Imagine Ballet (I’m saying it every time until you try it. The Imagine series are usually misses. But when Ubisoft took in some Japanese titles and repackaged them for American audiences?? My 6 year old mind was blown! Now I’m 20 and I have all the Otome games! With 3 different characters to play with their own personality and story. Where they are competing one another to become the most famous ballet dancer.
Lego Battles is one I don't see talked about much. It's a simple RTS using many of the Lego themes from the 2000's. I played the bejeezus out of my cartridge when I was younger, one of the first games I beat multiple times. It's not the best today, but I certainly had a lot of fun with it! It even gives you red bricks for cheats, like the mainline Lego games!
IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THAT ZUBO GAME FOR YEARS?? LIKE LEGIT OVER TEN YEARS- I THOUGHT IT WAS A FEVER DREAM BECAUSE IT HAS NO PRESENCE ONLINE AS I GREW UP IM SO GLAD YOU COVERED IT
there was a nintendo focused magazine here in the Uk that covered Zubo before it came out, they made a pretty big deal about the game iirc, like 3 pages dedicated to it. played it a ton once it came out, got all the characters to max level then sort of just moved on.
I've mainly played the 3ds style savvys but definitely an underrated game that usually gets seen as a bad just for girls game when its actually a nice business simulator with dress up aspects.
Not exactly shovelware, but Princess Debut was one of the weirdest DS games, because it was it Osu/Elite Beat Agents-like with only public domain classical music, where the MC gets isekai'd to a fantasy land. It was part otome, and had one character that was almost impossible to romance. A truly fascinating game. Also, the game Sprung haunts me to this day.
Sprung was so unironically funny tho. I loved pepper spraying the characters or dousing them in gasoline even if they always lead to a bad ending. Like how in one of them, the girl you can pepper spray takes your pepper spray to attack you back, and it leads to the bad ending where they both get sent to a mental asylum after pepper spraying each other non stop.
if you want a good style/dress up game, PLEASE play style savvy! it gets seen a lot as "just a girl game" but it has a lot of charm and actually teaches you how to style clothing. it's pretty great! they're mainly on 3ds but if I'm not mistaken there's one on the DS
YEAH! The OG first game is on DS, and it’s so special!! I don’t have the same nostalgia for the 3DS follow ups as I do for the original, but it’s still the strongest fashion game series I can think of (fashion dreamer was disappointing to me personally, but I guess when I pay $60 of my own dollars versus… emulating the others that was bound to happen. IDK if this is silly of me to think but a game new on the switch shouldn’t have any gender locked clothing. In the original Men weren’t even real except Dominic and Godfrey so maybe I’m being too picky but I guess I expected better from the most modern version
I'd define shovelware as "games more likely to be sold at a general store than at an actual game store", at least when talking about physical releases.
I love this approach so much more than people dunking on Ninjabread Man for the millionth time. Yeah its wild seeing what kind of broken messes got released back in the day, but I love highlighting odd little gems so much more. I played a lot of weird forgotten DS games, but the one I remember the most (despite never finishing it) was My World My Way. Its a jrpg where you play as an egotistical princess who literally changes the environment around her to suit her adventure by pure willpower. Also it was made by Atlus, the people behind the Persona games. Oh! Atelier Annie is really good too! A more simplified version of the Atelier series where you play as an alchemist competing with several other alchemists to build up an island. Really cute and fun, so long as you can enjoy management-type games?
I love looking into obscure shovelware games like these but it's rare to see them presented in a positive light, It's a refreshing take and makes me want to see if there's any more hidden gems out there
My fave weird obscure ds game is Princess debut. An anime styled dancing game where a princess from a kingdom in your closet busts in and asks you to attend a ball for her where she has to pick someone and dance with them. Somehow you’re convinced to go and get to have a mini dating sim with a dancing mini game using the touch screen to guide the dance along. Like all the characters are simple but good with a hidden extra love interest and it’s stuck in the back of my brain rent free lol
Holy shit Imagine Fashion jumpscare. That was one of my first ds games. To this day I remain fascinated that it had licensed music that you could listen to in full??? Truly *the* girl game of all time.
I think games like Balan Wonderworld get called shovelware because even though they definitely weren’t released to be that they were flops and now you’ll probably find them for cheap.
I was the kind of kid that had the entire neighbourhood play yugioh and so i obviously had to have all the ds games. To this day i will never forget that boss rush on world championship 2009 and how it took us 3 kids to theorize a deck build that could work to beat that thing. A year later i got into competitive yugioh and found out just how bad i was. That was also the first time i got scammed pretty hard. To be fair i had no business going on a 30 min train ride to the capital to play yugioh in a shady backstreet with young adult drug dealers who would put weed, coke, and other things into their card folders as a hidden stash when i myself was like 11 at the time
I actually love seeing someone talk about Barbie and the Three Musketeers. Never watched the movie but I had the wii game as a kid (essentially the same game with better graphics) and recently went back and played it. It's still fun in my opinion, even if the voice lines are annoying. Definitely better than what I expected though.
I was absolutely _obsessed_ with the movie and Wii game as a kid lmao, I think I even 100%d it by getting all the dresses. Hearing the music in the video sent me back in time. Now I wanna check if I still have it.
Weird, I remember Zubo having a lot of commercials and stuff when it was coming out. Anyways, I'm not surprised that Yu-Gi-Oh World Championships 2009 has what sounds like a short story, since a majority of these games are pretty much made for the sole purpose of being used for tournament events, with the single player content mainly being challenge duels and (if they even have one) a barebones plot to justify doing duels with a bunch of the characters. It seems like they tried to actually do more involved plots with the 5Ds WC games, but I think they also still remembered "oh yeah, this is still just a game made for competitions", so they tried to not do that much with the plots. The only DS Yu-Gi-Oh game that I played for a little bit and then stopped a year or so ago was Nightmare Troubadour, a game I found out about through TV Tropes that sounds both pretty interesting because of the things it does, but I also stopped because I was scared to keep playing because of those mechanics and also because it's one of those Yu-Gi-Oh games that people put up there as being pretty dang hard. Also the JP/NA version has a major bug that makes it so you can't do a specific trade in the game, which led me to playing the EU version on the emulator.
