Super Princess Peach for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

In a fit of irony, Nintendo has swapped the roles of Princess Peach and the plumbers-gone-hero Mario and Luigi. This time around, it's up to her to save them from Bowser and his goons. To do so, she is given a strange talking umbrella that will aid her along the way. Throughout her quest, Peach uses the umbrella to dispatch enemies, float through the air, and even uses it as a makeshift submarine. She is also equipped with the ability to change her mood at will, and each of her four moods grant her different powers and abilities. When she becomes angry, for example, she turns into a raging ball of flame and destroys everything in her path, while Calm allows her to regenerate health.

The controls of the game are standard fare for side-scrollers and work well for the game, with the exception of the underwater sequences which for some strange reason require the player to blow into the microphone to attack. A tap of the touch-screen switches between the four available moods, although the "mood meter" you begin the game with drains quickly so you'll have to keep refilling it.

The main game is quite easy. There are a few tricky areas but overall finding the items hidden throughout the levels is almost laughably simple. The bosses vary a little more in difficulty, but a handy talking block at the beginning of each boss level tells you exactly how to kill it, just in case the game wasn't easy enough already.

Even with the relaxed skill level and quirky underwater control, the game is still a fun diversion--at least for awhile. After a few levels of the same repetitive gameplay, you'll be ready to take a break and move onto something a little more entertaining. Luckily, the game does come with a few minigames that provide a decent break from the main story.

Overall, Super Princess Peach is a decent game that will probably appease fans of the series who are still waiting for the REAL Super Mario game that should be coming out for the DS next month.

This game is clearly marketed at girls. You are a pricess who uses the awesome power of her emotions to conquer enemies. If this bothers you, you should pass.

That said, it's a polished platformer set in the Mario universe. Most enemies you encounter have a "mood", which is funny. It's entertaining to see little crying bats flap by, and whack them on the head. But the happy bats, which flutter randomly around, are much more dangerous! Crying turtles can move pretty quickly, but angry turtles are more dangerous. And so on.

It's a pretty easy game, comparatively. When it presents challenges, they tend to be of the "figure out how to do this" vein, rather than being a tough-to-beat boss or a tricky jump puzzle. The different moods you have access to give you different verbs: you can stomp blocks when angry, float when happy, etc. This mechanic lends itself to puzzles that are reminiscent of Warioland 3, but much easier.

A good, fun rental that you can beat in a weekend without trouble.