More strange Nintendo DS games than you can point a stylus at

In a kind of fanboy tit-for-tat, I was totally prepared to match Sergio’s rundown of the top 8 weirdest Nintendo DS games with a similar list of ca-razy PSP titles this week. The problem is, that there simply aren’t enough weird PSP games to populate a list worth writing home about. Now, before you DS fanatics form an angry mob and burn down my house for being biased against your favorite handheld, keep in mind that I am completely willing to admit that the PSP does play host to some awful, uninspired shovelware. The problem is that there just isn’t anything weird enough, this side of Japan, to warrant a scathing blog post. What I did find, however, is that Sergio’s excellent post last week in no way exhausted the list of bizarre DS games. In fact, I was able to find a bunch more unbelievably strange titles without much exertion whatsoever, and that’s exactly the type of blog post I felt like writing on a sunny afternoon. So, here they are: five more of the weirdest Nintendo DS games currently on the store shelves.

Face Training (pictured) When I was a kid, my grandmother used to warn me that if I continued to make those faces, I might end up stuck that way forever. Well, facening, the recent beauty trend sweeping Japan, is predicated on that exact proposition: you can bend, squint, stretch and wrinkle your way to a prettier face in only minutes a day. Since the DS is host to a number of other ridiculous “training” programs, I guess the addition of one more is not such a big deal, except this one involves making funny faces at the supplied camera to mimic a freaky expression that is supposed to make you beautiful.

John Deere’s Harvest Heartland Frankly, I’ve always found the premise of growing vegetables and raising sheep in Harvest Moon a little bit on the strange side, particularly when the designers added the ability to run pre-scripted game on the village hottie in between milking sessions. But this corporate cash-in on the popularity of the beloved farm-sim is a bit over the top. Hey, designers, the freaks who like Harvest Moon games apparently do it for the methodical, zen-like gameplay, not for the blatant consumerism. And besides, we doubt there is very much overlap between the DS-owning demographic and the potential customers for your line of industrial farm equipment and chainsaws.

Touch Dic Pull your mind out of the gutter. Easily confused with another weird Nintendo DS game from Japan which involves young female witches and a lot of inappropriateness, this “game” is probably the most useful one of the bunch. Touch Dic is a convenient and much-needed dictionary application for your Nintendo DS with a touch-screen interface (see, it all makes sense). But, unlike the ratty old copy of Merriam-Webster you so furtively leafed through in the third grade, all of the dirty entries have been removed from this one. Oh, the irony.

Ultimate and Frisbee Golf Have you seen those weirdos on campus running around feverishly hucking frisbees toward a mutually agreed-upon target and then counting their strokes like in real golf? Well, now you can join in the fun in the safe confines of a video game, without feeling like such a hopeless dork IRL. The Frisbee ultimate mode features “realistic personality types, including the passive-aggressive biology grad student who always has to look up the official rules every time the disc goes out of bounds.” I hate ultimate frisbee, I really do, and this game does nothing to further its cause as a real — let alone enjoyable — sport.

I did it, mum Anybody who seeks parental approval through their performance in video games is either not playing the right kind of games, or is home-schooled like the poor sap featured on the front of this box. When not having his underpants pulled over his head by the mean kids from the public school down the street, little Sigmund likes to compete in a variety of decidedly un-fun coloring and logic exercises. Perhaps the freakiest thing about this title is that instead of boring victory music, parental authority figures can record their own voices into the game to reward and chastise their children when they complete a puzzle (”Adequate job this time, but just wait till your father gets home”). Further evidence that contrary to Jack Thompson’s opinion, parents have no business buying or designing video games.

Well there you have it, another batch of decidedly weird Nintendo DS games. We hear of more and more of these coming down the pipeline every day, so it is entirely possible that we will have another list soon. Heck, at this rate we might be able to make it a monthly feature. Be sure to let us know about your own favorite quirky DS title, or one that we overlooked, in the comments section below.