l-dopa

I love my Nintendo DS. It somehow keeps coercing me to feed it new $30 games, while my Sorny PSP just sits, uncharged, friendless and alone. Why do I cherish this stupid Nintendo dingus so?

• The games are awesome. Kirby. WarioWare. MarioKart. Advance Wars. Castlevania — which I never liked at all until the DS version! The PSP has Grand Theft Auto, with one analog stick. As much as I love beating up hookers, I do require slightly more variety in my portable simulated violence.
• The battery lasts forever. Seriously, it will go for days and days and days.
• It’s got an analog volume slider. So important when you have to carefully adjust volume between “audible” and “inaudible”.
• It sleeps instantly, like a PowerBook. It also wakes instantly, like a PowerBook. Also: having the media on ROM cartridges mean no loading time. Pull it out, open it up, and play.
• It’s only $130; This is just about half of what a PSP costs.
• The thing is backwards comaptible with older GameBoy Advance games, thus instantly opening up a market of cheap-as-hell $10-20 games, some of which — Zelda, Metroid, WarioWare, SuperStar Saga — are quite excellent.
• The touch screen turns out to be actually quite useful and fun! and the additional “upper” second screen, less so, but still, sometimes nice to have. And: the ugly-ass clamshell design protects each screen from damage, vs. the PSP, which is actually magnetically drawn to sharp pointy objects (a little-known fact!)
• Wireless multiplayer play on the DS generally assumes only one person has a copy of the game and thus automatically shoots the game out to everyone. Neat.
• Eventually Nintendo will release this MPEG-4 media player in the US and blow all of our minds. Seriously, check out the video of the interface, it looks it was designed by a team of the criminally insane.

My only gripe is that the thing is simply butt-ugly and unsexy as hell, looking way more similar to a cruddy 80′s relic than a high-tech gizmo like this should. However, given the neck-and-neck competition with Sony, and given the awesome design Nintendo’s been pulling out with their upcoming Revolution console, I expect the next revision of the Nintendo DS to look far more sleek and modern; and I bet any gamer on your Christmas/Hannukah list would be totally psyched to get one.

~jeff

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