Big Bang Mini (Nintendo DS)

I've played a couple of fireworks-related games in the past: Fantavision (which I liked), and Boom Boom Rocket (which I didn't, although to be fair, I only played the demo which was far too hard).

Big Bang Mini promised to be different, though... in a spectacularly obvious move, you get to use fireworks to blow stuff up. Yes, Big Bang Mini is a shoot 'em up. And that's good! I haven't played one in a while, and I haven't played a good one in even longer. So it was about time I blasted some stuff.

I don't know if the game's quite like I expected it to be, though. The fireworks are maybe not used to their full explosive potential. But on the other hand, the game mechanic forces you to be more accurate with your shooting. Every time you miss your shot, the firweork explodes, and the debris falls back down. And being debris from fireworks, they'll cause you damage if they hit you.


Oooh, it's like Chinese New Year.

Of course, this being a DS game, you use the stylus to fling your fireworks skywards. It takes a while to get used to this... you think you're moving your stylus in the right direction, only to be surprised to see it go the other way. It's all your own fault when that happens, though! Strangely, you ship is only on the screen as something to be hit. It doesn't fire the fireworks, it's just there for you to drag around out of harm's way.

It's fun enough, if not quite as frantic as I'd hoped for. And there are plenty of stages to unlock and play. The biggest disappointment to me is that there's no scoring, just the completion of stages. And for a shoot 'em up, that's pretty close to unacceptable. It takes the gloss of a decent little game, for me, but it can be found cheap enough to make it more than worthwhile.