I think Nightmare Troubadour basically being a Goat Format game iirc might also be a boon in its favour. Thought I haven't played it yet and mostly played WC2011.
@@ArbitraryOutcome wc 2011 is probably the best of the bunch but damn can it be hard it's definitely made for players who know the game well i played it and beat it as a kid myself I recently decided to do a full new game playthrough only i turned off the forbidden limited list and if made things alot more manageable as i could come at the opponent's i faced with every card from every pack i opened i think I'm on chapter 3 or 4 right now with a warrior beat down deck It's actually a pretty satisfying feeling being able to use everything i get It helps that game also has a tool to analyze your deck to tell you how good it is and what you could to improve it I've noticed you unlock cards alot faster than in the other two games I was unlocking structure decks pretty quickly which let me splurge whenever I had enough points to get 40 guaranteed cards all at once including some staples. It's been a pretty fun time.
2:51 PREY THE STARS, OH MY GOD. I bought the game once as a kid because I thought it was something different but I was curious. One of my favorite, most nostalgic experiences ever. Each stage has a different gimmick, the themes are catchy, and its gameplay is extremely fun. I adore this game and i am so so glad someone is talking about it.
I played the 2010 Yugioh DS game recently and it sounds like that one had a much better sense of balance to it, in terms of being able to gradually build up a competent deck by the time your opponents are getting serious and without really needing to look up how to unlock even more card packs. I was able to muddle through most of the game with a hodge-podge deck that focused on getting level 3 monsters out to synchro into level 6 boss monsters, and ended the game with a Moon and Sun Dragon deck that most NPC opponents just couldn't really deal with.
Yeah they are not really hard to beat, in the gameplay of the vid he hard misplayed with Lightsworn for example tribute Lumina for Celestia instead of Wolf and use Lumina to discard Necro Guardna and revive lvl 4 or lower Lightsworn 😅
Dude, you made me cry in nostalgia. I lacked commitment to focus on one game when I was a kid, so played almost every games in NDS back in the day. I've surprisingly played most if not all of these "obscure" games you showed, and seeing them again fills me with a lot of emotions that I can't describe. It's like scouring through sweet memories from early stages of my life that has been locked somewhere in my brain. These are some other shovelware/underrated games that I played back then: - Eco Creatures: Save the Forest - The Legend of Starfy and Stapi no Densetsu 4 - Ragnarok DS - Dinosaur King DS - Yugioh: Nightmare Troubadour - Frogger Helmet Chaos and My Frogger Toy Trial - Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs DS - Tamagotchi Connection 1 2 3 - UP the game DS - Bolt DS - Dino Master DS: Dig Discover Duel - Wacky Racers - Tom and Jerry Tales
Im so sorry that you had to deal with World Championship 2009. Compared to both 2010 and 2011, 2009 gives the yugioh 5d games a massive rocky start for the DS. For what the game gives you, you are probably going to be stuck using the starter deck that will have little to absolutely garbage compared to your opponents. The actual only way to have a fair match would be using the Lightsworn deck since that was one of the meta archtypes around that time, especially for what is meant to be the final boss of 2009. I hope you can have a better time with the other two games in the future!
Dragon Booster? I remember that cartoon. It was out well into my adulthood but I would still sit down and watch it when it was on. It had this really weird low framerate. It reminded me of Tron Uprising.
good to know zubo wasn’t just a memory limited to my childhood!! along w pokemon soulsilver it was one of the first ds games i ever owned, played through it to completion quite recently and it was a decent time
Dragon Booster is based on this old cartoon I think from the early 2000s. It came out along with the art style kind of matching up with storm hawks in a way. I never watched dragon booster but I know it's a game based on a show.
Man I remember that beyblade game, there was the bakugan battle brawlers game too, once you get to 3ds I recommend LBX: little Battlers experience, it was like Gundam designed for kids but the model kits were actually really great, game was quite fun too if I recall
Playmobil Pirates was probably my favourite childhood “shovelware” game, I have a core memory of spending hours sinking enemy ships for gold just so I could upgrade mine only for it to sink in a battle with a sea dragon 5 mins later. Speaking of dragons, Dragon Booster man I was obsessed with that show as a kid. When first played that game I remember being disappointed that it was just racing, no transforming into the gold dragon or fighting bad guys as the booster. The game also didnt have any of the charm of the show besides some fitting music, some dialogue between characters would’ve been nice to replicate the chemistry of the show, but probs wasn’t in the budget
DRAGON BOOSTER??? you're telling me I didn't hallucinate this TV series? Oh my god I think it's the first thing related to that series that I've seen since first watching it on TV more than a decade ago what the hell
You don't even know how many years I've been looking for this game Zubo. It was one of those things that was right on the tip of my tongue but could never remember. I had saved up my 6 bucks like $10 bucks some years ago and found this at GameStop when they still sold games lol Thank you for this video lol
Barbie and the three musketeers was one of my favorite ds games!! I played it so much, the little cat switch mechanic was really fun and the sprites look good too
Thinking back to my childhood, I had this cool DSi XL with an R4 card filled with lots of games. Some of those games on there were weird and different for the Nintendo DS - stuff I'd never heard of. A couple caught my attention, but most were honestly pretty dull.
holy SHIT prey the stars was a game that existed. literally only remember ever hearing about it through a nintendo power magazine i read from my elementary school library on lunch break, and then never again. insane. really cute character design though for real for real........ oh, to be a bakugan with a full mental health metre........
