Like most of my bad DS purchases, this one was born from morbid curiosity. Learning spanish is education, and the screenshots seemed pretty funny. How could I go wrong. So I picked up a copy at gamestop today, letting it sit in my office until I sat shotgun during the evening commute.
I fired it up. Happy low quality spanish(?) music greeted me at a simple menu screen. Start game. Awesome. The story itself is fairly tragic. A kid has his DS stolen and is soon picked up but a strange hooker promising lessons with a final destination in one of the more suspect mexican cities. After you get into the car with the mexican hooker she quickly drops various crossword and card matching games in your lap, and apparently the car can make stops to participate in a game where you whack a pinata. Lets go over these activities:
Word Search:
In this game, on easy, you have a list of english words you find on the crossword. Upon finding the word, the spanish version is displayed at the top. Apparently the nuances of the Spanish language aren't required so much as being a walking dictionary. This is the easiest activity in the game.
Card Matching:
The player faces off against a mexican gunman by matching picture cards. On easy you match similar pictures, on expert you match words that display on the top screen. Trouble is you have to remember a word you cannot pronounce or know the meaning of. Whats weird really is the difficulty level screen for each activity has this humanoid bull leaning against a fence. As you select harder difficulties he gets more and more pissed. About what? So I always choose easy cause he looks the least pissed and I can finish the activity.
Hangman/Pinata:
This game made no sense. I DO NOT KNOW SPANISH! I CANNOT USE THE CONTEXT OF OTHER LETTERS TO FIGURE OUT THE REST OF A WORD I DO NOT KNOW! You get 10 swings, and for anyone who doesnt know Spanish, this results in a lot of random picking at letters until the game says you lose. I found it appropriate when after losing the first game, I was stuck on the second game at the following solution:
FA_IL
The game has a dictionary chock full of spanish words with their english counterparts. However you cant access this dictionary within an activity. I suppose they assume you'll spend hours screaming words at your DS until you remember them, or possibly take your DS with you to Mexico as you scream nouns at the natives until they get you what you want. What I dont get is the game is never clear how to advance to the next part of the story. Am I supposed to get a certain amount of points in these games or what? You poke at these cactus flowers, half of them bring up the activities, half bring up charts showing your point gain in activities (what?!) and the last one provides me a list of people to blame for this game.
The game sucks. Plain and simple. It took me a 45 minute commute to decide that I would stop by Gamecrazy on the way home and trade it in. I got to the counter, handed him the game, and told them I want DQM. He scans it.
"I cant take this"
"what?"
"0.00, here i'll do it again. Yup.."
"Well..."
At this point I just wanted to be rid of it. I turned around to a family behind me picking up that Olympic Wii game, asked them if they had a DS. The kids eventually said yes so I handed it to them with the consolation "It has some crosswords *shrug*"
So I ended up paying full for DQM anyway, but lesson learned I guess. Lesson learned.
