Like our editor, I'm convinced that PC gaming is dying, if not dead already. Specifically, I am of the opinion that consoles have reached a stage in their development where no game genre that was previously held to be superior on the PC cannot be presented just as enjoyably (if not more so) on a console system. I used to be big on first-person shooters, yet the last three I played through were on the PS2; having been privileged with a glimpse of Bioshock running on the XBox 360, I have seen how even the more complex FPSes can be presented with ease. It used to be the accepted wisdom that non-Japanese RPGs had to be played on the PC, yet Oblivion was released on the 360 and I don't see any reason why versions of, say, Planescape: Torment or Knights of the Old Republic couldn't work on a console these days. While some genres are still stronger on the PC than on consoles these days, that's not for a lack of processing power or control mechanisms on consoles; it's simply a matter of market attitudes. People believe that PCs are better at certain games, therefore people buy certain types of games for the PC preferentially, therefore games companies produce those games for the PC.

But, of course, innovative game companies can and will find ways of coming up with new console experiences, and thus disprove the myths which are currently providing PC gaming with a grotesque parody of life. The life support machines are being turned off, one by one, as consoles come with new features for designers to play with - internet connectivity and hard drives for the PS3s and XBox 360s, and for the new Nintendo consoles we have new and interesting control systems. It is those control systems which have enabled game companies to produce workable first-person shooters, real-time strategy games and turn-based skirmish wargames for the Nintendo DS, three genres I never expected to see on a handheld gaming system. Two out of three of these games - the more successful ones - make heavy use of the DS's innovative stylus-and-touchscreen control mechanism, which can essentially replicate anything you would normally do with a mouse - simply substitute point-and-poke for point-and-click. Of course, just because the technology you have available supports the sort of game you want to make doesn't guarantee that what you produce is any good - decent gameplay, competant presentation and general talent on the part of the design team are also needed. Some of these games are more successful than others.

Metroid Prime: Hunters

Metroid Prime: Hunters is a first-person shooter, and the latest installment in Nintendo's long-running Metroid series (recently revived with the Metroid Prime line). As always, the protagonist is bounty hunter Samus Aran, arguably the most long-enduring female character in computer games; in this mission, she's dispatched to investigate a mysterious telepathic transmission from an isolated star system, which supposedly contains the key to ultimate power. The "hunters" of the title are an array of poachers, space pirates, aliens, and other competitors for the promise Ultimate Power. Naturally, Ultimate Power turns out to be not what it's cracked up to be, and it's up to Samus to keep it out of the clutches of the other hunters - and destroy it once and for all.

True to the traditions of the Metroid series, there's a certain degree of non-linearity in Metroid Prime: Hunters; after the first couple of stages, you're free to explore the four worlds (each of which has two Octoliths hidden away in them, which you need to collect to unlock the final battle) however you wish. All of the worlds have areas which are only accessible once you've collected the correct secret weapons, and while there are many scripted encounters with the other hunters they also move around the planets freely, so you can never tell when you're going to run into them - and since they steal Octoliths from you if they kill you, you might find yourself having to track down a particular hunter in order to regain a stolen Octolith. No, that doesn't make any chronological sense, but it's a fun feature.

A good control system is a must if a first-person shooter is going to be even slightly bearable, and Hunters delivers on two fronts. Firstly, it provides the player with plenty of choice as to which control system they wish to use - stylus-based, or button-mashy, left-handed or right-handed (the handedness making a much greater difference when you're using the stylus, of course). Secondly, the stylus-based control system is a genuine revelation. You move using either the directional buttons or the similarly-arranged X, Y, A and B buttons (depending on what hand you're holding the stylus in), you watch the first-person view on the display screen, and you look around and turn by dragging the mouse pointer about on the touch screen (which doubles as a radar, so it's not entirely useless if you don't use the stylus. Poking bits on the touch screen allows you to select weapons, switch between the action-packed combat view and the highly useful "scan" view (which allows you to analyse objects to get additional information out of them), and so forth. Oh, and you can turn into a whizzy ball which drops bombs as it rolls about, because this is a Metroid game.

It's as intuitive as using mouse and keyboard on a PC; combined with pretty decent graphics and sound, and challenging but not ridiculously difficult gameplay, this is excellent value for money, especially when you take into account the online multiplayer function (which will actually analyse your in-game performance to match you up with people of a similar skill level to yours, if you ask it to). My only complaints are that the boss fights get a bit samey - 8 out of the 9 boss fights are against different iterations of the same 2 monsters, a big floating eye and an enormous wart-encrusted wang-shaped creature - and that it's sometimes difficult to work out what to do next.

Lostmagic

Packaged as a Final Fantasy-esque RPG, Lostmagic actually resembles a real-time strategy game more than anything else (the only RPG elements are the grinding and the slightly tedious cut scenes - oh, and an irritating animal sidekick). Some floaty witch has beaten up a bunch of floaty witches and wizards and taken their wands, and for some reason this is bad. You're an apprentice magician, and you have to make it right again by enslaving monsters to your will and leading them across the countryside in a wave of destruction. A terribly cute wave of destruction.