OH. MY. GOD. I've been searching for the Zubo game for almost 10 years now. I had a memory of playing a silly RPG for the DS and i remember everything, the stetic, the characters... But i did NOT remember the name, and i swear i've been searching everywhere. I even posted on the tip of my tongue reddit but no one could answer me correctly. I'm so. SO glad i was able to find it in such an interesting video. Thanks for your content boss. Really, i'm so happy lmfao (Also, sorryn for my bad English, i'm way too excited right now)
I got low-key mocked for not being able to play or beat stardust Yu-Gi-Oh game Or games like that because it requires you to build your own deck or look up a good one and I just never could wrap my head around it but knew someone that said "oh but most of the game is easy" Which made me feel stupid so nice to know the npc's did have difficult combos and decks
I don’t think it’s shovel ware but the original 3ds Fantasy Life was so much fun, I could and would pour HOURS into it! The new switch fantasy life looks interesting for sure but that first 3ds one was a classic to me ❤️
The care and appreciation you show games that are normally spat on is really touching. Thanks for making these videos. Also, your little sprite for talking is super cute!
Card Games on Motorcycles the show: "Yusei, I thought you were in prison? What happened?" "Oh, I won a card game with the warden, got let out, became a hero of prophecy, and won the most important tournament in the world." I wouldn't change a damn thing 😎
I played a bunch of these games when I was a kid, and the dragon racing one reminded me of a game that I don’t know if you’ve talked about before, called Monster Racers, it was a 2d platform and monster collecting game. Also Dinosaur King and Fossil Fighters, I remember liking Dinosaur King a lot more than fossil fighters, in my child mind the mechanics were super deep and intricate
fun fact: there's a Japan exclusive Beyblade title,just named Metal Fight Beyblade. and it is based on the 4-Layer(aka Pre-Hybrid) beys,the package itself came with a game accurate Gold version Quetzalcoatl 90WF and a Beypointer adapter for the GBA slot.This is also started the tradition of featuring a secret unlockable left spin Pegasis named pegasis Omega(i usually to call it Black Pegasis lol)
This video fully unlocked some childhood memories from the mention of Zubo! I cannot believe I forgot about it but seeing footage made me remember some of the music it had and the characters I liked
I've never owned a single Bakugan in my life, and I have no idea how to play, but you'd better believe I played the HELL out of that DS game when I was little! My favourite was that mermaid one
my friend had a dsi before i ever got a ds, and she had this specific game that i was never able to find (she herself doesnt own it anymore and cant remember). it was one of the typical games aimed at girls, i believe it had an anime-esque art style? i dont think it was a licensed game of any existing thing though. it was some sort of puzzle game though i dont remember what exactly the puzzles were. haunts me forever
I swear, I have played like 75% of all the games listed here. Stardust Accelerator really got more bearable once I built my Lightsworn and DAD decks, BBT was my first experience with Bakugan on the DS and I can only imagine what you are dusting off next. Fossil League? Fossil Fighters? The Battle of Giants series?
i really appreciate this series. so much nostalgia + it inspires me to make modern games that pander to people who have a similar kinda DS shovelware nostalgia :) thank u
I'm suprised Spectrobes hasnt made it in. I remember back then how weird this game was to me. It was pokemon but also digimon a little bit... and very weird visuals sometimes
super appreciated these vids, I dunno there is is just something magical about stumbling upon a game that's outside of the spotlight. I would just randomly download roms to try out games that I've never heard of, as i couldn't afford games and the ones available to rent were mostly popular ones -understandably lol-. This makes me wanna go diving into the ds library again lol The last time i did that I found stuff like Elebits and avalon code(neither I would call shovelware but I don't see people talking about them either). love the weird stuff, games are awesome.
i swear prey the stars and zubo were fever dreams 😭😭 im so glad you found them. i played them when i was about 5-6, im 18 now. ive been looking for them for YEARS NOW so tysm 🙏 deadass made a note in my phone so i never forget them
I tried playing the sanrio game a while back as well and I also had trouble They do have Sanrio Picross tho if you like that and it's fun imo Also idk if this is a "weird and obscure DS game" but I found out they have a Ouran Highschool Host Club DS Game (Japanese Ver. Only tho)
Oh my god you are so real for talking about Prey the Stars and Zubo back to back!! I had so much fun on Gabu Gabu with my brother when we were kids, and Zubo remains one of my favourite DS games (although I could never finish it, I'm pretty sure I was softlocked on the moon), so much that I bought it last week 🥺✨
I know they arent s hovelware (or I hope they arent for the prices I paid for them) but Id love to see you take a look at the other two 5ds era WC games! They improve vastly on the issues from the first one and the plots a bit thicker (the last ones especially fun in my opinion!) Editing ti add: I have now beaten Stardust Accelerator and I'm so, so happy that I never have to face a mandatory brionac deck (in the srcond of four foghts in a row with a shared healthpool from hell) again. Fun game tho! And Illd ef3nd the starting deck by saying that you at least get stuff like Krebons and magical andriod to help migitate the Not Dying apsect of playing Funny Card Game
oh wow that fashion game unlocked a forgotten memory. I remember now spending a puzzling amount of time on this game. I guess the art drew me in, and kept me engaged, I am a sucker for nice looking character sprites during interactions also for the game with a few pronoun mistakes if you choose to play as a girl, it's kinda funny, I can only imagine the sheer unrestrained shock and joy from any feminine presenting genderfluid people having that experience. game with canon genderfluid main character confirmed, even if it's just through mistakes in script changes, it's still a fun thing to interpret
holy shit imagine fashion designer!! (at least, that's what it was called in the uk) I played the *life* out of that game when I was a kid, it was so cool designing stuff. I don't remember much about the plot, but I remember it being fun
The two games based off the first Michael Bay Transformers movie have no right to be as good as they are. Fully open world like you'd expect from a Spider-Man or Assassin's Creed console game (I don't think any other DS game has had that kind of scale without being top down) and have really fun gameplay, custom vehicle forms for your protag, all of the main movie characters are fully playable and there's a separate game for the Autobots and Decepticons (Decepticons has better story). I actually think it's way better than it's console counterpart on PS3/360 The sequel based off Revenge of the Fallen was worse but still pretty good but most of the other ones were pretty ass.
