Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Casual Games

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There is a time for giving and receiving, and that time is usually during bar fights. On this occasion however, we will be covering what to do in the other major give and take situation you will most likely find yourself in this year, though. Your kids probably know it as Nintendo day (or Apple day, depending on the household), but some of us old timers still call it Christmas. Well, here goes: get people presents. Have yourselves some great holidays everyone, we hope to bring you even better quality game coverage next year! Man, we can’t believe we get paid to do this. Oh, you’re still here. You’re going to want us to elaborate, aren’t you? Luckily, we have this handy dandy guide to casual games we’d love for you to check out.

App Store Games (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, $0.99 -ish)

Yes, these all get their own entry, because otherwise they’d have the whole guide to themselves, iPhone games are getting that good. Among the no-brainers like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Plants vs Zombies and Cut the Rope, there is slightly more curious and whimsical fare like GameDev Story, Canabalt or Mirror’s Edge if you prefer the corporate version of an escape side-scroller.

You can probably have them all for a $10 gift card, so no hard decisions here. There’s also the Gameloft advent calendar to keep an eye on, but telling someone about free stuff doesn’t really count as a present.

Super Scribblenauts (DS, $29.99)

Last year’s outing was a brilliant toy, not that much of a game. By all accounts, as a toy, the addition of adjectives to the nouns you can conjure up in the game have pushed it to stratospheric fun levels, while the level arrangement has been tweaked to offer some variety over the leaden “game” aspect of its predecessor. So, if you and/or your little have a fascination with language and the limits you can push it to, go right ahead, there’s no Geneva convention on words. Also, dinosaur-mecha-pirate Elvis. Yeah.

Professor Layton And The Unwound Future (DS, $29.99)

The first Professor Layton adventures caught us by surprise, since it’s very rare that something almost guaranteed to put you to sleep keeps you up nights. The puzzles are cute, even if a bit cheap in this latest one, we’ve found, but the main rub is that you get something for solving them, namely a well-spun yarn that glues you to the DS, as opposed to that Brain Training nonsense Nintendo keeps lying to old people about. Frankly, we can’t wait for the collab with our next entry.

Ace Attorney Investigations (DS, $29.99)

Our love for the Phoenix Wright universe and the characters is well documented, but even if you haven’t played the preceding five adventures, their connection to this game is tenuous enough to ensure your enjoyment won’t be affected beyond the odd cryptic comment by the main character. We’re not going to use words like wacky or zany, because we’re mostly respectable people, but the adventure does get out of hand, with over the top characters, ridiculous twists that will make you laugh and cry at the same time and some of the best dialogue ever translated from Japanese this side of the alternate universes theory.

Invizimals (PSP, $39.99)

It’s an augmented reality game about finding monsters in your everyday environment using the PSP’s camera. We know what you’re thinking, didn’t I play this thing on my Symbian-powered Nokia S60 back when woolly mammoths were busy freezing standing up? Yes, you did, but it didn’t look as good or have the depth of Pokemon-like gameplay this one does, allowing the player to capture and train critters as well as having them fight each other. There are issues with it and you will need to avoid bright lighting conditions to our udnerstanding, but it’s a solid gimmick than will definitely impress the kid who’s seen everything, i.e. probably yours.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn (Wii, $49.99): We don’t get the general fascination with Kirby, but the stitchy, handmade, do-it-yourself thing the game has going there make it one of the most visually appealing Wii games we’ve seen and the easy-going platforming gameplay means it’s about the easiest thing ever to recommend for the elusive parent-child gaming sessions. Let’s face it, your kid can probably even destroy you at Solitaire, but then Solitaire has never had this kind of hypnotic aesthetic, unless you count the card shuffling at the end.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, $49.99): We’re only putting this here just in case it’s so obvious you may miss it, like when you look for your glasses for two hours and find them on your nose. Yes, Super Mario galaxy 2 is the pair of glasses on your nose of the casual game market and it’s the no-brainer choice for people who like to game for fun instead of n00b pwnage for some reason.

New Super Mario Brothers Wii – (Wii, $49.99)

Not the most fun you can have with four players on the Wii, but it’s definitely in the top five. Mario games traditionally require some skill to complete, but give this one to grandma and you’ll find yourself waiting by the phone for that “how do I get past this thingy” call for naught. The game plays itself to get you through the tough bits and it’s made for co-op, so you can go join grandma with the whole family if you get worried.

Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS, $49.99 – $59.99)

Is Harry Potter better when everything in it can be broken down to little plastic bricks? Now go ahead and replace Harry Potter with absolutely anything else in the world in that sentence. Now you probably feel silly for even needing to have asked yourself the question, don’t you?

Rock Band 3 (PS3, Xbox 360, $59.99)

We covered Rock Band’s third outing a little bit already, mostly how their developer didn’t deserve to be put up for sale after putting out such fine work. And regardless of what people are saying about the music games market going up or down, you still can’t beat a good rhythm game as a social gaming experience and even if that’s not strictly casual gaming, it’s close enough that we don’t feel bad about including it on the list.

A fair observation to make would be that these are mostly on Nintendo’s platforms, with the Wii and DS a bit over-represented, some would argue. Some would, of course, be wrong, as we’ve left out quite a few, like the newly released Epic Mickey and Wii Party to name a few, but since Xbox 360 and PS3 offerings aren’t really geared towards more laid-back gamers, we think their fans can live with this list after all. Another objection might be that we haven’t offered any Kinect or Move advice. That explanation is amazingly simple. We don’t know which one, if any, will pan out and there are no killer games for either. You can make sure that if either one emerges as the must-have game peripheral of 2011, we’ll just go ahead and write Kinect or Move a thousand times and call that a gift guide.