EA’s “Need for Speed” series is no stranger to just about every game platform ever released. It was always the racer that tried to please everyone and ended up enthralling no one. This year, after a tepid critical and commercial performance for “Undercover,” EA decided to split the series into a serious experience approaching a simulation on the HD consoles, and a more playful and colorful game on the Wii and DS. After spending some time with the Wii and DS versions, “Need for Speed Nitro,” this is looking like a good move.

I wasn’t expecting much from “Nitro” on the DS, mostly because you can count the number of good racing games on the platform on one hand. I am pleasantly surprised. “Nitro” is a solid game, though not spectacular.

Before I get to the impressions, some perspective. I am not a serious racing fan. I think the best racer is one that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I love “Burnout” games, “Mario Kart,” and “Mashed.” “Forza” and “Gran Turismo” are, for the most part, beyond me. Perspective provided, moving on.

Instead of trying to show up “Forza 3,” “Nitro” wisely features exaggerated caricatures of real cars. The game pays little attention to reality, other than the fact that the cartoon fancy sports cars are in the higher tiers. Your first choices will include ’60s VW vans, Renault hatchbacks, and Nissan Cubes.

The cars are cosmetically customizable, but the only way to improve your performance is to switch to a different vehicle.
Surprisingly, driving using the DS’ D-pad feels great. It basically controls like an older console game, not taking advantage of the touch screen at all, which is completely fine. It just doesn’t need it. The game also looks quite good for a DS game – the solid framerate contributes to a nice sense of speed.

There are a few interesting mechanics sprinkled into the standard gas-brake-drift racing gameplay. The first is the context-sensitive X button, which basically makes you do an insanely ridiculous trick involving whatever is in front of you. This can be driving on two wheels between cops that randomly appear to block the track, and it can also be doing front flips over your opponents, if you draft them long enough. This is a fun mechanic that really embodies the game’s style.

Winning in “Nitro” requires a bit more than just getting first place – you also have to get the most stunt points. In addition to the expected drifting and airtime, you can also drive through a series of icons to paint your logo on nearby buildings. This easily nets the most points, and the first racer through an area has the first chance to grab these icons. Thus, if you are in first, you will end up with far more stunt points than your lagging competition, so this mechanic essentially becomes meaningless. However, it doesn’t really detract from the racing, and it’s fun to spray your customizable icon up on sections of the track.

The game’s structure is really its Achilles’ Heel. You go “around the world” (pick things from a menu) and do races at various exotic locales. The DS seems to lack the car upgrades its console cousin features, featuring only cosmetic changes, so career basically boils down to doing the same four event types at six different tracks. There are four “levels” of play that basically repeat the same six tracks. The tracks themselves are fairly mundane, with a small number of alternate routes and hazards – they don’t really do anything interesting, like risk/reward shortcuts.

The DS version of “Nitro” is probably best played in small doses – that was the only way I was able to enjoy it. More than two or three races in one play session really starts to drive the game’s weaknesses into the forefront. Still, “racing game with real cars” is not the most common kind of game on the DS, and hey, there will certainly be a sequel that might improve on the game’s flaws next year.

“Band Hero” is Activision’s attempt to bring the experience (and profitability!) of full-band plastic instrument games to the Nintendo DS.

“Band Hero” is also a bad idea for a game to its very core.

Upon first inserting your “Band Hero” cart, you are prompted to create a truly heroic band and character. The default state for your new rock hero is standing around in his or her underpants, instead of something generic like, say, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. After choosing from face types like “anime” and “elven” (nothing says RAWK like elves), you are prompted to choose the skin color. Activision are very progressive, so among the reality-based colors like “brown” and “lighter brown” are colors like “cyan,” “magenta” and “jet black.” The path of least resistance involves being green skinned and flaunting it in those hilarious heart undies, so that’s what I did.

After creating my rocker, “Formerly Bruce Banner,” I instruct him to play every instrument in my band simultaneously and head off to pick a song. The interface is geared for creating playlists, so you basically check off songs you want to play and then push a check mark. It’s easy to not realize what’s going on here and select and deselect a bunch of songs while just trying to get to the game, but it’s an understandable design choice. After all, when you’re playing a portable game, you’re going to play it for long periods of time, and not quickly while waiting in line somewhere.

Sarcasm aside, it’s a terrible interface and terrible default choice, especially when you consider that “Band Hero’s” target audience is supposed to be the tech-challenged mass market. Even if this was a game for power users, a group that puts up with bad interfaces, it’s impossible to sort the song list by difficulty or artist — it’s just alphabetic by song, with no artist alongside it. Additionally, the entire song selection interface only displays about four songs at a time, and it has a huge amount of wasted space that could be used for artist, difficulty, the entire song title instead of “Crazy Little Thing….”

But if the gameplay is good you can put up with all these problems, right? Well, it’s bad. I have never played a DS “Guitar Hero” title, so this is my introduction to the guitar grip peripheral. It is the most difficult thing to hold ever, for no good reason. It doesn’t make you feel like you are playing a guitar, and it makes the game a literal pain to play. Strumming the touch screen does not feel like using the strum bar on a proper guitar controller, and the frets are just hard to press while holding the system steady in your hands.

