3DS eStore Games Roundup
Zelda! Mario! Tennis! Alleyway! Excitebike!
Alleyway
- £2.70/$2.99
Bring on the clones! As one of the very first titles released for the Game Boy in April 1989, there's a certain historical significance to Alleyway - perhaps in the same way that Bros and Rick Astley were the hottest teen pop sensations of their day.
Even at that time, yet another spin on the done-to-death Breakout formula wasn't terrifically exciting to many people, and the game deservedly got bent over the knees of critics and given a stern spanking.
Looking at it 22 years later, there's nothing to suggest anyone was being particularly unfair for meting out physical violence to something that - even then - was considered something of a retro nonentity.
If you wanted to be the most forgiving critic who ever lived, you could could observe that, yes, it's a decent enough Arkanoid-style bat and ball game. But you'd be pretty perverse to be hankering after the most tiresome monochrome version that ever existed.
For anyone with taste and dignity, this is the kind of detritus you'd most readily associate with built-in late nineties mobile phone games, and it deserves nothing but contempt. £2.70? Really?
1/10
Tennis
- £2.70/$2.99
I've always had a bit of a soft spot for rubbish tennis games. Match Point on the Spectrum, On Court Tennis on the C64 and Great Courts 2 on the Amiga devoured for more of my time than they probably deserved.
I'm fairly sure that Nintendo's take on Tennis would have done the same if the NES had gained any sort of a foothold in this part of the world. It's wobbly, it's hilariously slow and imprecise, there's absolutely no depth to it whatsoever, but it has that same basic sense of absurd fun that all tennis games had back in the day.
Trying to play it now is something of a trial, with its ridiculous, arcane timing system, coupled with the most basic monochrome visuals imaginable. You can't really knock Intelligent Systems for its Game Boy efforts. This was 1989. It was in the post-launch range. What does anyone expect?
Perhaps it wouldn't be unreasonable of Nintendo to have bundled together some of its lesser lights into value packs for the curious and the completists. Maybe it could have charged an appropriate price like ooh, I dunno, 59 pence, to pluck a figure out of the air that seems to wind up Nintendo execs.
Instead, to experience this rather ramshackle offering, you're expected to pay over the odds. The only reasonable course of action is to vote with your wallets and send Nintendo a message that you're not interested in rubbish like this.
2/10