DS Shovelware Presents: Goldenballs

The DS was an incredibly popular handheld with masses of sales for it with Mario, Layton, Pokemon, Cooking Mama and many other franchises thriving under the system. Unfortunately it also died a little at the end and thats carried on to the 3DS and one of the major reasons has to be the amount of Shovelware that was pushed onto the system with little thought or imagination. The sheer amount of cheaply made, buggy and nasty titles that appeared onto both the DS and the Wii for me happens to be one of the big main reasons the Wii-U and the 3DS have not exactly set the world on fire.

Lets take this game for example (and maybe throw it into a bonfire afterwards). For those who don't know the TV-show 'Goldenballs', its a show where four people compete for a cash prize via a mix of luck, poker-faces and bold faced lies. The first round every player gets several 'Goldenballs', some of them containing cash, some containing 'Killer' balls. Players show off their front-balls (stop sniggering at the back there) to the other players while only they really know what the balls in their backrow contains.

Yes this is from the show, I cant actually find any screenshots of this game anywhere online

Players then try and convince the other contestants to vote somebody out who isn't them via a mix of truth and lies. Somebody gets voted out and all their balls are binned (again, stop sniggering), some more balls are added and the whole thing happens again, somebody else gets voted out then there's some random picking to decide how much money there is to win and finally a 'Split/Steal' mechanic where players can either share, steal via one playing picking steal and the other share and if they both pick steal, they get nothing.

So how the hell is this supposed to work in a videogame correctly? Answer? It doesn't and the developers clearly didn't even try and make it work with rounds being shown as 'Truth, Lie 1, Lie 2 and Lie 3' with nothing saying what each lie is supposed to be or even if it matters since even after picking, the game still doesn't tell you what you supposedly said to the others. The whole thing feels random and irritating because of this, there happens to also be no reason to ever really try and win as the most you get is a 'You win' and back to the main menu you go.

Oh and the graphics are blocky and ugly, the sound terrible with one tune playing throughout the entire game and occasional badly-done sound-rips from the tv show are around too. There's also zero multiplayer present, meaning you can only ever go up against samey looking bot-players who react as if their actions were decided via a slot machine.

TLDR Version: This is DS Shovelware through and through with lazy and ugly graphics, boring gameplay, cheap sound and a empty feeling all-around for everyone involved.