Short spurt gaming at its best
Portable gaming and toilets go hand-in-washed-hand: there’s no better time to get some uninterrupted gaming going than when sat atop the porcelain throne. With the DS turning five years old in Europe today, we're celebrating some of the machine's golden titles: those games that make us wish there was a way to charge the machine in the bathroom. Here's five DS titles that keep the Nintendo Life toilets occupied.
Burrowing your way to the bottom of a blocked passage may not sound like the ideal en suite entertainment, but its finely-crafted stages are just the right length for a brief pitstop, with the time attack mode enough to entertain anyone doing a long stretch. With
Mr Driller: Drill 'Til You Drop available on DSiWare in Japan, it may not be too long until you can line up more than one nugget on your DSi.
Another puzzler with the addiction factor, Picross is powder room perfection: finishing one off can take anywhere from thirty seconds to half an hour if it's a particularly big one. With
Picross 3D now available across Europe, gamers can take their defecation distraction to a third dimension.
Not all porcelain pastimes are short, one-more-go affairs. Animal Crossing: Wild World takes up your toilet time with the promise of something new always around the corner: taking AC into the WC at quarter-to the hour is a surefire way to lose twenty minutes. Sunday mornings are worst, the combination of turds 'n' turnips keeping you lavatory-locked for hours.
Although toilet roll makes rubbish paper planes, it turns out paper plane
games are ideally suited to latrine leisure, with this DSiWare download doing its bit to keep you entertained during your daily duties. Although the multiplayer Race mode that lets you and a friend race on the same machine is unlikely to see many restroom run-outs – but hey, we're open-minded about that kind of thing – the Endless mode is extremely bog-friendly and, at a measly 200 Points, almost as cheap as pinching a loaf.
Pokémon games are fiendishly difficult to put down at the best of times, but the format excels when you're perched on the can flushing out the odd Weedle or Grimer. In fact, there's so many Pokémon now that we could make filthy puns about going for a Squirtle all day long, but that would do the game a great disservice: time whizzes by when battling on the bog, whether your Pokémon uses Slash, Water Gun or, er, Egg Bomb. Just hope whoever's next doesn't use Odour Sleuth.
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My name is James Newton, and this is my website - a collection of my writings about
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