interesting! i never heard about bakugan battle trainer before now, but it does seem kind of.. strange. not in a bad way as you said though. another great video! i really love your outlook on perceived shovelware and am excited seeing new installments in the series. keep it up!
Yoooooooo ok i played zubo to the max i even unlocked the sports team themed characters idk y but i have good memorys this game came out in the timespan when EA actually cared about what they made
I've been playing the YGO WC games since i bought 2005 back when i was in high school. 2005 and 2008 are actually my favorite years. There's a yugioh game for the DS that i dont think you have heard of, it's called "World Carnival" It came out in 2014, the US release is horrible. By horrible i mean that when you buy it it's ALL unlocked, from the very beginning, which takes all of the fun out of it. IT was only available on the e-shop for a short amount of time. The main thing i hated about the DS YGO games (Especially in the 5DS era, was how slow the duels were, like the speed of the computer and everything, it would get rough.
A side fact the Yu-Gi-Oh world championship games, at least in the gba and ds era, they're all designed for RL Yu-Gi-Oh players to introduce them to the newer cards/rules and boosters. That's why all the booster packs you get are the same as their RL versions. They also updated the ban list in the ds games when you could connect to the internet for the newer ones. Also, you can no longer get anything like the Egyptian God card legitimately in game as well as some other cards as they were download events only. Silfer the executive producer made beating that a lot easier when put in a decent deck.
I LOVED ZUBO!!! I played it when I was a kid, and it was one of these games I did not remember the name of nor what it actually was about so I've spent years kinda bothered about there being a game I used to love but not remembering it at all apart from the general vibe so thank you for talking about it here!
You should add lists of the games reviewed and the music you use in the video to the description. I think I heard something from the Polarium soundtrack around the 8 minute mark? if so, you have amazing taste!
You should check out Little Battlers Experience, LBX, someday. It's not a shovelware game, but it's certainly a game not talked about much compared to other Level 5 games.
What’s one of your favorite games from your childhood?
Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies. So much content in one tiny cartridge. Still play it even today
Animal Crossing Wild World it was my first own DS game.I still have it but havent played it in a while.
Imagine Ballet (I’m saying it every time until you try it.
The Imagine series are usually misses. But when Ubisoft took in some Japanese titles and repackaged them for American audiences??
My 6 year old mind was blown! Now I’m 20 and I have all the Otome games!
With 3 different characters to play with their own personality and story. Where they are competing one another to become the most famous ballet dancer.
Lego Battles is one I don't see talked about much. It's a simple RTS using many of the Lego themes from the 2000's. I played the bejeezus out of my cartridge when I was younger, one of the first games I beat multiple times. It's not the best today, but I certainly had a lot of fun with it! It even gives you red bricks for cheats, like the mainline Lego games!
Kingdom Hearts 2.
"Their mental health meter is completely full!!!" That must be nice.
God, I wish that was me...
I can dream
Meanwhile me: 💀
IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THAT ZUBO GAME FOR YEARS?? LIKE LEGIT OVER TEN YEARS- I THOUGHT IT WAS A FEVER DREAM BECAUSE IT HAS NO PRESENCE ONLINE AS I GREW UP IM SO GLAD YOU COVERED IT
Same 😂
there was a nintendo focused magazine here in the Uk that covered Zubo before it came out, they made a pretty big deal about the game iirc, like 3 pages dedicated to it.
played it a ton once it came out, got all the characters to max level then sort of just moved on.
Same.
I've mainly played the 3ds style savvys but definitely an underrated game that usually gets seen as a bad just for girls game when its actually a nice business simulator with dress up aspects.
i lived off the og game as a kid. i think it's one of the only ds games i still regularly play.
I played all three, bought them on launch day, and was an actual adult. So much fun.
Same!!! Played through all three of the 3DS titles, can’t wait for Fashion Dreamer in November!
I also grew up with all the style savvy games, there's still a community for it :D
STYLE SAVVY MENTIONED !!!! i still play this now! and there are four of them !!!!!!!!!
Not exactly shovelware, but Princess Debut was one of the weirdest DS games, because it was it Osu/Elite Beat Agents-like with only public domain classical music, where the MC gets isekai'd to a fantasy land. It was part otome, and had one character that was almost impossible to romance. A truly fascinating game.
Also, the game Sprung haunts me to this day.
Omg I loved Princess Debut. Lol. I forgot it existed!
as an eba/osu! fan i must play this at some point
LUCIANOOOO
Also all of the romancable guys had the worst personalities ever. With the exception of a secret bachelor.
