Globulos Party

Why pay when you can play it for free on the web?

Posted 3 years ago By - Jay Acevedo

If you read my most recent DSiWare review, you already know how apprehensive I am about  DSiWare releases. It seems like, for every great game, five more pieces of boring shovelware pop up on the service.

And this, sadly, is the case for Globulos Party, a game that has almost everything you could ask for in a DSiWare game, except the fun.

For 500 Nintendo Points ($5), Globulos Party features colorful little blobs, the Globolus, as the playable characters. The game is simple: draw an arrow on the touch-screen pointing in the direction you want your critter to move. Once that is done, you tap on the "Go" button to propel it. The goal is to make them bounce, either on a side wall or off of another critter, and reach the objective of the selected mini-game. In Ice Hockey, one of the 20 featured mini-games, your ultimate goal will be to send one of your critters into your opponent’s goal. Its all turned-based so once you move your critter your opponent gets to move theirs and then its your turn and so on. Aside from Ice Hockey, Globulos also features versions of Tic-Tac-Toe, Snooker, Darts and Sumo  wrestling among others.

Seriously, after playing for a few  hours and testing various gametypes, none of them really caught my interest at all.  There’s no catchy music to suck you in either but the visuals and character animations, at least,  bring some nice personality to the game. The colorful presentation vies for your attention incredibly hard but the package as a whole just feels flat. I also tried the games’ multiplayer with my wife to see if playing it with another person might be more fun. The development team over at GlobZ thought well to add three different modes: not only can two players play on one handheld but you can also play against a friend wirelessly and through download play. However, while  the wife and I shared a few smiles, the fun didn’t last for long. Few DS games, whether downloadable or catridge-based, offer as many multiplayer modes as Globulos Party does.

Research on the developers led me to their website which features a FREE web-based version of the game with text-based chat and everything. Not that I’ve spent any more hours playing the Flash version but still, playing it for free and seeing that there were people actually playing the game made me ask myself why would someone would bother shelling out $5 for an almost identical version of the game on DS. Don’t get me wrong, I can see the amount of effort and love GlobZ put in to Globulos, but unless you have spare Nintendo Points to waste and nothing else to spend them on, I don’t see how I could recommend this. Now, if the game had Wi-Fi Connection support, it would have been more interesting since the web-based game offers a true online experience. It might have increased development costs, however, which would increase the price of the game and make it an even harder recommendation.

Conclusion

If the game was 200 Nintendo Points like the Arcade Basketball or the Extreme Hangman games (which are both fun and well priced by the way), I would probably recommend it because of its plethora of gameplay modes and how fun it is as a time waster game. But at five dollars, with other, more interesting games, to spend your Nintendo Points on, I just can’t.

Since there’s no demos on DSi Shop, this may be the only DSiWare game you can actually try before buying. Log to the site and picture the same thing on a much smaller screen and you’ll know what to do.