Welcome to DS on DS. This is where I'm going to be taking a look at the Nintendo DS and all of it's games. And when I say all, I mean it. We will be going from Metroid Prime: Hunters to Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends. From Tetris DS to Barbie 12 Dancing Princesses. Yes, I said Barbie.  Every Friday, I will write a review on the game I have chosen for the week.

This week I am going to be taking a look at Tornado.

Quirky games have always been appealing to me, so when I found out that there was a game on the Nintendo DS that allowed me to play as the scourge of trailer parks everywhere, I was excited.  I finally got my hands on Tornado, and I knew I needed to write about it.

In Tornado, you play as cats who create, you guessed it, tornadoes.  If that sentence doesn't immediately pique your interest then you need to go get your awesome sensor checked.  These cats are a part of the Cleanup Crew, who use tornadoes to clean up stuff and fling it into space..  A mysterious person, known only as Prince, used his Black Hole Device to steal everything on Earth and transported it to Planet 69.  And since they were working on Earth, he also ended up transporting the Cleanup Crew too.  You start off with Toki (not a bumblebee) and Gina, and you need to travel to different areas representing the different countries (like France and Iraq) and find various things across different levels, such as machine parts and the other crew members.

To start your tornado, and to keep it going through the level, you need to constantly draw circles on the bottom screen to keep power levels high.  The tutorial also says to use the touchscreen to direct your swirling vortex, but you can use the d-pad for that.  I highly suggest using the d-pad because it just plays better that way.  When you start out each level, you can only pick up certain items, like trees and people, but as you collect more, you get bigger and can pick up larger items, like the Eiffel Tower and pyramids.  It is very katamari-ish, and that isn't a bad thing at all.  While playing the different levels and trying to find the items you need, you will also find some items that will either unlock more music tracks or give you apower-up.  The power-ups vary from a twin tornado to being able to shoot out smaller tornadoes.

This game also seems to take some visual cues from the Katamari games as well.  Everything in game is done in a simple graphical style.  It is easy to tell what everything is while you are going around and sucking it up.  I have encountered some slow-down here and there, but it has been very brief and is actually hardly noticeable.  Other then that, everything runs smooth.

If you like games that stray from the norm and are just plain strange, this game would be money well spent.

Final Score: 8/10