Sprung was so unironically funny tho. I loved pepper spraying the characters or dousing them in gasoline even if they always lead to a bad ending. Like how in one of them, the girl you can pepper spray takes your pepper spray to attack you back, and it leads to the bad ending where they both get sent to a mental asylum after pepper spraying each other non stop.
if you want a good style/dress up game, PLEASE play style savvy! it gets seen a lot as "just a girl game" but it has a lot of charm and actually teaches you how to style clothing. it's pretty great! they're mainly on 3ds but if I'm not mistaken there's one on the DS
yes! the later additions have male options too
YEAH! The OG first game is on DS, and it’s so special!! I don’t have the same nostalgia for the 3DS follow ups as I do for the original, but it’s still the strongest fashion game series I can think of (fashion dreamer was disappointing to me personally, but I guess when I pay $60 of my own dollars versus… emulating the others that was bound to happen. IDK if this is silly of me to think but a game new on the switch shouldn’t have any gender locked clothing. In the original Men weren’t even real except Dominic and Godfrey so maybe I’m being too picky but I guess I expected better from the most modern version
Even after the third time I cannot resist clicking when I see Bakugan in thumbnail
I second this a second time
Bakugan pog!
i think shovelware is usually used to refer to bad games that look appealing to parents/gift givers . i think a better term for these are hidden gems
I'd define shovelware as "games more likely to be sold at a general store than at an actual game store", at least when talking about physical releases.
I love this approach so much more than people dunking on Ninjabread Man for the millionth time. Yeah its wild seeing what kind of broken messes got released back in the day, but I love highlighting odd little gems so much more. I played a lot of weird forgotten DS games, but the one I remember the most (despite never finishing it) was My World My Way. Its a jrpg where you play as an egotistical princess who literally changes the environment around her to suit her adventure by pure willpower. Also it was made by Atlus, the people behind the Persona games.
Oh! Atelier Annie is really good too! A more simplified version of the Atelier series where you play as an alchemist competing with several other alchemists to build up an island. Really cute and fun, so long as you can enjoy management-type games?
My world my way looks like it’s worth up to 180$ complete these days
I love looking into obscure shovelware games like these but it's rare to see them presented in a positive light, It's a refreshing take and makes me want to see if there's any more hidden gems out there
Eragon GBA is a true gem and one of the best RPGs on GBA. The Harry Potter GBC/GBA games are also very good hidden gem RPGs.
My fave weird obscure ds game is Princess debut. An anime styled dancing game where a princess from a kingdom in your closet busts in and asks you to attend a ball for her where she has to pick someone and dance with them. Somehow you’re convinced to go and get to have a mini dating sim with a dancing mini game using the touch screen to guide the dance along.
Like all the characters are simple but good with a hidden extra love interest and it’s stuck in the back of my brain rent free lol
Holy shit Imagine Fashion jumpscare. That was one of my first ds games. To this day I remain fascinated that it had licensed music that you could listen to in full??? Truly *the* girl game of all time.
I think games like Balan Wonderworld get called shovelware because even though they definitely weren’t released to be that they were flops and now you’ll probably find them for cheap.
I was the kind of kid that had the entire neighbourhood play yugioh and so i obviously had to have all the ds games. To this day i will never forget that boss rush on world championship 2009 and how it took us 3 kids to theorize a deck build that could work to beat that thing. A year later i got into competitive yugioh and found out just how bad i was. That was also the first time i got scammed pretty hard. To be fair i had no business going on a 30 min train ride to the capital to play yugioh in a shady backstreet with young adult drug dealers who would put weed, coke, and other things into their card folders as a hidden stash when i myself was like 11 at the time
i need to see more ds bakugan battle brawlers in my life
it's like literally what my childhood relied on
I'm going to give that My Melody game to my dad who's been smoking for 25 years and see how long he can play it before he passes out
I actually love seeing someone talk about Barbie and the Three Musketeers. Never watched the movie but I had the wii game as a kid (essentially the same game with better graphics) and recently went back and played it. It's still fun in my opinion, even if the voice lines are annoying. Definitely better than what I expected though.
I was absolutely _obsessed_ with the movie and Wii game as a kid lmao, I think I even 100%d it by getting all the dresses. Hearing the music in the video sent me back in time.
Now I wanna check if I still have it.
Weird, I remember Zubo having a lot of commercials and stuff when it was coming out.
Anyways, I'm not surprised that Yu-Gi-Oh World Championships 2009 has what sounds like a short story, since a majority of these games are pretty much made for the sole purpose of being used for tournament events, with the single player content mainly being challenge duels and (if they even have one) a barebones plot to justify doing duels with a bunch of the characters. It seems like they tried to actually do more involved plots with the 5Ds WC games, but I think they also still remembered "oh yeah, this is still just a game made for competitions", so they tried to not do that much with the plots.
The only DS Yu-Gi-Oh game that I played for a little bit and then stopped a year or so ago was Nightmare Troubadour, a game I found out about through TV Tropes that sounds both pretty interesting because of the things it does, but I also stopped because I was scared to keep playing because of those mechanics and also because it's one of those Yu-Gi-Oh games that people put up there as being pretty dang hard. Also the JP/NA version has a major bug that makes it so you can't do a specific trade in the game, which led me to playing the EU version on the emulator.
I think Nightmare Troubadour basically being a Goat Format game iirc might also be a boon in its favour. Thought I haven't played it yet and mostly played WC2011.
@@ArbitraryOutcome wc 2011 is probably the best of the bunch but damn can it be hard it's definitely made for players who know the game well i played it and beat it as a kid myself
I recently decided to do a full new game playthrough only i turned off the forbidden limited list and if made things alot more manageable as i could come at the opponent's i faced with every card from every pack i opened i think I'm on chapter 3 or 4 right now with a warrior beat down deck
It's actually a pretty satisfying feeling being able to use everything i get
It helps that game also has a tool to analyze your deck to tell you how good it is and what you could to improve it I've noticed you unlock cards alot faster than in the other two games I was unlocking structure decks pretty quickly which let me splurge whenever I had enough points to get 40 guaranteed cards all at once including some staples. It's been a pretty fun time.
yeah the three 5ds ds games are all short snippets of different arcs from the show. 2011 is probably the best overall, but they're all fun
2:51 PREY THE STARS, OH MY GOD.
