The third pillar, many people forget the troubled beginnings of the Nintendo DS, and for this anniversary I want to pay tribtue to its tough beginnings and how it became one of my favorite gaming consoles of all time. The Gameboy successor which was not a Game Boy successor at first was unveiled to a lot of criticism. The PSP had just been announced and it offered near PS2 quality graphics while this toy looking 2 screen device with a touch screen looked for kids and not great for gaming with N64 quality graphics. This was the opposit of sleek and techie that the Playstation Portable had. This was Nintendo’s third pillar so if it failed they would continue the Game Boy line which is why I dismissed it at first. It took a while before I was convinced.
The actual system got a redesign when it finally launched a few months later..and not for the better. It now lacked the more futuristic touches the prototype had and instead looked like a boring bulky hunky PC Case. It didn’t help that most of the launch games were for the most part tech demos with few games like Super Mario 64 DS being full games. And even then that was only an enhanced port/remake of the original. I gotta hand it to Nintendo they did went crazy with their marketing and their Touch This campaign. Brilliant. Crazy. I still couldn’t get myself hyped for this system as much as I wanted to, it had too much I disliked to bite the bullet.
I was waiting for any excuse to buy it, in fact I had already bought Feel The Magic even without a DS to play it in. When Mario Kart DS released with a bundle I had to get it and so I did. I came home and started to play with Pictochat and while fun I had no one to chat with, and besides the time there wasn’t much of a UIto play around in. I did play some GBA games and had some fun with the games i had. I did get a small pause in my Nintendo DS since it had a dead pixel right in the middle. I went to get it exchanged but they said I could only get it refunded and then buy it again but I ended up deciding to do it a bit later and I just never did. My time with the original model was limtied but it was big, comfotable but not portable. I loved the thumb stylus thing that they never reused. Really at this time a lot of experimental games came out which are the heart of the Nintendo DS but it was only a mild success.
That is until the Nintendo DS came out. It was sleek, sexy like an aApple product. Small and classy not to mention cheaper. As soon as it released I had to get one, I was hyped for the Revolution and finally understood what Nintendo was doing with the DS. By this point it was clear this was their second pillar and not a third one. A ton of early DS games were now heavily discounted which I got to buy and enjoy, including all time classics like Ace Attorney, Another Code Trace Memories, Trauma Center and even ports like Resident Evil Deadly Silence. I had a blast during this time playing all those quirky games. And then I had even more fun with the touch generation games. Stuff like Big Brain Academy, Brain Age, Elite Beat Agents, Master of Illusion all made the DS special to me.
We did eventually get more and more traditional like games on the system that only used the second screen as a map, but the fun ones that had gimmicks like blowing, closing the screen etc were the true heart of the system. That’s why I wanted a DS and not a PSP. That’s not to say the more traditional games weren’t great on their own. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, the Professor Layton Games, all classics. Just like the previous handhelds, there were tons of editions, colors and whatnot for the DS line of systems.
Then we got to the DSi which to me felt like a needless redesign. I mean for the most part it just tried to modernize the DS with an actual UI and having an onine shop to download games but even then it was a bit underwhelming for an upgrade. I do think they are cool features, the camera and the dsiware store were cool. The actual system felt mostly the same but less sleek and no way to play GBA games unlike its predecessors. I did enjoy the Game & Watch games in the store and some of the downloads like having the Brain Age games as apps, other stuff like the Animal Crossing Clock, not so much. We got another redesign with the DSi XL which was aimed at an older audience and they were aiming a much older audience, like grandparents. The marketing reflected that as well as the colors in the orignal models. Unironically this actually becaume one of the better models. It was big, fun to hold, included a pen like stylus, all the DSi features. It’s just a great redesign to play games in. It came out too late in the systems life and marketing messed up at aiming for an audience that no longer cared (despite that same audiene having been onboard with the previous systems.
The Nintendo DS became one of my favorite systems, not only handheld but general. It fulfilled every promise it made out more so than the Wii. It was not a Game Boy but it didn’t need to be. I only with the 3DS had carried over some of the heart the DS had instead of opting for more traditional games. I’d say the Nintendo DS Lite and the DSi XL are both the definitive ways to play DS games on, depending on whether you preferred portability and sleekness or just quality.