Polar Bowler
Nintendo DS - Released - December 1, 2008
Polar Bowler is a bowling game. But no ordinary, the game uses an Arctic theme (more or less). Furthermore, there is not even a ball in the game.
First off, the game offers two different game modes, “Straight Bowling” and “Power Bowling”. Furthermore there are 7 different lanes and 6 different characters in the game, so you can play an Ice bear, a Penguin, a Snowman, or even Santa Claus. But the game starts only with one lane and one character.
Straight Bowling acts much like the classic bowling. You have the ten pins and your character, which is the game’s substitute for your ball, and you must smash as many pins as possible in order to get a good score (and to win the game when you are not playing alone). You start your ride by positioning your character at the beginning where you want him to slide from. In contrary to a real bowling, you can’t throw the “ball” diagonal, but that’s not needed too. Once your ride has started, you can move your character left and right and change his destination. You can even slide a curve, if you’re good. If not, the physic do their job. You can even control how fast you slide, but that only at the beginning of the ride. Their, you can choose the speed by tighten the line you use to throw you into the lane.
Power Bowling sets on top of this. Here the game gets spiced up by Power Ups. After you positioned your character and tightened your line, at that time you can’t change your position anymore, Power Ups appear on the lane. Once you collect them, they work in this throw, and this throw only, once you return to the start, their bonuses will be reset. So you must collect them, and use them immediately (will be automatically used, when the character impacts on the pins). There are two different types of Power Ups, one that affect your character, and one that affects your score.
The following Power Ups are possible to find: Bomb (doubles the power of the character; at the impact it will smash more pins then regular), Zap (will send an electrical discharge out on impact with the pins, which will smash much more then the bomb), Vapor (will vaporize all pins on impact; will result in a strike even when you only touch one of the pins at the far sides), Multiplier (will multiply the amount of pins you smash with the type you collected for your total score), Multiplier can be found as 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, and 6x. Smashing 5 pins with a multiplier of 3x will result in 5 regular points and 10 power points.
The basic scoring is on both game modes the same, it is also the same as regular bowling rules. In Power Bowling mode, once you finished the game, the amount of power points you gathered, will be added to the regular points, and so both of them will determine your final score. So, with many strikes, you can get awesome scores.
Every time you reach 200 points on a single lane, you unlock a new lane or a new character.
And like a real bowling game, the game can be a multiplayer game, where up to four players can participate, playing on the same computer in Hotseat mode.
