Resident Evil: DS

Ruffin threw two Nintendo DS games my way, Elite Beat Agents and Resident Evil: Deadly Silence. I'll write about EBA later.

• The whole FMV intro is there, including cheesy character introductions. The black & white video looks pretty bad in spots, with one of the shades actually being a bit pinkish instead of a shade of gray. I believe the original PSOne game had the same misspelling of "bizarre" in the newspaper headline that's shown, a nice touch. Still isn't the full, uncut Japanese intro, however, since some of the gore is missing.
• The top screen is constantly a map when you're running around. It becomes a second part of the inventory screen otherwise.
  
• The use of the stylus is clumsy, a point made painfully obvious when swapping out with games like Zoo Keeper and Elite Beat Agents that are 100% stylus-based. Going from stylus to buttons and back for things like inventory management is definitely a bit awkward.
  
• One DS-specific addition is the knife-slashing minigame that I'm guessing comes up occasionally. You walk into a room and get a first-person view of zombies coming up at you. You tap the screen to slash with your knife and fend the enemies off. The first time I did this, I got bit twice. The second time, after I let myself die against the window-smashing dogs, I didn't get bit at all and appeared to get an ammo clip as a reward.
• You can skip door animations, which is a nice touch. I find myself watching them out of habit.
• By default the blood is green. I switched it to red in the options menu. You'd think an M-rated game could use red blood without that kind of joke.
• The stereo audio reflects the action. You can hear the sound panning as you move from one side of the room to the other, relative to the current camera angle.

So far, impressive port. I'd really dig Resident Evil 2 put into this form, but I fear it'd have to be two, or more, cards to do it justice.