The basics of the control system for Lostmagic is quite reasonable. Your top-down view of the battlefield is displayed on the touchscreen, on which you can poke, drag and wave your stylus in order to select units, move them about, have them attack enemy units and so forth. The top screen has a map of the entire battlefield (with, saints be praised, doesn't have any irritating "fog of war"), and can display unit stats (but you'll probably be paying too much attention to the other screen to pay much attention). You can cast spells by hitting one of the shoulder buttons to bring up a magic circle, on which you can draw eldritch runes to cast spells with. As you battle, your ability to use different types of magic increases depending on how much you use those varieties of magics (so the spell types you use most frequently become cheaper to use), your monsters get stronger, and you collect cool treasures to boost your units. The game is nicely non-linear, promising multiple endings and allowing you to explore a branching pathway between battles, giving the player plenty of choice.

Unfortunately, there's just a few problems. Firstly, a little more clever AI for the player's monsters could be appreciated when it comes to them finding their way across the screen; several times I wondered why a particular monster was taking a while to get across the screen, only to discover to my irritation that it had got stuck on a rock. There is nothing worse in a real-time strategy game than units that get stuck on rocks; a unit which will attempt to walk in a straight line from its current location to the location you have asked it to go to, and can't work out how to walk around a rock, is completely useless. For God's sake, even the troops in the first Command and Conquer game had sufficient AI not to be bamboozled by a tiny tree; surely my little pig-men shouldn't be flummoxed by such things?

The second problem is the magic system. The last game I played where you cast magic spells by drawing on the screen was Okami; in that, the game will usually recognise the shapes you draw, only asks you to draw relatively simple shapes, and pauses the action while you are drawing. Lostmagic often fails to recognise the symbols I draw (even the simple ones), soon starts asking you to draw quite complicated symbols, and doesn't pause the action while you're casting. Since the little people on the touch screen are quite big, you can only see a small area of the map, and what's more the range on most of the spells is quite limited, so you often have to stand quite close to the monsters you want to cast spells at - so if you don't cast it right the first time, and you don't have a mob of your monsters keeping the baying hordes away from you, you'll get whacked. The magic system starts out reasonably simple but rapidly gets annoying.

The third problem is the unforgiving learning curve, and the grinding it makes necessary. The process of playing the game goes a little like this:

• Play for a while.
• Get to a battle you can't beat.
• Try, try, and try again.
• Go away and play through the same set of random encounters over and over and over again until you and your monsters have gained enough experience and items (and you've captured enough monsters) to beat the level which was too hard for you.

This gets a little boring after a while. While Lostmagic proves that real-time strategy games are viable on the DS, it sabotages itself with its poor AI, repetitive gameplay, insufficiently polished magic system and the grinding. Dear God, the grinding. Clearly, someone thought that it'd be a good idea to market Lostmagic as an RPG (and it really isn't one), and thus random encounters were necessary. The jerk.

Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix

A remake for the DS, as the name implies, of Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth (a PS1 game which didn't get especially good reviews at the time), H:RBER, like Lostmagic, pretends to be a Final Fantasy-style RPG but really isn't: it's a complicated turn-based skirmish-level wargame, like Warhammer only it kind of sucks. And like Lostmagic, the control system is just fine (although it's actually possible - and easier - to forego the stylus entirely); the problem is in the structure of the game.

The problem is threefold: firstly, it throws heaps of complexity at you. to relatively little benefit. Most of this complexity comes from the RAP system, which on the face of it is reasonably simple; if the soldiers under your command don't do everything they possibly could on their turn, they get their next turn a little sooner than otherwise; similarly, you can go overbudget a little if you don't mind your next turn being delayed. However, the implementation of this system results in each character's turn taking a good long time, much of it spent deciding how much time your character is going to spend twiddling their thumbs (and the answer's going to almost always be "as little as possible, what are you talking about?"). Furthermore, the game system shows every decision and detail of the opposing force's decisions, including their little initiative bar filling up, so each one of the computer opponent's moves takes 30 seconds to a minute to resolve. Also, you're often facing vastly superior forces, which can result in five to ten minute stretches of time when you're just watching the computer having its go. Perhaps I lack the patience for turn-based strategy games, but that's just lame.

The second problem is the difficulty. The game soon becomes monstrously difficult, unexpectely so, demanding a heap of grinding (in the handily-located Tower of Trial, which is essentially a box where people go to fight rather dull battles to get XP). What's worse, whenever one of your soldiers dies, they are gone forever, and you have to go and recruit a level one dork - who's obviously going to be too green to actually use on the battlefield beyond possibly the first battle, so as soon as you recruit someone you have to fuck off to the Tower of Trial to get the useless bastard up to scratch. Each battle in the Tower of Trial takes about half an hour (at a generous estimate).

Yeah.

The third problem is the wild inconsistency. Some battles you are clearly meant to win - or are clearly too high-level for - so the enemies can't hurt you at all, and it becomes an hour-long exercise in swatting irritatingly resilient flies. Other battles - often coming immediately after those stupidly-easy fights - are horribly, impossibly difficult. There is little way of telling how hard a fight is going to be before you begin.

After wasting about three to five hours on this ridiculous game, I gave up. It claims to have 50 hours of gameplay, but my guess is that's 30 hours of tedious fights and 20 hours of cliched cut scenes. (Guess what... the bad guy's main henchman is a big guy in black armour and a big old helmet that conceals his face. Originality!) Hoshigami proves that very complicated wargames can be simulated on the DS. But out of all the games in the world to remake, why pick this turkey?