This week's Nintendo Download celebrates the silver ball with not one but two games to satiate gamers' cravings for hitting metal spheres with paddles.
First up we have 101 Pinball World, a quick and dirty little game that features 101 bite-sized pinball tables across four different worlds. It sounds like it's perfect for a quick fix of single-player table tennis.
And then we have Zen Pinball 3D, the debut of Zen Studio's award-winning console and mobile pinball platform on the Nintendo 3DS, with four full-featured tables and some incredibly impressive ball physics, especially for a portable pinballer.
If you don't like pinball there's always another Carmen Sandiego math adventure or a new installment of the music-making Hip Hop King series. Me? I'm in pinball heaven. Hold my calls.
WiiWare (Wii)
Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math: The Crumbling Cathedral
Publisher: The Learning Company
Price: 600 Wii Points
Bad news, detective! There's trouble in Moscow, Russia. St Basil's Cathedral has disintegrated! All that's left is a giant pile of sand. The Chief wants ACME's best agent on this case, and that means you, detective. Get to Moscow fast and find out what's going on before any more monuments turn into giant sand castles.
Carmen Sandiego is back and only you can foil her V.I.L.E plans. Travel the globe, solve brain-twisting math puzzles, and catch the villain behind the Crumbling Cathedral.
Crack the case of the Crumbling Cathedral in single-player Story Mode. Perfect your math skills in single-player Practice Mode. Challenge your friends and family to solve math puzzles against the clock in Multiplayer Mode.
In Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math, you practice your math skills and use them to fight crime. Ideal for grades 4–5, math topics include arithmetic, logic puzzles, fractions and much more!
eShop (3DS)
Zen Pinball 3D
Publisher: Zen Studios
Price: $6.99
Zen Pinball for Nintendo 3DS brings an incredible stereoscopic 3D experience to the acclaimed video game pinball series for the first time ever. Featuring four beautifully crafted, original tables, Zen Pinball features the most advanced ball physics in a video pinball game to date, online leader boards ranking you against other players, in-game friend challenges, interactive 3D models, and more!
Features
• Earth Defense pits the player against hordes of hostile aliens as they try to take the planet by storm!
• Players will experience life as a novice sorcerer who must master the trade of summoning spectacular natural phenomena in Shaman.
• Travel back to the middle ages to the Kingdom of Camelot and become a Knight of the Round Table in Excalibur.
• Experience the unexplored jungles of Eldorado as you hunt for hidden treasures and uncover the mysteries of ancient civilization.
DSiWare (DSi / 3DS)
Hip Hop King Rytmik Edition
Publisher: Cinemax
Price: $7.99 / 800 DSi Points
Hip Hop King is an application for creating rhythmical and melodic themes and for composing whole songs. Its user interface blends the fast and well-arranged interface of classic drum machines with flexible pattern interface of popular trackers and with modern sound library. It contains more than 170 carefully selected sound samples of drums, percussions, bass, melodic instruments and gramophone scratches. With Hip Hop King you can quickly and easily create the basic building stone – an audio clip. It consists of musical notations for up to four instruments that you may transpose, select their location in the stereo field, and modify their volume, reverse, shuffle (rhythm twist) and polyphony (with extended polyphony handling), chorus/widening stereo effect and echo. You may arbitrarily combine up to 128 such clips in four tracks and create complex pieces of music. Hip Hop King is not only for playing with sounds; in the hands of a skilful musician it can become a serious musical instrument – surprisingly powerful pocket music station. For the best musical experience we recommend connecting headphones or quality speaker system. You'll become the Hip Hop King of the party in no time…
101 Pinball World
Publisher: Selectsoft
Price: $4.99 / 500 DSi Points
Get ready for fast-paced pinball action with a twist! Complete special objectives to earn fun bonuses as you shoot your ball through pipes, up ramps and around mind-blowing obstacles. Choose from 2 game modes, Quick Play and Random, and blast through over 100 fun tables on 4 exciting worlds filled with eye-popping details. Be a pinball wiz in Wizard World, go on a galactic adventure in Alien Spaceship, enjoy a spooky trip through Halloween and become a buccaneer in Pirate's Bay. Rack up enough points to top the High Scores and you'll be the pinball champ.
Features
• 101 amazing tables in 4 unique worlds
• 3 player profiles and High Scores list
• Classic pinball gameplay enhanced with beautiful graphics
• Multiple special objectives earn extra points and power-ups
• Fun bonuses include table tilt, slow ball and immunity