What game do you recommend for the Nintendo DS?

I find it’s always a matter of personal taste, and have frequently been underwhelmed by highly rated games that just aren’t my style. You may want to take a peek at metacritic.com

My faves include Picross DS, Advance Wars DS, Lost in Blue I and II (which critics hated). I also liked Freedom Wings, which is impossibly hard and not well liked. NY Times Crossword gets super hard. Age of Empires offers lots of gameplay like Advance Wars, but the interface is slower. Also, you may want to pick up one of those board game collections. You’ll get good use out of them when you’re not in the mood to play something that requires a lot of time and concentration. I like Boggle/Yahtzee/Battleship/Monopoly, but there are others to choose from. Club House games is supposed to be a good value in that regard, but I’ve never played it.

Now’s a good time to buy, though because with so many new releases, there’s bound to be something good.

How is Zelda?

My favorite game on the DS is Metroid Prime: Hunters. It’s adventure mode isn’t all that great, but if you have wi-fi or friends to play with… It’s a blast! Get this for sure if you like FPS, or have wi-fi / friends with DS’s.

Mario Kart DS , Splinter Cell and Resident Evil

I prefer games that make good use of the stylus and touchscreen, so Kirby: Canvas Curse was really pretty great, as was Warioware: Touched!

And New Super Mario Bros is a must for any DS owner.

I agree it is a matter of taste buy the following games are ones I like.
any Final Fantasy
any Mario except the Sonic Oylmpic one
any WarioWare
Star Wars – The Complete Trilogy
any Zelda

Super Mario 64 DS is a great game, IMO.

I recently finished Zelda: Phantom hourglass. That Game used every feature of the DS! You have to blow into the microphone, draw shapes, do you own mapmaking, make notes on the maps and even close and open the DS in some stages of the game to progress! The game rocks on top of all the features. I have played most of the previous zelda games and this one was a good length and I didn’t get stuck very often. This game is very fun and addicting I couldn’t put it down until I had mastered all aspects of it and beaten the last guy, and of course there is a pretty good multiplayer game built in as well.

Metroid Pinball: The normal game is challenging and fun, it kind of blends the many aspect of the metroid series into a pinball game. It works very well for me. It is simple enough to play mindlessly for a while, but also deep enough that the more effort you put into it the more substance you find. The multiplayer mode seems bland at first until you get 3 or more people to play against (which they don’t have to own btw). I played with three others a while back and we ended up playing for 4 hours straight one evening. I ended up winning the most, but my thumbs were sore.