I bought the game once as a kid because I thought it was something different but I was curious. One of my favorite, most nostalgic experiences ever. Each stage has a different gimmick, the themes are catchy, and its gameplay is extremely fun.
I adore this game and i am so so glad someone is talking about it.
I played the 2010 Yugioh DS game recently and it sounds like that one had a much better sense of balance to it, in terms of being able to gradually build up a competent deck by the time your opponents are getting serious and without really needing to look up how to unlock even more card packs. I was able to muddle through most of the game with a hodge-podge deck that focused on getting level 3 monsters out to synchro into level 6 boss monsters, and ended the game with a Moon and Sun Dragon deck that most NPC opponents just couldn't really deal with.
If you liked that one try out the 2011 game, that one’s even better!
I still play World Championship 2008 to get to sleep from time to time XD
Yeah they are not really hard to beat, in the gameplay of the vid he hard misplayed with Lightsworn for example tribute Lumina for Celestia instead of Wolf and use Lumina to discard Necro Guardna and revive lvl 4 or lower Lightsworn 😅
Dude, you made me cry in nostalgia. I lacked commitment to focus on one game when I was a kid, so played almost every games in NDS back in the day. I've surprisingly played most if not all of these "obscure" games you showed, and seeing them again fills me with a lot of emotions that I can't describe. It's like scouring through sweet memories from early stages of my life that has been locked somewhere in my brain.
These are some other shovelware/underrated games that I played back then:
- Eco Creatures: Save the Forest
- The Legend of Starfy and Stapi no Densetsu 4
- Ragnarok DS
- Dinosaur King DS
- Yugioh: Nightmare Troubadour
- Frogger Helmet Chaos and My Frogger Toy Trial
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs DS
- Tamagotchi Connection 1 2 3
- UP the game DS
- Bolt DS
- Dino Master DS: Dig Discover Duel
- Wacky Racers
- Tom and Jerry Tales
Im so sorry that you had to deal with World Championship 2009. Compared to both 2010 and 2011, 2009 gives the yugioh 5d games a massive rocky start for the DS. For what the game gives you, you are probably going to be stuck using the starter deck that will have little to absolutely garbage compared to your opponents. The actual only way to have a fair match would be using the Lightsworn deck since that was one of the meta archtypes around that time, especially for what is meant to be the final boss of 2009. I hope you can have a better time with the other two games in the future!
Dragon Booster? I remember that cartoon. It was out well into my adulthood but I would still sit down and watch it when it was on. It had this really weird low framerate. It reminded me of Tron Uprising.
good to know zubo wasn’t just a memory limited to my childhood!! along w pokemon soulsilver it was one of the first ds games i ever owned, played through it to completion quite recently and it was a decent time
Bro put Phineas & Ferb in the intro but forgot to put it into the video 😭
Dragon Booster is based on this old cartoon I think from the early 2000s. It came out along with the art style kind of matching up with storm hawks in a way. I never watched dragon booster but I know it's a game based on a show.
3:50 PROFESSOR LAYTON AND THE AZRAN LEGACY OST SPOTTED 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Man I remember that beyblade game, there was the bakugan battle brawlers game too, once you get to 3ds I recommend LBX: little Battlers experience, it was like Gundam designed for kids but the model kits were actually really great, game was quite fun too if I recall
Playmobil Pirates was probably my favourite childhood “shovelware” game, I have a core memory of spending hours sinking enemy ships for gold just so I could upgrade mine only for it to sink in a battle with a sea dragon 5 mins later. Speaking of dragons, Dragon Booster man I was obsessed with that show as a kid. When first played that game I remember being disappointed that it was just racing, no transforming into the gold dragon or fighting bad guys as the booster. The game also didnt have any of the charm of the show besides some fitting music, some dialogue between characters would’ve been nice to replicate the chemistry of the show, but probs wasn’t in the budget
DRAGON BOOSTER??? you're telling me I didn't hallucinate this TV series? Oh my god I think it's the first thing related to that series that I've seen since first watching it on TV more than a decade ago what the hell
You don't even know how many years I've been looking for this game Zubo. It was one of those things that was right on the tip of my tongue but could never remember. I had saved up my 6 bucks like $10 bucks some years ago and found this at GameStop when they still sold games lol Thank you for this video lol
Barbie and the three musketeers was one of my favorite ds games!! I played it so much, the little cat switch mechanic was really fun and the sprites look good too
Thinking back to my childhood, I had this cool DSi XL with an R4 card filled with lots of games. Some of those games on there were weird and different for the Nintendo DS - stuff I'd never heard of. A couple caught my attention, but most were honestly pretty dull.
holy SHIT prey the stars was a game that existed. literally only remember ever hearing about it through a nintendo power magazine i read from my elementary school library on lunch break, and then never again. insane. really cute character design though for real for real........
oh, to be a bakugan with a full mental health metre........
the Dragon Booster DS game made me so sad because the show was so good I hoped as a kid that it would be something so much better than a janky racer
I think of shovelware as a game that you always see at Gamestop for 10 bucks that may as well be invisible
OH. MY. GOD. I've been searching for the Zubo game for almost 10 years now. I had a memory of playing a silly RPG for the DS and i remember everything, the stetic, the characters... But i did NOT remember the name, and i swear i've been searching everywhere. I even posted on the tip of my tongue reddit but no one could answer me correctly. I'm so. SO glad i was able to find it in such an interesting video. Thanks for your content boss. Really, i'm so happy lmfao (Also, sorryn for my bad English, i'm way too excited right now)
I got low-key mocked for not being able to play or beat stardust Yu-Gi-Oh game
Or games like that because it requires you to build your own deck or look up a good one and I just never could wrap my head around it but knew someone that said "oh but most of the game is easy"
Which made me feel stupid so nice to know the npc's did have difficult combos and decks
I don’t think it’s shovel ware but the original 3ds Fantasy Life was so much fun, I could and would pour HOURS into it! The new switch fantasy life looks interesting for sure but that first 3ds one was a classic to me ❤️
I feel like you'd be a good youtuber to give "Pokémon rip offs" a better chance. We need more people talking about Yokai Watch and Dinosaur King. 😔🤙
Don't forget Bakugan. And sure, the IP as an whole still exist thanks to 2018 reboot.
