This is great. I get to buy not one but two new games for my Nintendo DS with a perfectly clean conscience intact. They have to be a good investment - they are educational . I admit, I already own that language game with a giant blue bird - Talkman for the PSP and I rarely used it. But it was more of a dictionary than a learning aid really.

The two new games are both about learning Chinese characters - kanji as they are called in Japan. That should be a good idea for me since learning Chinese signs is good both for brushing up my Japanese and will come in handy in Hong Kong since most of the characters have about the same meaning in both countries - at least that's what I've heard and hope for.

The first one is called Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun and is meant to help out Japanese children just starting school with learning kanji. In Japan you often see these seven-year-olds sitting on the subway practicing their kanji with small paper notes. It was about time that they were provided with a little more hi-tech solution. The Nintendo DS comes to the rescue and it is of course perfect for practicing kanji with it's touch screen and pen. Check out the commercial for an injection of Japanese cheerfulness.


Game number two might suit you better if you have trouble identifying with a Japanese seven-year-old. Here you get to be a kung-fu master. Better eh? A kung-fu master who defeats opponents by demonstrating his awe-inspiring kanji skills apparently.This is Kanji-ken where you write the correct kanji on the touch screen after reading the phonetic description of it. A concept that reminds me of the home made RPG Slime Forest where battles also are won by knowing your alphabets. In slime forest you start out with learning hiragana and katakana - the two phonetic alphabets of Japanese that you probably need to know before you start practicing with these two DS games - could be a good start if you can live with the graphics and have a sense of humor - there are some really funny RPG clichés in it.

I have already been through the slime forest myself so I'm ready for some kung-fu action!

Today I played the Puzzle Quest - Challenge of the Warlords demo. It was recently released for Nintendo DS and PSP and it seems pretty sweet. Someone had a really good idea that must have sounded something like: "-let's make a puzzle rpg!".
And so they did.

That means - you walk around on a very old-school world map with your character (who is about the same size as the towns on the map, in that old school way). You get to choose if this character should be a wizard, druid or one of a couple of other classes that I can't remember because I didn't think about it much - I always pick the wizard or mage if there is one. You level up, equip items and distribute points in skills just like we're used to in a rpg. But when it's time to fight the puzzle enters the picture. You share a board with your opponent and take turns in lining up symbols in groups of three or more. Line up three skulls and you do a normal attack to the undead skeleton, orch or family member that you are up against. Lining up other symbols give you mana that you can use for magic attacks or extra money. There's not just those elements of puzzle and rpg but strategy too. For example you want to keep your opponent from being able to do his or her worst attacks or evil magic and that's fun - genre-bending ftw!

As an extra plus, the developers at Infinite Interactive seems really friendly. I saw this on their forum:

Oberoni:
My request is (hopefully) pretty simple - when this game comes out, please give a bit more contrast to the yellow and green jewels.

I'm a bit colorblind, as you might have guessed. Thankfully, I can kind of see a little difference between the two colors, but it's tough. I mainly have to rely on the symbols on the jewels.

The answer:

SteveFawkner
Developer:

It shall be done!

(...for any future releases of the game on... umm... platforms that aren't announced yet...)

Cheers

-Steve

I think I might have been spending too much time on the World of Warcraft forums, reading this friendly conversation almost felt a bit odd to me.