Pogo Island connects DS with the Web
Five casual games plus extra mini-games and an Internet hook-up
After the success of Nintendogs, the Brain Training games, and 42 All-Time Classics, DS must seem an increasingly tempting proposition for companies looking to crossover their casual games onto console.
And sure enough, Electronic Arts – never slow to spot an opportunity – is to bring a selection of games from its Pogo.com website onto DS in Pogo Island.
The package will consists of five games, plus some extra goodies.
(Deep breath!) Phlinx is a version of Puzzle Bobble, where you fire a sequence of coloured balls from your cannon into a screen full of coloured balls to create groups of three or more of the same colour. Poppit! is a version of casual classic Bejeweled, which has you matching balloons instead of the latter's gems. Squelchies sees you creating chains of three or more sea creatures of the same colour as they drop down from the top of the screen, while Tri-Peaks Solitaire is a jazzed up version of the card game Solitaire. Finally, Word Whomp is a version of Boogle, where you have to spell as many words as possible from the selection in front of you within a certain timeframe.
Pretty simple puzzle games, then, but one nice trick, at least for Pogo.com subscribers, is that Pogo Island will also let you log into your account (via the DS' wi-fi), so you can upload any tokens you win. You'll also be able to use the wi-fi to go multiplayer, as well as beaming friends a demo version of Poppit!. (That's EA's exclamation mark, you'll note…)
Rounding out the extras, four mini-games are included to encourage you to play through the Adventure mode, as opposed to just diving into quickplay.
Pogo Island will be released in the US in March, with a European version expected in the summer.
