Pipe Mania (DS)

1990's Pipe Dream was a favourite of mine among the games inclided in the thirty-two game Game Boy multicart I had as a kid and I know there's probably been a ton of updates and sequels and so on, with or without the approval of the original developers, but this one (which does seem to be official) is the only one I've played. It's something of a mixed bag, being a true sequel in the sense that it builds upon the game's concept with a lot of new ideas that really add to the formula, but it also implements some more modern structural ideas of which I'm less fond. And somewhere in the middle is an idea that makes the game worse (though it's mostly optional). In case you're not familiar with the concept, you have to lay down pieces of pipe in different shapes (randomly given to you like the pieces in Tetris), to direct the flow of a liquid from one place to another, usually with a quota of spaces it has to pass through first. To get the good stuff out of the way first, there's generous…