Review by: Brandon "Disco Fever" Cackowski-Schnell

Deca Sports DS has a pretty impressive framework built around the game's multiple sports, allowing for league play, customizable teams, various sport-specific challenges, tournaments and even the ability to allow up to six different consoles to play off of the same cartridge. It's a pretty impressive list of features except for one nagging detail, namely the uneven selection of sports and the complete and total lack of insight into what constitutes a strategy for most of them. Still, if you're looking for something to keep a backseat of kids busy on a long car trip, or you only care about a handful of sports, the game might have you covered.

I've certainly never seen a more diverse selection of sports providing golf, rugby, ping pong, bobsledding, rock climbing, skydiving, arm wrestling, skeet shooting, cheerleading and sepak takraw for your sporting pleasure. For the uninitiated, sepak takraw is volleyball only with kicking. It's certainly an odd mix and probably the only time you'll see rugby on a handheld, but for all of the novelty of bringing new sports to players, the game doesn't do a lot to explain what you're supposed to be doing. I'm not talking about which buttons to press as it certainly does that, but I'm talking about even the basic strategic elements of the sport in question. Obviously, I'm not looking for an explanation of arm wrestling, I think my repeated childhood viewings of "Over the Top" has that covered, but according to the rugby tutorial the game is played by running with a ball, throwing it backwards and occasionally using your team to push against the other team. Surely there's more to it than that.

Other sports require less strategy but could use a little hand holding in connecting the dubious control scheme to the on screen antics, particularly in the tutorial. I still have not successfully pulled off a block in sepak takraw and am beginning to think it's some cruel joke being played on me by a programmer with a bad sense of humor. Luckily you can replay the tutorials as much as you need to, however redoing the same thing over and over again in the tutorial eventually makes you want to risk losing on the playing field if only to do something different. The various sports vary wildly in the execution with some like golf, ping pong, sky diving and bob sledding working well with both stylus control and button presses. Cheerleading uses the same circle matching tap and slide controls as Elite Beat Agents only with decidedly worse tap registering, and rock climbing and arm wrestling uses a strange mix of furious rubbing and tapping. The least said about skeet shooting the better and while rugby and sepak takraw control just fine, as I said before, I have no earthly idea what I'm supposed to be doing.

If the notion of playing obscure sports is enough to hook you in, you'll find plenty of ways to explore the sports at hand. Every sport can be played in an open match by one of several precreated teams, all filled with players of various sizes. As the size of the player affects how they play different sports, it's a lot to keep track of, but you catch on pretty quickly, especially when your lumbering giant gets soundly thrashed in rock climbing by the pipsqueak next to you. If the premade teams aren't to your liking you can create your own teams with control over the various appearances, size and names of your players. In addition to open matches you take your team through tournaments and league play as you travel on a whirlwind tour through the various sports. At first only the beginner circuit is available but as you win matches and progress, higher difficulty levels as well as greater geographic tournament regions become available. In addition to these modes, each sport has it's own challenge that vary from something as inconsequential as rubbing the screen as hard as you can for two seconds to measure your arm strength in arm wrestling to hitting the ball into specific tiles in ping pong.

If local play isn't enough the game offers DS download play for up to six different consoles. I can honestly say that I've never seen this level of game functionality available via download play off of one cartridge. Every sport is available via download, some with both versus and co-op modes. The loading screens stick around for a considerable amount of time, but even so, given all that you're getting, it's worth the wait to thrash your fellow travelers in ping pong.

Deca Sports DS isn't a bad game, it's just not giving me everything I want. If you're giving me an opportunity to play something that I've never played before, like rugby, I want more insight into the sport than what the game is giving me. Certainly in a game with ten sports you can't expect an incredible amount of strategic depth in each one, but by this time, I've played ping pong and golf to death and I've never, ever played volleyball with my feet or had a reason to bust out my rugby shirts from 1985. It's great to see such a varied mix of sports, it's just a shame that the game falters on the execution.