Geometry Wars: Galaxies

So I — doubtless like many others — have a habit of trawling the clearance bins for discounted games. It's not a very fulfilling act, but every so very rarely, one can find a gem among the dust, debris, and detritus.

Today, for instance, I have found a copy of Geometry Wars: Galaxies for the Nintendo DS, for the princely sum of \$9.99. I'm not usually terribly fond of shmups — my predilection for mixing nostalgia and video games like some ill-concocted pharmacological cocktail notwithstanding — but Geometry Wars has been recommended to me by too many disparate sources that I've bowed to pressure and opportunity and picked up a copy.

It's not as pure, so to speak, as I'm told the original Geometry Wars is; there is a two-player mode, and something like levels in the single-player mode, and purchasable upgrades which themselves must be "leveled up" by gaining "XP". I can't say this affects my opinion of GW:G one way or another, although it'll probably affect my actual play: at some hypothetical future point I will have won the game, a thing not possible for the original — a verb not relevant to the original — so there will eventually be a sense of finality, and a day when it will be returned to its case knowing it to be the last time.

In the here and now, though: for the short time I put into playing it (as, while improved, I'm still not feeling up to focusing on a small screen for hours on end), it was in fact nifty. Notably, it's the first game I've played in several years without first reading the manual. To be as succinct and informative as possible: 1 out of 1.