My ire is with the game developers more so than Sony or Nintendo, because they are only responsible for providing the tools. It's the developer that overuses them or uses them in situations where they are not needed. It's exactly this problem that is my biggest issue with Eragon, despite it being a halfway decent game.

Eragon on the DS, unlike the PSP version thankfully, has little to do with flying around the dragon Saphira. In this game you play the role of Eragon and advance through the story with a degree of cohesiveness that's lost in the PSP version. Now I love a good story game, even if I know how it ends, and I love a good third person, shoot ‘em up, hack and slash combo game. I especially love the kind of game when you can level up, learn new abilities and advance the character in the game. Well, that's exactly what Eragon on the DS is.

There were a few detractors, like the poor 3D engine quality but nothing to really get up in a huff over. There were even some nice features, like the ability to see the “oh so” crucial map on the bottom screen while you are running around on the top screen.

But it wasn't any of these things that really frustrated me. It was the concept alluded to before of using the system's capabilities just for the sake of using them.

Examples of good usage include displaying the map, accessing the game's help system or menus for saving and loading a game. Inventory screens are great for the second screen. I'd even consider it useful for selecting inventory items or changing equipment without having to replace the game screen or dedicate buttons to the task. You could argue that some of these features add only marginal value, and I'd agree except with the map. I really did love playing the game with the map up at all times.

What really irritated the piss out of me did not have to do with any of these improvements. I consider the previous examples to be legitimate, useful features. These are not gimmicks to me. Unfortunately, Eragon has more than a few poor applications of the touch pad. There are three such applications in Eragon. The first two have to do with the built in DS shape recognition software.

Let's say that in the middle of a heated battle, you are fighting 3 Urgals at the same time and they get a couple of lucky shots off. Your health is low, but lucky you, you found a plant along the way that has the power to heal you. You go to use it, by taking your hand off the buttons, grabbing the stylus and attempting to draw the shape that corresponds to the kind of plant in your inventory. Oh wait, in the shuffle to change input devices, you got clobbered in the head and died. I can't see any reason to employ the shape-drawing concept here. It just gets in the way, it was not more fun to do it that way, it was just a bad idea. I'll admit that after playing the game, I overcame the handicap of having to switch to the stylus to draw the symbol of a plant, but I don't feel that I should have had to.

The second one also has to do with drawing pointless shapes. This one severely irritated yours truly. At certain points in the story, you converse with the dragon Saphira using your Jedi mind tricks. This would have been easy enough to convey with thought bubbles and a button to advance the text. Instead, the game requires you to draw shapes within a set time frame in order to advance the dialog. The game even breaks the dialog into partial words, which for a writer, is even more annoying than having to literally “draw” the dialog out of the game.

Imagine if you lac

ked all of the let

ters needed to m

ake a complete tho

ught.

Now imagine if you had to draw a shape in between each fragment in order to get the whole conversation. Irritating to no end in my experience. Early in the game it was annoying because you had to draw triangles or L shapes and you had ample time to do so. Towards the end of the game, I had to laugh out loud at the futility of it all when in order to proceed, I was asked to draw complex shapes like S curves or several sided irregular polygons each drawn randomly in a fraction of a second. It took me literally 12 tries to draw the last symbol and by the time I had, I was so surprised that I forgot what the dialog had said and I forgot to read the last part so for my effort I had no idea what was said.

The one place where I really did like the drawing mechanic was when casting spells. You draw the symbol of the spell and an icon pops up on the touch screen. You can push the icon back and forth on the screen and it'll move under its own inertia, but to use the spell you have to flick the icon towards the target. It gives you the effect of drawing the spell in the air and then hurtling the resulting lightning bolt at your target. The learning curve was even reasonable, because it felt like you were learning how to use magic and not that it was an inherent ability.

The third issue has to do with the camera controls, or lack thereof. This use of the touch screen is just plain awful. In the bottom right hand corner of the touch screen is a little tiny donut shaped icon. This icon is basically the missing right analog stick. But boy is it broken.

For any of you that have Ipods, the input works similar to the Ipod's menu selection. You rotate the stylus around the ring and it rotates the camera left or right. The entire function is completely unusable in combat, since you'd have to let go of the buttons and grab the stylus. Not to mention the fact that you have to make two complete revolutions on the touch pad to achieve one revolution in the game. And to top it all off, to me it was completely backwards. If you rotated the donut clockwise, Eragon would rotate counterclockwise. I tried using it for a time and quickly abandoned the function entirely. They did fortunately give you a camera lock button that you can use to strafe around a single target.

My opinions may sound harsh, and some aspects of the game really did irritate me, but I have to admit that I got used to the game. I even finished it. This was partly because I learned how to compensate for the game's shortcomings but it was largely due to the fact that it's a lot of fun. Whenever I got low on health, I'd run away someplace safe so I could dial in an Herb to gain back my health. I got really good at locking on to enemies and strafing around them and I suffered through the shape drawing whenever it came up. After getting past these annoying negatives I had a decent amount of fun playing it. I can't really say how it stacks up against all other DS games, but I can say that I enjoyed it.