Drums are okay. They are controlled with a rubber drum condom that fits over the system and pressed the face buttons for you. There is no strumming here, though. Just hit the drum when the gem crosses the hit zone, like “Dance Dance Revolution.” Unfortunately, the silly drum skin is arranged with the drums in two vertical stacks, which is counterintuitive when the game arranges them in the traditional horizontal row on-screen. It’s technically possible to play without it using just the face buttons, but the game’s UI doesn’t change to show button names to make up for the lack of colored pads. Once you get used to it, it’s better than guitar, but that’s not saying much.

The instrument play is broken up by silly minigames that have you doing touch screen crowd surfing, stage diving, and T-shirt tossing while the song still plays without you. These really make me feel like I’m playing an instrument and not a video game that felt its core gameplay wasn’t adequate enough to stand alone! Thankfully, these can be ignored entirely, if you never accidentally press that part of the touch screen while strumming.

Here is the core problem, though: Even if you like the guitar and drum play in Band Hero, do you really want to lug around a bunch of instrument peripherals for your portable system? This was a bad idea with “Guitar Hero: On Tour,” and the addition of the drum face just exacerbates the problem. Here is another problem: These peripherals are for the DS Lite only. That guitar peripheral you see above will only work with a GBA slot, and the rubber drum condom fits the Lite perfectly, though it might also function on the DSi. “Band Hero” was a chance to rethink the guitar game and start over now that the DSi is out, but that apparently would’ve been too much effort, as the box brags: “Exclusively for the Nintendo DS Lite!”

Singing, a peripheral-free activity, is the most functional part of the game. It works pretty similarly to singing in “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero,” but it’s definitely not as difficult — I was able to pass a Queen song on my first try. I imagine they had to lower the sensitivity of the singing because of the DS’ lower quality microphone. It’s great that the DS now has a singing game worth playing, and I look forward to seeing it played in the public places where people enjoy playing portable games, because that is certainly a thing that will happen, and making a singing game for a portable system is not an inherently flawed concept conceptually.

Overall, Band Hero is a really bad game. It’s a shitty implementation of an even worse idea. I guess if you were able to tolerate past DS “Guitar Hero” games, then it might be worth checking out, but I can’t recommend it at all. Look to “Elite Beat Agents,” “Rock Band” for iPhone or “Rock Band Unplugged” for a rhythm gaming experience that remembers it’s on a portable platform, and is designed accordingly.

One DS game I’ve been kicking around for a while, in one form or another, is Elite Beat Agents, an Americanized sequel to Japanese developer iNiS’s (Guitaroo Man) rhythm game hit, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. I had actually originally played an imported copy of the original game, but I wasn’t going to review an obscure Japanese title and say “Hey guys this is awesome too bad it’d be really expensive to buy it and also you can’t really understand it.” Because I had played the Japanese game, I took my time getting around to playing the American version, released last fall, and, well, it’s still really awesome.

Elite Beat Agents is a rhythm game where players have to poke and drag various points on the DS’s touch screen in time with music. The core gameplay works fantastically, but what really pushes the game over the edge from good to great is the presentation. Each song has a comic panel-based story to go along with it, and the player’s performance in the song affects the outcome of the story. Most of them are extremely silly and surreal, and they’re very fun to watch, and the art itself is fantastic.

The best thing about them, however, is introducing story into rhythm games, and the consequence that goes with it. The idea behind Elite Beat Agents is stupid, but really fun: You are a part of a secret government agency (the titular agents) that is deployed whenever someone really needs help. You arrive on the scene, generally in a dramatic fashion alongside your two backup dancers, and dance to some rockin’ music until the target’s problems are solved. The consequences of losing are much higher than, say, Guitar Hero. Losing a song there means the lead singer shaking his head at you AGAIN, losing a song here means that adorable puppy never makes it home to his owner, or any number of other scenarios.

One thing I must say about this game is that it is hard. This is the hardest (good) rhythm game I have ever played. “Free Bird” on expert has nothing on the insane precision required to best some of the songs on the hardest difficulty here. The main difference is that Elite Beat Agents, like DDR and Samba de Amigo before it, measures exactly how close you were to the beat. A perfect hit will net a 300, while one pretty close but off-beat will give you 100 or 50. On the highest difficulty, you pretty much have to be perfect at it. This is a stark contrast to Guitar Hero, which is mainly concerned at making you feel like a rocker rather than the exact precision of your strumming.

A few items of note. One: It is hard to play Elite Beat Agents with just the DS’s speakers. I find I perform much better with my DS on a pair of good headphones or plugged into a set of computer speakers or the line in jack on my stereo. Of course, it is both impossible and pointless to attempt to play this game with the volume down. In-class DS players, be warned. Two: Elite Beat Agents is a fast paced game that rewards extreme precision with the stylus. It is at the very least impractical to play in the car or on the bus. Paradoxically, it is almost a handheld game in name only, and is best experienced with the volume on your stereo up while on the couch.

However, the game is good enough to overcome these restrictions. I have no issue with the gameplay itself, however unforgiving it may be. Play it.