Fossil Fighters was available for play in the Nintendo Booth on the show floor today. The game is not in development at any in house Nintendo studio, but is being published by the company. Regardless, the game still sported a very Pokemon-like feel, including characters, humor, setting, and gameplay.

The demo was split into two pieces; Fossil Cleaning, and Dinosaur Battling. Fossil Cleaning being the precursor for Battling, I decided to start there.

My character was brought into a special rpom, and a large rock appeared on the bottom DS screen with an outline of a dinosaur skull displayed on the top. I was given three tools, a hammer, drill, and x-ray, and told to extract the skull from the rock. I took the hammer and began chiseling away the rock. Layers of it slowly broke away, eventually revealing the encapsulated skull. At this point I was told to take my drill and slowly clean away all of the smaller piece of outstanding rock in order to fully reveal the skull. I also needed to blow away the remaining debris from the drill every so often with the microphone.

As I was performing these actions, I noticed the skull on the top screen slowly filling with blue, eventually reaching a line which had split the skull outline in half. Apparently as I extracted pieces away successfully I was awarded blue points. A quick whack from the hammer directly to the bones quickly displayed red fill in the skull outline above. According to the game, I need to keep the blue points over the halfway mark in order to successfully extract the skull. Depending on that ratio after all of the rock had been removed I received a score.

Extracting the skull proved more challenging and fun than I had originally anticipated. After receiving my score, the true purpose of the extraction was revelead: recreating that dinosaur from its bones. In this case, I had made a Vivosaur. This creature was then used for the battling half of the demo.

In this mode, I was assigned a team of three dinosaurs in a grid of four spaces shaped like a diamond. I faced off against a similar team in a similar setup. The battle allowed me to attack first due to being weaker overall. Each dinosaur on the grid had a variety of different attacks and defense, each of which cost a certain amount of fossil points. These points recharged a certain amount in between rounds, so at least for this limited demo, it made sense to exhaust all of the given points in each round. Presumably, proper utilization of these points will be more important in the future.

The demo had me attacking back-and-forth with the computer controlled enemy until I eventually triumphed. The gameplay felt very standard for an RPG, though it lasted for an excessively long time. It wasn't particularly fun, but this could possibly be attributed to the lack of depth of the demo and the small range of strategy that could be employed to win.

Following completion of the battle, the demo ended, so I'm not certain what the repercussions of success are following the bout. Given that the game has some better depth and further interesting tie-in with the fossil cleaning mode, it seems as if it could turn out well.