Crazy Or Genius?

Nintendo DS: First Thoughts

Posted Wed, 04 Jan 2006 02:58:55 GMT to Posted in Geek, Reviews

A few weeks back I bought myself a Nintendo DS for my birthday. Now, normally it is usually hard for me to play anything more than ‘twitch’ games on my main PC, due to my regular busy schedule. However, I noticed that I generally have down time between tasks that is spent just sitting around or aimlessly surfing the web. I figured I could use this time to play games with one of the current gen portable consoles. But why the DS and not the PSP? Several reasons really: I have fond memories of my old Nintendo products. Nintendo seems to innovate in gameplay more than the competitors (and dual screens seem cool). Oh, and Final Fantasy and Shining Force (in various incarnations) are/will be available for it. Coincidentally, the Mario Kart/DS bundle came out shortly before my birthday, and my friend has been going on about how awesome that game is, so I got that too. <!-more-> Initial impressions:

Right now the dual screen doesn’t do much (in Mario Kart). Then again, I used to hate pausing to view a map, so we will see how future games handle it.

I hate the fact that there is no battery indication. I hate playing a game and all of a sudden my DS going dead. I mean, they have a flashing light for testing Wi-fi connectivity, why not have one of them flash steadily when the battery is low? At least then I would know that I need to wrap things up, maybe save, and then exit gracefully.

Range of the Wi-fi connection seems a little slow, and I have had some problems getting connectivity over the internet, but some of that might have to do with the set up of the access points I have been connecting to over the DS itself.

Doesn’t support the GBA link mode. For example, in Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced you could link two GBA units and do co-operative and competitive missions and get extra stuff. Not so with the DS. The rest of the backward compatibility works fine, but I thought doing this for the DS over WiFi for GBA games would have been a no brainer. I suppose the most likely cause is hard coded hardware information in the GBA cartridged, but it still would have been nice to have.

All in all I am enjoying my purchase. Mario Kart is a blast and I am loving going retro and playing some of my favorite older games. The fact that Final Fantasy 3-6 are coming out (4 is already out) only strengthens my decision in my own mind. Suddenly, waiting doesn’t seem as boring any more…......