31. Slide Adventure MAGKID [Nintendo DS]Or technically, スライドアドベンチャー マグキッド. Slide Adventure MAGKID was a Japanese-only release by Nintendo for the DS. And I can find so little information about this game in English that I almost wonder whether I'm the first person to actually beat it and write about it in English.
I had been curious about this game for a while, for one big reason. It comes bundled with its own unique accessory: the Slide Controller. Effectively: it's an optical mouse for your DS. No, really. You plug it into the GBA slot on your DS Lite (and I presume original DS), and then you slide your system around on a table to play the game. Slide the system to slide around your character. And yes, Nintendo being Nintendo: Slide Adventure MAGKID was the only game to ever support the Slide Controller as far as I'm aware.
I have a big soft spot for weird obscure gaming accessories, so I wanted to give this game a proper go. Around fourty levels and a credits sequence later, I can say that the story of the weird accessory is more fun than the full game itself. Since there is so little known about this game in English, I'm gonna go more in-depth. If anyone's gonna do it anywhere, it might as well be me doing it here.
The story is...well I have no clue because I can't read Japanese. You're a magnet moving around a family's house, and from what I can gather I'm assuming you're trying to help them out? I'm not sure. Thankfully, the game is more than intuitive enough to figure out without needing to understand any of the text on screen.
You slide your system to move Magkid around. Your goal in the regular levels is to form a certain chain and get to the end location before time runs out. The game has many different enemy types. If you knock one out, you can connect to it. Connecting multiple enemies will form a chain. Every level will give you a specific chain of enemies you have to make. So you go around the house, find the enemies you need, knock them out and go get the next ones. Connecting to an enemy will also give you that enemy's ability. Fire enemies let you shoot fire, water enemies let you shoot bubbles, et cetera. Different enemies need to be taken out in different ways, so you need to keep going around to get the enemy you need to take out the enemy you actually need. Every few levels things get mixed up with a boss fight or a challenge level (defeat all the enemies within the time limit-sorta ordeals). But the controls and actions remain exactly the same.
The house is divided up into multiple areas, which you traverse between using objects in the areas. For example, in the son's room on the floor, if you get in the pencil case, you'll be moved to his desk. But if you get into the comic book, you'll be taken to the table in the living room. From there, get on the glasses case to be taken to dad's desk, et cetera. You'll be hopping back and forth between locations constantly, so you're kind of forced to map out what object goes where and what path you took so you can get back. It gave me a bit of a headache earlier on. I found that writing some of the steps down as I went helped a little bit.
When first trying it out, I thought it was fun enough. I mainly enjoyed the novelty of using this weird obscure accessory. But once that wore off and you're familiar with the concept, the game starts to drag. If I hadn't already decided that I wanted to beat this game, I'm not sure I would've stuck with it.
The controls are a major part of the experience here. The Slide Controller works as well as you'd expect an optical computer mouse to work. You slide it around to move, you quickly jerk it to the side to hit an enemy and knock it out, you use the face buttons to attack and activate travel points, and the shoulder buttons to strafe. For basic moving around, it works fine enough. The problems come in the later levels. There are enemies that can attack you quickly, sometimes from off-screen, and seriously hinder your progress if they hit you. Or there will be so much going on that you need to make quick and sharp movements. The problem is that the Slide Controller is not accurate enough to handle those split-second actions, and it will cause you some problems. What makes this significantly worse is that jerking in a direction quickly is also how you disconnect your chain, scattering what you had around you. You will find yourself losing enemies when you don't want to, and more often struggling to get rid of them when you do need to do so. It's finicky, and especially in the later levels it does become a hindrance. Maybe things are different on different surfaces, but you need a good bit of space and I kinda had to make do with the table I have (which did mostly work fine). (Also, the Slide Controller has built-in rumble. Just thought I'd mention that.)
Moreover, I will fully admit I was not playing this at a desk when I really should've, so my posture was not great, but even then I think it would've given me a backache either way. Since Magkid is on the bottom screen, you kind of have to lean over the system to play. It's not comfortable for long play sessions.
The biggest problem for me is that as the game progressed, it started to become a chore. And a headache-inducing one at that. Simply because there are way too many steps that the game expects you to do. Just one example:
A later level may prompt you to get a wind enemy, two dust enemies and two pumpkin enemies, and it starts you on the son's desk. All right, I know the pumpkins are on the garden table. So I use the pencil case to get to the floor, the ABC-book that's there to get to the daughter's room, then the bag of candy to get to the dining room table and then the gardening book to get to the garden. But along the way, I find the dust enemies. To knock those out, I need the fire enemies. Those are in the kitchen. But to knock
those out, I need a water enemy, which is in the laundry room. So I have to go back via all those objects to the son's room, get into the paper bag to go to the laundry room, get the water enemy, but oh no, it's blocked by bubbles, which I need a bug enemy to pop. So I go back one step, get a bug enemy, go back, get the water enemy. Then...what was I doing again? Oh yeah, fire enemy, for the dust enemy I need. So I go back to the boy's room, use the book and bag of candy to get to the table again, then get inside the oven mitt to get to the kitchen counter, knock out the fire enemy (while avoiding the enemy that can destroy my water enemy and force me to start allover!), and add the fire enemy to my chain. Then I have to remember where the dust enemies were again, try to remember what crossing paths of objects I took so that I can take it in reverse to get back to them, knock off my chain, reconnect them in the right order so fire is in the front, knock out the dust enemies, and finally I can add them to my chain.
And after all that, I still have three more enemies to go.
Plus I still need to find the endpoint that I have to get to once I have everything, and remember how to get
there if I stumble across it early. And if I lose one of the enemies I need along the way because a different enemy destroyed it, I can repeat the process for that one allover. It's a freaking chore. In the earlier levels it's fine because your range is limited, but later on, trying to remember where everything is, what leads to where, what step you were taking to complete which step of which step, it's draining.
I beat this game simply because I liked the novelty of being able to say "I beat this Japanese-only DS game that uses this weird mouse accessory and I am possibly the first person to beat it and post about it in English". But in terms of gameplay, it was tiring. Every time I started it up and beat a level, I then didn't really wanna do another one after that. It's a charming little concept, but definitely not one for long play sessions, and one that I think majorly outstays its welcome.
Overall, as a collector and weird accessories-fan, I'm glad to have this on my shelf. And I do like that I can say I beat it. The Slide Controller is also a fun novelty to show off (people at my local gamerspace were certainly intrigued). But as a game, I would not say it's worth going out of your way to get.
But at least there's now an English post describing the game a bit more in-depth somewhere online
Edit: I stand corrected. YouTuber SquallSnake has a good video on this game. Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_YwvjDHuh0
