Because it’s rather early in the semester I’ve had a lot of downtime in between my classes thus far. I’ve been using this time wisely and completing assignments, but I’ve also been bringing my 3DS. This has given me a great opportunity to play a DS game that I’ve had for a long time but never tried: Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword.

I’m surprised how well Team Ninja was able to translate the fast-pace action gameplay of the series to a touch screen. I slash enemies with my stylus and Ryu will follow suit. Combat isn’t as refined as I what I imagine when I hear people describe the series under former head honcho Tomonobu Itagaki, but it’s very fun and surprisingly deep.

My friend and I continued playing Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure. Even though we’re only a couple of hours into it, it’s really tough. We only completed two stages and those two were mind boggling. They both took place in a snowy environment. All stages revolve around getting treasure and the first tasked us with getting treasure while avoiding a Roomba-like robot who automatically cleaned the stage of our footprints every ten or so seconds. He’d end the stage if he caught us too, but we learned that shaking trees would drop snow on our most recent footprints thereby obscuring us from the sightless cleaner. The second stage was a boss battle in which we reflected a laser through a field of increasingly fewer mirrors. It was tough and all told we spent an hour and half completing these two stages.

I of course continued to play Skyrim.