After a couple of recent updates I’ve decided I’m going to have to add some common games industry words to the custom dictionary for Google toolbar’s spellchecker. Not too long ago I remember a discussion on the Chaos Engine about the correct hyphenation for these terms (and if they should be hyphenated at all), and being a bit lazy I thought I could get an update out of it, instead of just looking at that (and besides, I seem to remember no solid answers being arrived at).

Anyway, I’m currently thinking the following:

• Gameplay, not game-play or game play because they both look funny (hey I’m not saying this is a scientific study).
• Cut-scene instead of cutscene. Though I’m not too sure about this one, both look kind of right to me.
• Mini-game. If I’m remembering my English language teacher correctly, this is right because the ‘mini’ is a prefix.

Is there any kind of industry standard for these? It’s one of those things that you sometimes stumble across quite by accident that make you realise just how young the industry is, and how much more we have to do.

In a strange turn of events, I’ve recently been playing a few new DS games. I say ‘strange’ because, unlike apparently the entire rest of the world, I’ve had a very small DS software collection until about two weeks ago.

I only bought one for Advance Wars, you see, and picked up a couple of other interesting-looking titles along with it – Phoenix Wright (the first one), and Trauma Centre, both of which left me a bit cold if I’m being honest. Phoenix Wright because even in the tutorial I found it annoyingly linear, and Trauma Centre demanded too much skill from me in too short an amount of time. And not much else in the DS’s library has appealed to me since then (except for Hotel Dusk a few months back).

But in the last month I’ve bought three new DS games, effectively doubling my collection. I shall list them now, for your reading pleasure.

Theme Park, which is a port of the old game Theme Park (remarkable, I know, but I’m sure that no matter how much intelligence I hope my readership has, someone won’t have realised). The interface has been nicely ported, apart from one thing – to select things in some menus you have to draw ticks or circles. Why do people keep doing this? Just because it’s a DS game it doesn’t mean you have to shoe-horn in some retarded gesture system to make it worthwhile – the two screens and touch screen are fine enhancements to the interface all by themselves. I swear, some day someone will release a game where you select options on the main menu by blowing on the microphone.

Slitherlink came highly recommended by Eurogamer. If, like me, you have a sordid past filled with easy addiction to grid-and-numbers puzzles like soduko, minesweeper, and picross, this will be an entirely new form of electronic heroin. There’s not a lot more to be said about it really. The menus are utterly incomprehensible to me, but by experimenting before I’d invested too much time into my save game I managed to work out what most of the buttons do.

Puzzle Quest was a game I’d heard mentioned all over the place on the internet – it seems to be one of those occasional titles that gets picked up on as something of a darling to the hardcore gamer wannabe elite. Except this turned out to be very good, and not something deeply average but arty looking. There’s a PC demo kicking around somewhere and after a quick play I knew I’d have to buy it. It’s a fairly basic fantasy RPG but instead of a tiresome turn-and-stats based combat system you play a Bejewelled clone against the monsters. Its design genius also extends to you not losing any progress if you lose a fight, and in fact you keep the gold and experience gained during that scrap, so you’re still progressing, even when you fail.

So there you have it – a brief round-up of some DS games I’ve been playing. This isn’t just an Xbox fansite after all, see?