How Western game developers fail to score with Nintendo DS

For the past 25 years, the bulk of the best games have come from Japan. But after recent years in which the likes of Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and World of Warcraft have set the pace, is that true today?

For DS, certainly. We've crunched the numbers, as described in detail below, and found that Japanese DS games (let alone Nintendo-developed ones) score markedly higher than titles from the rest of the world.

The DS is, of course, a famously innovative console. And it seems that Japanese developers, who lean far less on movie licences or formulaic sequels (think how Mario is reinvented from console generation to generation) have been most able to get to grips with it.

They've been rewarded with better review scores. Who says creativity doesn't pay?

Doing the maths

Following last year's PSP versus DS number-crunching, we thought it was about time to pull on our waders and take another sticky stroll through the deep pool of Metacritic data. This time we placed a red 'n' white spotted mushroom on the end of our hook to see what Nintendo DS-related information we might catch.

We took Metacritic's entire collection of DS game review scores, all 201 of them (as of February 21st), as our sample. If you run the mean average (add up all the scores together and divide by the number of scores) you get 64 per cent as the result – the average score given to a DS game by all MetaCritic's partner sites.

Which isn't bad at all, although you have to remember that game reviewers rarely use 50 per cent as their 'average' score.

The lowest scoring game is Peter Jackson's King Kong, at 28 per cent (one reviewer suggested it was 'so bad that other developers should study it'), while the highest scorer is Mario Kart DS, with 91 per cent. In case you're wondering, there are three games that fall exactly on the 'average' mark of 64 per cent: Worms: Open Warfare, Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005.

Looking at the numbers a bit more shows that some 40 titles (20 per cent of all DS games) are either published or developed by Nintendo.

Casting the net a little wider finds that 105 releases (over 50 per cent of all DS games) originate from Japan, or 66 (33 per cent) if you remove the Nintendo games. The Nintendo titles average a 77 per cent score (that's 20 per cent above average), the Japanese games 63 per cent (pretty much bang on the average) – and the rest of the world brings up the rear at 58 per cent (10 per cent below average).

This is where things get really interesting – when you realise that the highest-scoring non-Japanese DS game is Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, in 16th position with (a very respectable) 84 per cent. We then have another Activision title, Ultimate Spiderman, in 34th place, and then another Tony Hawk's title, Downhill Jam, in 40th.

On the whole, the bulk of the top 100 places – 74 of them – are from Japan, while the country is responsible for just 32 of the bottom 101 places.

Made in Japan

It is always a given that without Nintendo's support its consoles would fall unceremoniously on their behinds. In fact, the main point of buying a Nintendo console is to play its games, something that Sony and Microsoft have never been able to claim. However, what these numbers prove is that without support from Japanese publishers and developers, too, the Nintendo DS would be a lot worse off than it is today.

That is, of course, to look at the DS in isolation, and to some degree the argument would hold strong, too, for both PSP and PlayStation, which have also benefited from key Japanese support. (It also suggests why Microsoft's Xboxes have struggled).

As an aside, we've invented a new statistical tool: The Pocket Gamer Mediocrity Ratio. Okay, it's not very scientific, but it does kind of illustrate how large the contingent of below-average non-Japanese games there are on DS.

If you divide the average score for each group by the number of games released, Nintendo scores at Mediocrity Ratio of 0.52, Japanese (non-Nintendo) games score 1.05, and 'rest of the world' scores 1.65.

Which is another way of showing how there are loads of below-average DS games coming out of the West – often TV or movie licences, or low-quality reworkings of stale genres.

Good times will continue for DS

And what of the future? Can we expect that the average quality of DS games is going to rise even higher over the next couple of years?

First off, running the same average on all GBA game review scores (there's 558 of them) results in a mean average 67 per cent. So either GBA games were better, or the reviewers are tougher these days, or the best is yet to come. The answer is probably some combination of the three. GameCube's 500 reviews also average slightly better at 70 per cent.

But both GameCube and GBA (looking at reviews from 2001 to 2006) show a drop in average review score of between 3 and 6 per cent from year one to year two (which is understandable, once the launch hype has worn-off), and then remarkably stable average review scores in years three to six.

The average score never improves, so it seems unlikely that the DS's average will rise further, either. Looking on the bright side, that means DS owners have another two or three years of decent releases to look forward to – albeit in decreasing numbers.

We're going to wrap things up with a prediction for 2007's Metacritic DS reviews: there will be roughly 85 of them, and of those, approximately 15 will score an average of 80 per cent or above.

Howzat for a guesstimate? See you in January 2008 to find out whether we were right! In the meantime, stay tuned to our dedicated DS section to follow the year as it happens.