I haven’t been posting all week because I’ve been taking a much-overdue vacation. Whilst tooling through the forests of Oregon, I noted to myself that this was the first vacation out of town that wasn’t either a trade show or a Christmas break I’ve taken in something like five years. This is way too long.

I’ve always been a sucker for wacky input devices, but I’ve been so far severely disappointed with my DS, partially because some exec thought it the flagship title, Metroid: Hunters, should be an FPS you control via stylus (note to anyone working on a DS game: this really sucked). Still, I wasn’t ready to give up on it, and so I picked up two games for the DS before I hopped on the plane: WarioWare: Twisted and Kirby’s Canvas Curse.

Twisted is like the other WarioWare games, only the cartridge has a little mini-gyroscope built into it, and thus many of the little many games require you to tilt the gameboy to work, which is novel. I will note that this was completely impractical while sitting in coach on the plane. Overall, this game falls into the ‘OK’ category — oddly, the WarioWare format kind of hurt. One of the things about input devices is the degree in which the interface becomes second nature. The fact that all the games are different, and none lasts for more than 5 seconds makes it oddly hard for you to master this new gameplay paradigm. Still, I love the idea of building in the input device into the cartridge itself.

Kirby, on the other hand, is a delight to play. I bought it on a lark based on Penny Arcade’s random endorsement. It’s a 2D platformer, only Kirby is a ball, and you use the stylus to draw him ramps or walls to block his progress. Think Super Mario meets Lemmings, controlled solely by stylus and you get the idea. The number of ways the designers were able to stretch this simple paradigm is also quite impressive. It takes a little getting used to, but unlike the gyroscope, you do so very quickly. Once you do, drawing paths for the little guy is absolutely mesmerizing.

That’s not to say that the stylus has a huge future as an input device. It definitely smacks of a novelty feature, albeit one that’s done well, and I don’t see a lot of games copying Kirby’s gameplay. But if you have a DS and like old platformers, I’d advise picking it up.