I am in the middle of a game I have no rules for, and it’s giving me a panic attack. This means that when I play Puzzle de Harvest Moon, it is like being thrown into Squid Game. My old DS games do not have tutorial levels and they aren’t in their original boxes – so there are no manuals.

We complain about how slow tutorial levels can be, but now I realise how crucial they are ever since the world cast aside boxes and instruction manuals. Maybe there’s more to it, but I’ll never know, because there are no in-game instructions. They are middle-aged sledgehammers trying to crack the tiniest walnuts. And my hands feel twice as clumsy as they did back then.

It’s like using a Ferrari to mow your lawn. Stylus control is just weird in a platformer you can move too freely, compared to D-pad and buttons. Simple rainbow platform fun has given way to some horribly frustrating pseudo-platformer where you drag your guy around the screen using the stylus. Except it’s not one of those good revolutions I enjoyed hearing about at school, which gave the world agricultural independence or trains. Classic platform action just what I need. I try Rainbow Islands Revolution instead. Luckily, they don’t work, so the financial wellbeing of the video games industry remains intact, along with my legacy. I have no idea how they got in there because obviously I, Dominik Diamond, would never have anything to do with video game piracy. You could fit 50 of them on a tiny micro-SD chip.

Then I spy gold: the R4 Revolution and Acekard 2! These were special cartridges, bought from mythical, far off lands, that could play illegally downloaded copies of DS games.

Ds games cooking mama 2