipped with a gun that fired Genergy, a form of energy that was used in terraforming. As well as being able to destroy enemies with the gun, Xed could also fire it at objects to make them overheat and blow up. It’s third use was actually in creation. The levels contained holographic meshes in various places, and Xed could make these solid so he could interact with them by pumping Genergy into them with the gun. Genergy came in three different colours, and this allowed a puzzle solving element to come into the game as well, as you had to make sure you had the right colour of Genergy in order to make the meshes solid.

The game was developed by PictureHouse and released in 2000 on PS1, and despite getting some excellent review scores failed to sell. It was also well received at E3, but was never released outside of Europe. Being my first published title I’m obviously very proud of it, it’s just a shame that it was never really marketed. Not that I’m bitter or anything. Well, not much anyway Check out the game’s website if you’re curious.

Jim could perform the usual range of platform game moves, running and jumping, going hand over hand along wires and so on. Firing rooted Jim to the spot, but this meant he could aim his gun at enemies. He could also whip enemies with himself! The suit was kind of alive, and would pull Jim’s body out and flick him quickly out. Jim could also hold on to wires with his wormy tail to allow him to fire at the same time as dangling precariously over clifftops! This also allowed him to use his body as a rope and swing from various special hook-on points throughout the game.


The game also had a crazy streak of humour running through it. A good example of this was early on in the first level where you had to drop a fridge onto a see-saw to launch a cow into space. It was this sense of humour that got Jim his own cartoon series, with Jim being voiced by none other than Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson no less! Some of the crazy characters to feature were Princess What’s-Her-Name, Professor Monkey-For-A-Head and Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed, Slug-For-A-Butt.

Earthworm Jim 2 was a fairly standard sequel, i.e. more of the same kind of thing as the first game, which was no bad thing. The third game in the series was Earthworm Jim 3D, which appeared on the PC and N64, but unfortunately Jim didn’t really make the transition to a full 3D game very well, and there have unfortunately been no more games featuring our annelid chum since.

Thanks to one of our readers, nafi, for suggesting Earthworm Jim for our Advent calendar. An excellent choice!