Foto Frenzy: Spot the Difference for Nintendo DS

Foto Frenzy: Spot the Difference is a Nintendo DS photo puzzle in which the player compares two pictures and taps every change before the clock runs out. WorthPlaying reviewed it in May 2010 and gave 7.0 out of 10.

Overview

The game follows the familiar spot-the-difference pattern, with real photographs instead of drawings. The ESRB summary lists landmarks, food, animals, landscapes and sports among the subjects, and rates the game E for Everyone with no content descriptors. Sanuk Games is the developer named in WorthPlaying’s review, and Storm City appears as publisher under two spellings.

Dates are a minor puzzle of their own. The WorthPlaying review and retail listings place it in 2009, with 24 November given in the review’s data, whereas a Michigan State University library record writes 2010. A neighbouring title from the same publisher, Beastly: Frantic Foto, is a different game with its own ESRB entry.

How it plays

The top screen carries the reference photograph and the bottom screen the doctored one. Brian Dumlao’s review explains that the main mode gives each picture five flaws to find within a time limit, and that missing too many sends the player back to the start of the round. Enough passed pictures lead to a boss puzzle, which is either a sliding tile puzzle or the hunt for one flaw across a run of pictures.

A Custom menu holds three more options. Spot the Difference repeats the main game with a choice of difficulty and picture category. Extreme Frantic gives three minutes to clear as many single-error pictures as possible. Puzzle offers sliding puzzles made from the game’s own images, to be finished in six minutes or less.

Controls are limited to tapping the touch screen, which Dumlao calls responsive. He observes that some changes are obvious and others take a sharp eye, and that tiny flaws are harder to see on the small DS panel, giving DSi XL owners an advantage.

Release and credits

Up to four players can share one cartridge in Cooperative, Competitive and Last Man Standing modes, according to the review, so no second copy is needed. The review counts over 200 puzzles and calls it a budget title without quoting a price. A product page for a used copy advertises over 5,000 challenges across more than 200 themed puzzles; no other source repeats that number.

Reception

Dumlao’s verdict was that the game is hard to resist if photo puzzles appeal: the single-genre focus works out pretty well, the puzzle count and the one-cartridge multiplayer are strong for the price, and the images fill the screen without visible compression. He took points off because the changes are fixed in each image, so a solved picture gives away its answers, because replay value drops after all 200 pictures have been seen, and because the soundtrack has only three instrumental tracks. The timer alarm also sounds early, at one quarter of the time remaining. His advice was not to try to unlock everything in a single sitting.

Can you still play it?

The game ships as a DS card, so it starts on the DS, DS Lite and DSi, and on any Nintendo 3DS system in DS mode. It does not start on a Wii U or Switch. Nothing about the title is DSi-only, so a card bought in another region still works. Nintendo discontinued the 3DS family on 16 September 2020; used consoles remain the way to run it.