Best/favorite eShop titles?

[pdSlooper]

Now that the service has been out for nearly 4 years, what titles do you think are the best (or your favorite) eShop titles?

Some of my favorite titles are the shortest, including the Mighty Switch Force games, Ikachan, and Fairune. It's always disappointing when a game ends quickly, but I'd rather have a shorter game that feels well-made and complete than a longer one that feels too ambitious and falls apart. Most of the longer games I liked are puzzle games, like the Picross e games and the Nikoli puzzles, particularly Akari and Slitherlink.

So far I've been let down by the DSiWare games. The only one I've been really impressed with has been Glow Artisan. I really like the selection of games on the Virtual Console, but honestly I already own most of those games on cart, so they don't compare to the newer games.

The biggest let-downs so far have been Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (VC), Art Style: PiCTOBiTS (DSiW), Edge (3DSD), and Secret Mysteries in New York (3DSD - a hidden object game).

[Kong Wen]

I've played the five Picross games, and they are my top five favourite eShop games.

[Claytone]

I haven't played that much eShop stuff, actually, but I really like the Sega 3D Classics titles. From a programming perspective, they're super cool, and of course, the source material tends to be good. Fun series.

[MerlinDrazziw]

Still have to check some of the VC and DSiWare, but WayForward delivered some fun titles on eShop.

[The Shoemaker]

Ignoring great multiplatform games like SteamWorld Dig, Shovel Knight and the rest, Xeodrifter is an eShop title I've enjoyed quite a bit. It's straight up a Metriodvania game, but lending itself more to the classic Metroid side of things. It's a short game, but it has a lot of secrets packed in and is good for speedrunning. It's kind of nice to have a game on the go you could actually beat in one sitting. First time around it took me 3 hours, but I could probably do it in about an hour now.

It has a neat customizable weapon aspect where you find little white circles you can use to apply to an attribute of your gun, affecting its speed, strength, size of bullets and wave like motion. You can put all of your points into strength and beat everything in one shot, put it all into speed and get as many hits in as possible, or put it somewhere in the middle. Charming game made by the devs of Mutant Mudds, Moon Chronicles and Doom.

I also have to give praise to Gunman Clive 2, and in turn Gunman Clive 1. The sequel is only $2.99 and it gives you a good amount of levels to run, gun and jump through. The game has a good difficulty that keeps you coming back and couple characters that really change it up. Gunman Clive can shoot like normal, while Chieftian Bob only has a spear and is limited to powerful short range attacks. Definitely worth it I'd say, plus the art style has this neat retro western vibe that looks really good in 3D.

For puzzle games I'm sure you all know of Pushmo and Crashmo, but another one I like is Ketzal's Corridors. It's an older one, but I'm not sure if it got as much attention. It's a little like tetris, but from a top down view. You have a tetris-like block you need to fit through outcoming walls by flipping it in different directions and even rotating it three dimentionally. You can to collect the hearts that are laying about along the way as well as to try and let your silhouette touch each corner of the hole in the wall to rack up combos. It has a lot of levels and quite a few different challenges as well as a multiplayer mode that uses just one 3DS and two people playing simultaneously.

More recent is BoxBoy, a puzzle game made by Hal (Kirby devs) You play as a box in a black and white world, it's all very modest. You essentially duplicate yourself making more and more boxes to get through each level. It's a simple premise that gets more and more complex, classic Nintendo philosophy. I think it's worth checking out.

(extra large in case someone doesn't feel like reading about each individual game).

[pdSlooper]

I picked Xeodrifter up after my original post, and it's up there with my favorites. It's short, but it's solid.

I'm turned off by the aesthetics of BoxBoy. It reminds me of so many iOS platformers with similar looks. Knowing it's Hal helps, though Hal isn't known for its puzzlers.

[Kong Wen]

Xeodrifter is an eShop title I've enjoyed quite a bit. It's straight up a Metriodvania game, but lending itself more to the classic Metroid side of things. It's a short game, but it has a lot of secrets packed in and is good for speedrunning. It's kind of nice to have a game on the go you could actually beat in one sitting. First time around it took me 3 hours, but I could probably do it in about an hour now.

It has a neat customizable weapon aspect where you find little white circles you can use to apply to an attribute of your gun, affecting its speed, strength, size of bullets and wave like motion. You can put all of your points into strength and beat everything in one shot, put it all into speed and get as many hits in as possible, or put it somewhere in the middle. Charming game made by the devs of Mutant Mudds—

I was starting to get on board until you said it was made by the developers of Mutant Mudds. Awful game. If this came out after Mutant Mudds and the devs learned some lessons from their earlier game, then I could maybe be convinced to give it a shot.

[pdSlooper]

Xeodrifter is definitely better than Mutant Mudds, but it's also a completely different genre, so it's hard to say how much they learned between games. If you're used to Metroid and Castlevania Metroidvanias, it's going to seem like a very easy, simplistic game.

[The Shoemaker]

Xeodrifter is an eShop title I've enjoyed quite a bit. It's straight up a Metriodvania game, but lending itself more to the classic Metroid side of things. It's a short game, but it has a lot of secrets packed in and is good for speedrunning. It's kind of nice to have a game on the go you could actually beat in one sitting. First time around it took me 3 hours, but I could probably do it in about an hour now.

It has a neat customizable weapon aspect where you find little white circles you can use to apply to an attribute of your gun, affecting its speed, strength, size of bullets and wave like motion. You can put all of your points into strength and beat everything in one shot, put it all into speed and get as many hits in as possible, or put it somewhere in the middle. Charming game made by the devs of Mutant Mudds—

I was starting to get on board until you said it was made by the developers of Mutant Mudds. Awful game. If this came out after Mutant Mudds and the devs learned some lessons from their earlier game, then I could maybe be convinced to give it a shot.

I thought Mutant Mudds was pretty solid, so I suppose it depends what your problems with Mutant Mudds were and whether or not those continue into this game. It definitely holds up the relative challenge Mutant Mudds had, and it does have exploration sections that involve going back and forth between the foreground and background similar to Mutant Mudds. But this is an exploration game, not a platformer. Mobility wise you have a lot more options than Mutant Mudds as you gain new abilities.

The game was on sale about two weeks ago, maybe it'll go up again in a month or so.

As for BoxBoy, the simplistic nature of its visuals go along well with the characters being simple blocks, but it depends on whether you're satisfied with that or not. The puzzles are satisfying, but about 42 levels in and I haven't run into too many difficult levels that require more than a couple minutes of thinking. I'm not sure exactly how many levels there are, but there are expert levels I haven't tried yet.

[MerlinDrazziw]

Xeodrifter isn't available here

But to get back to my previous post. From the DSiWare, I enjoyed Mighty Flip Champs and the bonus of Zelda: Four Swords. The other DSiWare games from WayForward were ok. From VC I was happy to play Metroid II again, that's still my favorite GB title. VC titles that were unknown/unplayed before I installed them, didn't do much for me. As for 3DSWare ... Mighty Switch Force, Pullblox (Pushmo) and The Denpa Men were some entertaining titles.