Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force (2008, Nintendo DS) notes

List of bad game design in _Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force_ (Nintendo DS, 2008):
1. Snow Trekker minigame makes you basically constantly talk or make noise when you're over water to be able to move, and seemingly requires perfect memorization of the map to get the gold medal.
2. The built-in way to decode the Tic Tac Code in missions is laughably slow and terrible, just use the image of the code from the club penguin wiki and your computer's notepad for your decoding needs because you're not going to get shit done with what 1st Playable gave you.
3. The Ice Fishing mini-game is completely random, instead of following a set pattern like on PC. Also, nowhere in game tells you that catching any squid prevents Mullet from spawning. (I only found that out via GameFAQs.)
4. There is no way to replay side missions outside of starting a new save file.
Good game design:
1. Island decorations and extra missions appear when playing on holidays, adding replayablility. (Specifically; April Fools, Christmas, Halloween, and the Summer Solstice.)
2. You could get additional missions (and Club Penguin Times issues to read on the go as like an ebook thing) by connecting to console.clubpenguin.com. These are saved to your cartidge's save file, and can be shared via local wireless. (Making it possible for them to be shared after they stop getting distributed.)
3. The touch pad controls for Cart Surfer are really intuitive and easy to use.
4. Buying clothes to dress up your in-game pengu from the catalog gives a use for them when you're unable to upload coins.
5. It feels *really good* to play on real hardware, with honestly smoother movement than the online PSA missions.
6. The Snow Boarding minigame *rocks*
7. The soundtrack features all the 2008 Club Penguin music you know and love, but ramped up to *11*.
Design that makes me go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:
1. Jet Pack Adventure's touch screen controls aren't really a good or bad change, it's just kinda There.
2. DGamer.
3. The low-res artifacted textures are *passable* when playing at the game's normal resolution, but I would have liked it if they future proofed it more by using an alternate method of storing them that looked better upscaled. It's really only an issue on emulators, where you shouldn't be playing the game anyway due to how DS-catered the controls are.
4. Activating random objects to get a coin is a fun idea to reward players for messing around in missions, but the single coins you get are practically useless both on DS and PC, so if you want to earn coins playing the minigames is just better in every way since you get tons more from doing that. It's not harming anything, but it could have been better executed.
5. Playing minigames as part of mission objectives is fun! But not being able to replay the mission-specific minigame levels outside of missions is not particularly fun (and clearly 1st Playable agreed with me on that, since they fixed this in Herbert's Revenge.)
6. More 3d models outside of Ultimate Proto-Bot 10,000 and the Snow Trekker would have been cool, but the predominantly 2d style doesn't harm the game.
7. The fact that minigame high scores track the number of coins you were awarded instead of the actual score you earned in the minigame is confusing at first, but you wrap your head around it soon enough.