But as far as anime is corncerned, the OG is still the best.
DINOSOUR KING MY BELOVED ‼️‼️
The care and appreciation you show games that are normally spat on is really touching. Thanks for making these videos. Also, your little sprite for talking is super cute!
You showed imagine fashion designer and I yelled “I know this one” irl. I played this game all the time as a kid
Card Games on Motorcycles the show:
"Yusei, I thought you were in prison? What happened?"
"Oh, I won a card game with the warden, got let out, became a hero of prophecy, and won the most important tournament in the world."
I wouldn't change a damn thing 😎
Imagine your child passing out from trying to play a DS game XD
I miss this shovelware era of experimentation.
The bae bit around 19 minutes was so fucking good
did you know that the ds stands for: dnew stylervideo!!!!!!
I played a bunch of these games when I was a kid, and the dragon racing one reminded me of a game that I don’t know if you’ve talked about before, called Monster Racers, it was a 2d platform and monster collecting game. Also Dinosaur King and Fossil Fighters, I remember liking Dinosaur King a lot more than fossil fighters, in my child mind the mechanics were super deep and intricate
Finally! Someone actually talks about Zubo in a list of obscure DS games! I felt like I was the only one who knew about that game.
fun fact: there's a Japan exclusive Beyblade title,just named Metal Fight Beyblade. and it is based on the 4-Layer(aka Pre-Hybrid) beys,the package itself came with a game accurate Gold version Quetzalcoatl 90WF and a Beypointer adapter for the GBA slot.This is also started the tradition of featuring a secret unlockable left spin Pegasis named pegasis Omega(i usually to call it Black Pegasis lol)
This video fully unlocked some childhood memories from the mention of Zubo! I cannot believe I forgot about it but seeing footage made me remember some of the music it had and the characters I liked
I've never owned a single Bakugan in my life, and I have no idea how to play, but you'd better believe I played the HELL out of that DS game when I was little! My favourite was that mermaid one
also the foto showdown for the dsi its a monster collector battler but you need to take photos with the systems camera to make your monsters
my friend had a dsi before i ever got a ds, and she had this specific game that i was never able to find (she herself doesnt own it anymore and cant remember). it was one of the typical games aimed at girls, i believe it had an anime-esque art style? i dont think it was a licensed game of any existing thing though. it was some sort of puzzle game though i dont remember what exactly the puzzles were. haunts me forever
by any means, is it called mystery mansion ? the description seems to fit, even tho there are many, many games out there
good luck in your search !
I swear, I have played like 75% of all the games listed here. Stardust Accelerator really got more bearable once I built my Lightsworn and DAD decks, BBT was my first experience with Bakugan on the DS and I can only imagine what you are dusting off next. Fossil League? Fossil Fighters? The Battle of Giants series?
i really appreciate this series. so much nostalgia + it inspires me to make modern games that pander to people who have a similar kinda DS shovelware nostalgia :) thank u
We need more videos on obscure games like this
Literally got me screaming STARDURST ACCELERATOR at the gameplay in the first 30 seconds. On the edge of my duel runner's seat lol
this video made me turn my room upside down looking for my zubo game cuz it reminded me that it exsisted i didn’t find it 🙃
I'm suprised Spectrobes hasnt made it in.
I remember back then how weird this game was to me. It was pokemon but also digimon a little bit... and very weird visuals sometimes
Still waiting for Styler to cover Fossil League: Dino Championship Tournament
its actually in my list of games to look at lol
@@stylerrobin Looking forward too it!
The memories!
@@stylerrobin still waiting for styler to cover the jewelpet games
The wackiest games i've played on the DS would be Flower, Sun and Rain and The Sims 2.
super appreciated these vids, I dunno there is is just something magical about stumbling upon a game that's outside of the spotlight. I would just randomly download roms to try out games that I've never heard of, as i couldn't afford games and the ones available to rent were mostly popular ones -understandably lol-. This makes me wanna go diving into the ds library again lol The last time i did that I found stuff like Elebits and avalon code(neither I would call shovelware but I don't see people talking about them either). love the weird stuff, games are awesome.
i swear prey the stars and zubo were fever dreams 😭😭 im so glad you found them. i played them when i was about 5-6, im 18 now. ive been looking for them for YEARS NOW so tysm 🙏 deadass made a note in my phone so i never forget them
I tried playing the sanrio game a while back as well and I also had trouble
They do have Sanrio Picross tho if you like that and it's fun imo
Also idk if this is a "weird and obscure DS game" but I found out they have a Ouran Highschool Host Club DS Game (Japanese Ver. Only tho)
excause me disney princess on the ds is a master piece collector for the intended target audience
PREY THE STARS IS PEAKKKKK
Oh my god you are so real for talking about Prey the Stars and Zubo back to back!! I had so much fun on Gabu Gabu with my brother when we were kids, and Zubo remains one of my favourite DS games (although I could never finish it, I'm pretty sure I was softlocked on the moon), so much that I bought it last week 🥺✨
That yugioh game also haunted me and began my lifelong Yu-Gi-Oh sym addiction
I know they arent s hovelware (or I hope they arent for the prices I paid for them) but Id love to see you take a look at the other two 5ds era WC games! They improve vastly on the issues from the first one and the plots a bit thicker (the last ones especially fun in my opinion!)
