I spent part of the weekend up at the family cabin in the Colorado mountains. It s a majestic place, but sadly lacking in any game consoles. Fortunately, I had my DS and PSP with me, so I didn t have to spend much time looking out at the great expanse of deer-filled, untouched woods that make up the cabin s backyard. I played Polarium, Retro Atari Classics and Rayman for the DS, MLB for the PSP and Mario Party Advance for the GBA. (Whew, that s a lot of acronyms.)

Polarium
I really like this DS puzzler. The play mechanics are very basic, which means you spend less time figuring out how to play and more time playing. The game s two major modes are challenge and puzzle. In challenge you have to clear rows of black and white bricks before you screen fills up. To clear a row, you have to get the entire row to be all black or all white. To switch colors you just trace your stylus along the bricks. It sounds too simple to be fun, but it isn t. Although I enjoyed this mode I found the utter lack of any sort of graphic or audio panache, very off putting and the game began to wear on me after awhile. The puzzle mode, which gives you an increasingly comples series of assorted bricks that you have to clear in one swipe of your stylus, was much more to my liking. When you get up into the 20s and 30s (There are 100 puzzles includes.) you really have to stop and ponder how to solve the puzzle. It s quite the brainteaser. Although I think Polarium is a fantastic game, it really could have been much better. It s almost as if the game s excellent mechanics were perfected and the developers just stopped designing. If you could add the sort of aural and visual delights included Lumines, Polarium would be a showstopper.

Retro Atari Classics
I had such high hopes for this collection of Atari retro games reworked by street artists. I was picturing Space Invaders with the splash and music of Lumines, Bustout with graffiti flair and maybe some sort of Centipede where the protagonist s body segments were made up of a collection of famous jabbering heads. What I got was recycled Atari games with an occasional splash of color and lackluster music. To top it off this collection of ten classics does the unthinkable and reworks the original games in ways that are totally unnecessary and quite annoying. First, every game can now be controlled with the touchscreen, which works well in some games (Missle Command) and horribly in others (Tempest). The game also seems to have messed with the games innards. For instance in Missle Command you don t have to worry about deciding where missles fire from, that s now done automatically. Other games see similar simplifications. No matter how much you want to, don t buy this game.

Rayman
Man, what a disappointment. Let, me start by saying how much I hate (With a few exceptions.) straight ports of old games to a new system. Rayman DS is a hinky recreate of the N64 s Rayman 2: The Great Escape. The graphics have certainly improved this time around, Ubisoft really didn t bother to put the DS s unique abilities to use at all. You can use your stylus to move Rayman if you prefer, but doing this makes button pushing nearly impossible. So, what you end up with is a port of an old N64 title with little reason to put it on the DS. The entire touchscreen of the game is taken up with a little direction graphic used for touch movement and a health bar. What a waste, and I m not just talking about the misuse of the touchscreen.

MLB
In real life I pretty much avoid watching all profession sports, so I m always surprised when I come across a sports video game that I really like. The Playstation Portable s MLB fits nicely into that category. While a little light on the modes you can play, what it does do it does well. MLB comes only with three modes: Quickplay, Season and Online. While that can be a bit offputting initially, the three modes are almost as robust as their PS2 equivalents. You can track stats, choose different difficulty levels for batting and pitching and even mess around with your line-up in Season mode. The online mode is relatively lag free, thought it doesn t track player stats, a real disappointment. I was really blown away at how crisp the graphics were in the game and surprised to hear a fairly in-depth play-by-play. Even if you re not really into sports, MLB is a fun game to play and the depth of play and realistic graphics will likely please even hardcore baseball fans.

Mario Party Advance
I was surprised to find out that the story mode of Mario Party Advance is actually a single player game. It s a little weird going through the story, which is played out on a Mario Party reminiscent board, on your own. That doesn t mean it wasn t fun, just really, really, really perplexing. While it s a blast to play, the single player story mode ends up feeling like a way to unlock the game s huge selection of mini-games and gadgets. (Thoughfully misspelled as gaddgets, to make the bad spellers among us feel superior.) The mini-games are a strange mash-up of single player games, multi-player games that either divvy up the buttons on the GBA to different players or makes you take turns and multiplayer games that require multiple GBA. I found the game, while mostly enjoyable, to be poorly thought-out and oddly constructed.

Send an email to the author of this post at editor@kotaku.com.