All posts in November 2020

Ant-Gravity: Tiny’s Adventure ($1.00)

By wizard on Leave a Comment

For some reason, Black Friday sales on the eShop resulted in FEWER games being dirt cheap, and so we’re up to a full DOLLAR for Ant-Gravity: Tiny’s Adventure.

Ant-Gravity, by QUByte Game Studio, is a simple platformer with a twist — you can press the L or R buttons to rotate the stage around yourself.  Tapping a shoulder button rotates the entire stage 90 degrees.  All you have to do is reach the exit by walking, jumping, and rotating the screen.  The game also allows you to use motion controls to rotate the stage — shake the Joycon left or right to rotate the screen.

While the screen rotation is different, the basic gameplay is very generic — I was tired of it before finishing the first stage.  It has a different little gimmick, but it’s still a tired platformer at heart.

Ant-Gravity: Tiny’s Adventure: $1.00 on the eShop.

Ludo Mania ($0.04)

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Ludo Mania, by Baltoro Games, lets you play ludo (a.k.a. “pachisi”/Parcheesi) with three other people or computer players.  All the standard options are there, so if you really want to play Parchisi, it’s only four cents!

Four different variations are available, each with slightly different rules — but nothing that is really out of the ordinary.  The game does include full instructions for playing each variant, which is nice.

Ludo Mania does have a few glaring design flaws, such as:

  • There is no way to speed up turns.  The rolling/movement mechanic is fairly slow, and you can’t speed up the movement animations.  This means that a lot of time is spent waiting for the game to slowly move pieces around the board.
  • There is no touch screen support.
  • In multiplayer, all controllers do exactly the same thing.  To roll, you need to press the A button.  No matter who’s turn it is, pressing A on any controller rolls the dice.

There really isn’t much reason to play this on the Switch.  It’s cheap, and it basically works… so, in a way, this is really one of the better “dirt cheap” games I’ve played on the Switch.

Ludo Mania : 4 cents on the Nintendo eShop.