Eidos Interactive have announced what Brand Manager Ray Livingston has rather ambitiously called, “THE new phenomenon on the Nintendo DS” in the form of cute-looking puzzler, Soul Bubbles.

The game features neat use of the DS touch-screen in order to manipulate your bubbles by first drawing them, then deflating them, or cutting them or joining them to other bubbles. They can be filled with water or gas, and used to escape traps, extinguish fires and avoid all the sticky or dangerous surfaces that will slow the bubbles down. Marvellous!

Woo! Cutting a bubble using the stylus!

Livingston (not to be confused with Ian Livingstone, who’s Creative Director at Eidos) goes on to say that, “every single person who has picked up this game has fallen in love with it instantly. We can’t wait to introduce the world to Soul Bubbles.”

Presumably every single person who has picked up the game thus far works for Eidos, so we’re not sure how much trust to place in that - however if the screenshots are anything to go by, this looks like it could be a cute, engaging, and fun addition to the DS library. Huzzah!

We all know Spore is going to be great. On the DS it looks particularly amazing with its super-stylised and yet outrageously cute 2D creatures.

In a completely sensible move, Spore on the DS isn’t some kind of horrifically scaled down version of its PC big-brother but rather a fleshed out individual focusing entirely on the creature bits. As you’d expect, you can completely customise your creation picking up new legs and such-like as you progress, with design decisions determining the characteristics of your little fella.

And to top it all off as Jason Haber, producer on the DS version of Spore, demonstrated to Eurogamer in their preview it’s even possible to create a carrot. And wander about. Although, being a carrot, it’s not going to be terribly good at fighting. Or eating. Or staying alive generally.

All in all, I think we can safely say that Spore on DS is going to be completely brilliant.

10/10 in advance.

(even though we don’t do game reviews)

Whee! That’d be good, wouldn’t it? It’d be a bit like when you used to wander into WHSmiths when you were a kid and browse the £1.99 and £2.99 super-cheapo budget games because they were all you could afford (and your mum would let you buy).

And now, almost 20 years later, the first £9.99 game on the Nintendo DS is due out - which is sort of like £2.99 in today’s money isn’t it? Yeah?

The game’s called ‘FIZZ‘, is some sort of puzzle game, and rather dubiously has a bit with a picture of a (sort of) sci-fi looking girl with ‘touch me’ written underneath.

Still, it all looks rather promising and if this is the beginning of a cheapo-games trend on DS then that can only be a good thing. Set your alarm clocks for April 25th 2008!

P.S. I was going to make a ‘Pokemon’ joke in the headline there, because ‘Pokemon’ sounds a bit like ‘Poke(t) mon(ey)’ but changed my mind because I realised that in fact, it would have been rubbish.

Alas not another tantalizing glimpse of the frankly amazing-looking Ghostbusters game, but instead a natty little 2D title coming to the Nintendo DS.

Mr Slime appears to be a fairly standard 2D side-scroller but with DS stylus controls wedged in. Which is fine by me - to be honest I was a little worried that with the 3D capabilities of the DS, that the end might be nigh for daft little 2D games. Thankfully, however, that appears not to be the case.

Apparently it’s got an “advanced physics engine” too, although we suspect that’s probably marketing speak for “the arm stretches when you drag it with the stylus”. It also involves some amount of blowing into the microphone, however, which if it didn’t really work that well in MarioKart is unlikely to work well in anything else.

Still, it might just turn out to be cool - to be honest any game which has the phrase “the wonderful world of slime” in the press release has me sold already.

Source: GamesPress