Holy nuts! There's some great footage of the
recently announced DSi (yeeeeeOW!) on Kotaku. Man, if
they had shown all those fantastic games at the last
Electronic Entertainment Expo, people would have been singing
Nintendo's praises rather than cursing its name for the last
three months. The RPG fans alone have plenty to get
excited about, with Kingdom Hearts, Chrono Trigger, Shining
Force, Mario and Luigi, and several flavors of Final Fantasy
all scheduled for release in the near future.
"But what about the hardware?," you ask (assuming that
you're even here to ask that question). Well, the DSi
represents a pretty big change from the previous two units in
a number of ways. First, the bad news... the rumors that
the Game Boy Advance cartridge slot would be kicked to the
curb turned out to be right on the money. It's gone for
good, just as Game Boy Color support was dropped from later
models of the Game Boy Advance. If you have an older
flash cartridge or one of those cart-based peripherals, you'd
better hold onto your current DS, because the new unit won't
take them.
Now for the improvements, and there are a lot of
them! The DSi includes not one, but two cameras.
The first is set on the system's hinge, allowing you to
interact with specially designed games. The second, set
in the back of the top screen, has a much sharper resolution
and lets you take snapshots of your friends. Then
there's the greatly expanded BIOS... previous systems gave you
rudimentary features like a clock and Pictochat, but the
new DS offers PDA-like functionality, with an MP3
player and web browser. It's probably safe to
assume that the DSi has extra RAM built in to accommodate
these two features, since the previous two handhelds required
a cartridge to surf the web.
The DSi also has an SD card slot, which leads us
to its most surprising new feature... Internet
commerce. You'll be able to download games and other
content from Nintendo's servers, which opens
up intriguing possibilities for gamers as well as
ample opportunities for Nintendo to shake its loyal user base
for every last dime. The downloadable content ranges in
price from free (gee, my favorite!) to 200, 500, and even 800
points. The thought of a download service for the DS
doesn't sound all that enticing... after all, if Wii Ware
games are scaled down from their retail counterparts, how
much more simplified would a DS
download be? However, it does open
the door a tiny crack for Game Boy Advance titles, which
would otherwise be inaccessible on the DSi.
So that's what you can expect from the latest Nintendo
DS. It's dropped the backward compatibility,
but gained a lot of nifty gadgets and gimmicks
that expand the scope of the system. It's starting
to move into convergence territory, an approach that didn't
work so well for the PSP but may actually pay dividends for
Nintendo. If it doesn't, they can always do what they
did with the Game Boy Micro and pretend it never existed!
I'm feeling especially accomplished today,
thanks to a project I finished last night. There's
never been a suitable controller for the Virtual Console
games on the Wii, so I set out to change that by bringing the
ultimate controller to Nintendo's latest game
system. I took a spare Saturn joypad, opened it, and
removed some of the components, including the cable and the
logic chip set in the center of the pad's printed circuit
board. Next, I connected a series of tiny wires to the
traces where the chip had rested, and soldered the other ends
of the wires to a connector. After some invasive surgery
on a cheap GameCube controller, I was left with this...
It doesn't look pretty, but let me tell you, it
works! I've given this a test run on a GameCube, and
every button but the L and R triggers (which I haven't wired
up on the GameCube controller yet) work perfectly.
That's a very good thing, but what's even better is that I can
take this controller and adapt it for use with practically any
other game console.in existence. Can you imagine Super
NES games with Saturn-quality control? Or, dare I make
the suggestion, 3DO games that are actually playable? I
can now, and I vow to make that dream a reality!
In less self-congratulatory news, I bought the Wii version
of Mega Man 9 on Monday, and it's been kicking my sorry butt
for the rest of the week. I'm planning a video review of
this game for next Monday, but what I'll say right now is that
the outrageous difficuty does detract from what could have
been the all-time best game in the series. As it is,
it's still one of the highlights in the game's history...
although Mega Man and Mega Man 2 will always be my personal
favorites, Mega Man 9 impressed me more than the third game
and is loads better than the fourth and fifth. If you've
got some spare Wii points, do yourself a big favor and
spend them on this release.
Oh yeah, one more thing before I go. Awesome NES is closing out
the Ns with reviews of the Ninja Gaiden trilogy, as well as
Nintendo World Championships, a triple shot of Super Mario
Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris that has become a hot commodity
among collectors thanks to its extreme rarity. Only a
handful of these cartridges were made for a contest held by
Nintendo nearly twenty years ago, making them worth thousands
of dollars... or tens of thousands if you can find the coveted
gold cartridges given to finalists!
Hey, I'm updating again! Occasionally,
anyway.
So, I just beat Mercenaries 2: World in Flames over the
weekend. People have been complaining a lot about the
bugs in the game, but the one that really twists my last nerve
in a knot is Mercs 2's uncanny knack for crashing just as I
complete a side mission. I could almost forgive this
while playing the previous game, because it was designed for
the original Xbox, and we all know how temperamental the Xbox
360's backward compatibility can be. However, crashes
in Mercenaries 2 are a lot harder to accept, since
the game was tailor made for the Xbox 360. Maybe I
should forget about all the small fry I missed while playing
through the story mode and just move on to Mass
Effect...
Outside of that, I don't have too much to discuss.
The sequel to Rock Band was just released. Electronic Arts
recently abandoned its repeated attempts to acquire its
competitor Take-Two by force. After months of being
bested by the PSP, the DS Lite has finally risen to the top of
the Japanese sales charts. And there's a new installment
of Awesome NES, featuring such
titles as NightShade and NES Open Tournament Golf. I
guess that's it! I'll talk to you later.
I don't really have much to say at the moment (and
anything I did say would be a lot of emotionally
charged, intensely personal drivel that would be best
reserved for a LiveJournal post), but I do feel an obligation
to update this site. So here you go, folks... have some
Nintendo DS Reviews, an
update to Awesome NES,
and a handful of videos. I may have
some commentary on the latest Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade
games at a later date, but right now, this is as much as I can
give you.
I need time away from the site. At the moment, I
need time away from everything.
Mickey Mouse takes center stage in this installment of
Awesome NES, with reviews
of Mickey Mousecapades as well as two Disney-licensed
educational titles. The rodent mascot didn't shine until
his first appearance on the Sega Genesis, but if you want to
see what he was up to before he hit his stride, now's your
chance!
These updates are getting shorter and shorter, aren't
they? It's almost like I've stopped caring...