Editing ti add: I have now beaten Stardust Accelerator and I'm so, so happy that I never have to face a mandatory brionac deck (in the srcond of four foghts in a row with a shared healthpool from hell) again. Fun game tho! And Illd ef3nd the starting deck by saying that you at least get stuff like Krebons and magical andriod to help migitate the Not Dying apsect of playing Funny Card Game
Barely any of these are shovelware, basically just GoGoGos, Imagine Fashion, and maybe Bakugon.
oh wow that fashion game unlocked a forgotten memory. I remember now spending a puzzling amount of time on this game. I guess the art drew me in, and kept me engaged, I am a sucker for nice looking character sprites during interactions
also for the game with a few pronoun mistakes if you choose to play as a girl, it's kinda funny, I can only imagine the sheer unrestrained shock and joy from any feminine presenting genderfluid people having that experience. game with canon genderfluid main character confirmed, even if it's just through mistakes in script changes, it's still a fun thing to interpret
holy shit imagine fashion designer!! (at least, that's what it was called in the uk) I played the *life* out of that game when I was a kid, it was so cool designing stuff. I don't remember much about the plot, but I remember it being fun
The two games based off the first Michael Bay Transformers movie have no right to be as good as they are. Fully open world like you'd expect from a Spider-Man or Assassin's Creed console game (I don't think any other DS game has had that kind of scale without being top down) and have really fun gameplay, custom vehicle forms for your protag, all of the main movie characters are fully playable and there's a separate game for the Autobots and Decepticons (Decepticons has better story). I actually think it's way better than it's console counterpart on PS3/360
The sequel based off Revenge of the Fallen was worse but still pretty good but most of the other ones were pretty ass.
I remember prey the stars! I swear it was a fever dream as no one else ever seemed to remember it
interesting! i never heard about bakugan battle trainer before now, but it does seem kind of.. strange. not in a bad way as you said though. another great video! i really love your outlook on perceived shovelware and am excited seeing new installments in the series. keep it up!
Hey if you really want a Sanrio game where you just hang out and enjoy life you should get hello kitty island adventure. I’ve had a lot of fun with it
hell yeah, jokes in particular were super on-point in this one
I only know a few bakugan by name, from my childhood.
And one of them is my fav, Monarus, my beloved. Always got paid dirt, when she was so slay.
Love the low poly Julie model
I own the my melody game! I’m so happy to see someone talking about it (sure not the best game but it’s very cute)
Yoooooooo ok i played zubo to the max i even unlocked the sports team themed characters idk y but i have good memorys this game came out in the timespan when EA actually cared about what they made
I'm actually amazed at how good the sprites in that Barbie game is
I've been playing the YGO WC games since i bought 2005 back when i was in high school. 2005 and 2008 are actually my favorite years. There's a yugioh game for the DS that i dont think you have heard of, it's called "World Carnival" It came out in 2014, the US release is horrible. By horrible i mean that when you buy it it's ALL unlocked, from the very beginning, which takes all of the fun out of it. IT was only available on the e-shop for a short amount of time. The main thing i hated about the DS YGO games (Especially in the 5DS era, was how slow the duels were, like the speed of the computer and everything, it would get rough.
It's such a rush to wait for the moments where this TH-camr becomes Tim Rogers for 2.5 seconds at a time.
Oh wait, he actually went full Tim Rogers again two thirds through. Exhilarating.
My favorite DS game that no one played was Infinite Space. The promo materials were so cool to me as a kid.
Man, I remember Stardust Accelerator. Got some serious nostalgia for that game.
Dragon Booster: core memory unlocked.
A side fact the Yu-Gi-Oh world championship games, at least in the gba and ds era, they're all designed for RL Yu-Gi-Oh players to introduce them to the newer cards/rules and boosters. That's why all the booster packs you get are the same as their RL versions.
They also updated the ban list in the ds games when you could connect to the internet for the newer ones.
Also, you can no longer get anything like the Egyptian God card legitimately in game as well as some other cards as they were download events only. Silfer the executive producer made beating that a lot easier when put in a decent deck.
I LOVED ZUBO!!! I played it when I was a kid, and it was one of these games I did not remember the name of nor what it actually was about so I've spent years kinda bothered about there being a game I used to love but not remembering it at all apart from the general vibe so thank you for talking about it here!
Once i Re-discovered bakugan toys as an adult, I also enjoyed this DS game. It's actually pretty good, maxed it out.
Prey the stars is really fun game it reminds of the munchables on wii
You should add lists of the games reviewed and the music you use in the video to the description.
I think I heard something from the Polarium soundtrack around the 8 minute mark? if so, you have amazing taste!
Stardust Accelerator is so good! I wish it wasnt limited to just the first season of 5Ds, because everything about it was perfect for a Yu-gi-oh game.
Bru you’re supposed to use the touch screen to beat up the enemies in the my melody game lmao
WAIT WHAT
@@stylerrobin yeah 😭😭😭
Dude, I did not think anyone remembered Prey the Stars! Thank you so much!
You should check out Little Battlers Experience, LBX, someday. It's not a shovelware game, but it's certainly a game not talked about much compared to other Level 5 games.
........Why does Barbie and the Three Musketeers look very similar in graphics style to the DS Castlevania games?
BRO YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LOUD I SCREAMED WHEN I SAW PHINEAS AND FERB AND ZUBO THOSE ARE MY CHILDHOOD AND SOME OF MY ABSOLUTE ALL TIME FAVORITE GAMES
i genuinely forgot dragon boosters existed till i heard that voice line lmao thanks for reawakening something from my childhood