On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up New Super Mario Bros. and suddenly I can’t put my DS down! To be perfectly honest, I had thought Mario would be a bit dated by now, but not a bit; great graphics, great sound and most important – great game play.

This was what I had expected from Lego Star Wars, and Splinter Cell, not from a game whose basic idea has been around for well over a decade.

I’ve put Age of Empires on my Christmas list (Santa, are you reading this? I’ve been a good boy all for most of the year….) and I’m really looking forward to seeing how one of my favorite PC games translates to the DS, so if you’ve played it on your DS, let me know what you think of it.

[tags]Super Mario, AOE, Age of Empires, handheld, gadget[tags]

Perhaps I’ve chosen badly – Super Monkey Ball, Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory and Lego Star Wars II:The Original Trilogy. None of these games is particularly playable. Lego Star Wars is exceptionally bad - but that’s not limited to the DS version; I downloaded the XBox 360 demo from Marketplace and found that to be equally poor, and this is the game that won the award for best gameplay at the recent Baftas.

So, the other day I picked up a copy of the Opera browser for the DS, and while I knew the performance wasn’t going to be blistering I thought that it might come in handy for ad-hoc browsing when I haven’t got a laptop with me. It’s barely usable, at best.

What’s frustrating is that the DS should be a killer handheld console – it’s light, the battery life is amazing, the dual-screens are bright and vibrant and the sound, while not great, is more than adequate – but that counts for little when the content appears to be so weak.

So if you’ve got any game recommendations that will help change my opinion, please, let me know before my DS gets reassigned as a paper-weight!

[tags]nintendo, ds, ds lite, handheld, games, console[/tags]

I was surprised to see that Tomb Raider Legend pipped it for Best Original Score, because although the title/main screen track is certainly memorable, the in-game tracks weren’t as atmospheric as GRAW – if you’ve played the game, you will surely remember the music that plays when your team are pinned down near the Central Plaza, waiting for reinforcements. The way the music rises as your comrades are dying around you made the hairs on my neck stand up – something that the Tomb Raider soudtrack didn’t manage.

The strangest award was Best Gameplay going to Lego Star Wars II. I’d love to know which platform this result was based on because it certainly wasn’t the DS Lite version. Strange camera angles; characters ending up hidden behind walls; NPCs getting stuck in loops – that’s my experience of this “winner”. I will, more than likely, buy the same title for my Xbox 360, simply because it’s Star Wars and its in the blood of men my age….

The full results – including nominees and winners – can be found here.

I’m not expecting blistering performance but I am looking forward to this, because there are times when the browser on my cell-phone just doesn’t cut it, and I don’t have my laptop with me.

I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who has already tried Opera on their DS, so if you’ve got one, post a comment!