Atlus is releasing a large amount of RPGs across many systems in the next year. Since I've enjoyed some of their games in the past, I couldn't give up the opportunity to check out Contact for the DS. On hand was one of the localizers, so it was great to fill in some of the holes as it was obvious that it was a very initial translation - nothing was correctly named, simply titled "food12" and "item3." I started by moving around, which I could do both with the d-pad as well as simply dragging the stylus around where I wanted to go. Before I went outside, I hopped into the bed and took a nap. While the main character was napping, I was able to control the space dog that came with the professor; he aspires to be a cat, and thus was wearing a cat costume complete with cat ears. I was able to point him towards various objects around him which made him happy, such as letting him sleep on his bed, feeding him food, and other actions.

When the main character woke up again, I took him outside; the professor had converted his space ship into a sailing ship to make it "inconspicuous." When I tapped on the character a menu with four characters came up, and the same four menus could be accessed using the A-B-X-Y buttons in the same pattern. Tapping one symbol, or Y, gave me a menu with many tabs, including foods, possible spaceship parts, and the decals menu. Tapping the crossed swords or using B let me move into battle mode, which allowed me to be ready to attack enemies, though it did slow down my movement speed. I couldn't find any items to equip in my short jaunt but another version of the game was further along and the main character had been equipped with a small knife. Battle is real time, and involves moving in for an attack and hopefully dodging any counteraction, which isn't as easy as it sounds. I was able to kill most enemies that I was presented with, but when I played much further in, I did manage to get myself killed. Despite the untimely death, the game was a definite pleaser, and I am looking forward to seeing the full translation later this year.