Review: 100 Classic Books Collection

Brain Training. You can blame Brain Training, fanboys. Now onto the game.

100 Classic Books Collection is a, erm, collection of 100 Classic Books. These 100 Books all range in quality, and we haven’t yet read every single one, as there’s the obvious flaw in Nintendo’s logic: Reading on the screen doesn’t fell natural.

We felt this when we first played Brain Training’s Syllable Count game, and while we love Phoenix Wright and Hotel Dusk, there’s a fair difference.

To put it into a book-related anthology, let’s say that Wright is Shakespeare, and Classic Collection is Dickens. Capcom’s Law ‘em up is designed to be played, shown, not simply read. A major part of the PW experience is the sprites; seeing the faces of the criminals as you crack them, the disappointment of Gumshoe’s face when his wages are cut, and the prosecutor’s actions, as cold sweat drips down their face. However, there’s none of that in 100CBC. It’s a crusty old relic, which is just words. And it doesn’t work, staring at a screen for a couple of hours to read.

We’d say that arguably the best of the bunch are the two Sherlock Holmes stories. While their not the best in the series, they stand out when compared to the likes of The Adventures of Gulliver, and some of Shakespeare’s works.

Still, it‘s amazing value for money. How much would you spend on 100 Books, many of which said to be some of the best ever written? Usually, £1 per book would be pretty good, so for 100, you’d pay, ooh, £100 or so. HOWEVER! This is where Nintendo’s advertising genius steps in. You end up paying the equivalent of about 5p per Book, if you go by our local Sainsbury’s price of £18.97.

But the actually, genuine genius is the Downloads. You have a set amount of space on the cartridge, shown in a Casual-unfriendly ‘Kb’, and using ‘Harper Coins’, you can download new books of your choice. There’s ten up at the time of writing, and it’s unknown as to whether Nintendo will add more, but we hope so. However, you get nothing but the title and author to enjoy the purchase, so it’s a bit of pot luck as to what you get.

Other things include a setting where you can rate a book out of ten when you’ve finished it and upload it online, it gives you the average score, and then you get menu screens, option screens, and that’s about it, really.

Still, it’s a good barging, and worth a look- Especially if it suffers the same fate as Magic Made Fun and fall to about a fiver quick.