Pogo in my Pocket

When the Nintendo DS first came out I wished aloud to Gren that I’d love to play Pogo on it. Just to connect to pogo.com through my DS somehow and have it just like the web version. My dream hasn’t completely come true, but I can play Pogo on my DS!! Gren got me Pogo Island for Nintendo DS for my birthday last month. It has some of my favorite Pogo games; Tri-Peaks Solitaire, Squelchies and Poppit. It also has Phlinx, and Word Whomp both of which I don’t care for too much. I can play just the game in “Quick Play” mode or play the slightly board game-like “Island Adventure” mode.

With “Island Adventure” I play the games with specific challenges such as getting a streak of 8 cards in Tri-Peaks solitaire. “Island Adventure” mode revolves around the story that the Pogo mascots wrecked their boat on an island and need to fix it. In addition to the challenges you play mini games where you repair the sail, sort rusty nuts and bolts from the good ones and sling shot the mascots into boxes on the boat. These mini games add nothing for me and I groan when I have to play them.

Like on pogo.com I can get badges for each game. I am able to get 8 of them, but so far the most I have per game is 5. I was sad to see the website is doing very little to integrate the DS game other than a free outfit and accessories for your “mini” character. When Pogo came out with games for the mobile phone they had a badge book designated to those badges. There isn’t a badge book to show off your Pogo Island badges.

There is connectivity via wi-fi where I can upload my tokens to my online account. The only complaint I have about that is that it doesn’t save my login info and password. So each time I have to poke out my login on the tiny on-screen keyboard. I do have several complaints about this game, but I still play it daily. I hope Pogo makes another with different games in it. My suggestions would be Ace’s Up, Mahjong Garden, Spider Solitaire, Lottso and Payday Freecell. I could keep naming, but that’s a good start.