Here's a quick history lesson for you. Long before the first opening bars of the Tetris theme played on the first Game Boy, Nintendo was letting fans take their love of video games on the road with them. From 1980 through 1991, Nintendo manufactured a line of portable LCD games called the Game & Watch series. These little handheld devices were inexpensive and entertaining, and ended up being big hit in the video game market. In fact, if not for the popularity of the Game & Watch, we might have never had a Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, DS, or DSi. Now Nintendo is giving DSi owners a chance to return to their retro roots with re-creations of some classic Game & Watch titles, available for download as DSiWare through the DSi Shop. The first of these, available for 200 Nintendo Points each, are: Mario's Cement Factory, Judge, and Chef.

Each of the Game & Watch downloads is its own individual release, but it's not all that hard to put together a review of the series as a whole. After all, the graphics and sounds aren't all that different across the titles. Nintendo went out of its way to faithfully recreate the LCD experience of the originals. You can even see the layered visuals, like those old digital watches from back in the day. The developers even went so far as to recreate the painted parts of the screen to frame the action. Add to that, the sound effects are near pitch perfect duplicates of the beeps, bloops, and grainy tinges of "music" instantly familiar to anyone who ever played a Game & Watch unit. In fact, at first glance, you'd be hard pressed to tell any noticeable difference between the downloaded software and the original hardware. It's ironic that recreating a retro experience as faithfully as this is actually a testament to capabilities of the DS hardware.

While the presentation of each Game & Watch title is the same, there is some variety in how each game plays. In Judge, two characters each hold hammers in their hands, waiting until they both raise a card with a number 1-9 above their heads. Once the numbers pop up, the player with the higher number must try to attack, and the one with the lower number tries to dodge. In Chef, players have to scramble across a kitchen to keep flipping ingredients with their pan in order to keep the food from falling to the rats on the floor. And the last game in the initial DSiWare lineup is Mario's Cement Factory, in which players have to run back and forth across a construction site, emptying wet concrete from containers and into trucks waiting in a loading area at the bottom of the screen. Each game has a Game A and Game B mode. In Chef and Cement Factory, Game B mode is simply a higher difficulty level than Game A. Judge, though, stands out as its Game B is a two-player version of the title, with both players controlling their respective character on a single system. Admittedly, it's a little cramped on the DSi (though likely not the new DSi XL), but it's still fun to have the option available. All three games can also be set to Time mode, turning the DSi into a glorified clock ... basically the "Watch" half of Game & Watch.

Okay, I'll be the first to admit you'll probably never use the term "cutting edge" when describing these Game & Watch titles, They're not exactly the types of games that push the DSi to its limits. Instead, they're little bite-sized morsels of video game nostalgia that are still a blast to play some fifteen or twenty years after their initial release. And with a price point of just 200 Nintendo Points ($2) each, you'd be hard pressed not to get your money's worth out of 'em.

Final Score: B+