Gaming on the Nintendo DS

 Zoo Vet: Endangered Animals for Nintendo DS is a role playing game in which you act as a newly hired vet at a zoo that has many endangered animals.  The game is pretty easy to learn to play and is forgiving if you make a mistake while diagnosising and treating the animals.  Basically you just go around the zoo and help the animals when they are ill or hungry.  You mostly use the touch screen to play the game.

When diagnosising and treating the animal you do things such as using a stethescope (this particular action is actually quite hard to get right), cleaning wounds, and giving shots.  The graphics of the different things you do and treat are relatively realistic.  The wound graphics are kept in good taste, but still do show blood and such.

The game also has a few mini games that you can play on the computer in the office area.  This includes a matching game, a penguin feeding game, and a puzzle game.  In the office you can also see photos of the animals you have treated and medical terms information.

Overall this game is a pretty well done.  The main people this game will probably appeal to is kids that like animals, especially helping them and budding vetrinarians.  The game is not as educational as I thought it might be, as it does not teach that much about the animals at least not for a while, although it does teach about some medical things.  I personally found it got boring and repetitive fast, but then again I am not much into animals.

Animal Crossing: Wild World was one of the first games I bought for my Nintendo DS. I loved the Gamecube version and thought this would be fun, too.  While it is not bad, I have not found it as attention keeping as the Gamecube and Wii versions.

In the DS version a lot of the things are the same as the Gamecube version, but there are some differences.  For one you arrive by taxi instead of train.  Secondly, if you have multiple people playing on one cartridge you share a house and the mortgage instead of each having you own house and mortgage.  Also, the map is continuous and there are two screens being used.  The touch screen can be used, but it barely changed the way the game can be played, as you can still just use buttons.

It is a good on the go version for those who really love Animal Crossing. However, certain things annoy me. I especially hate sharing a house with my brother just because we share the game.  On the Gamecube and Wii we share the game and easily have our own towns because we play on our own systems. I would not mind sharing a city, but sharing a house can be annoying.

Overall this is just an average game and the worst in the Animal Crossing series, which I overall think is above average.  At least the graphics are a good improvement over the Gamecube one.