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I just bought a DS through an offer on Nintendo UK's website. £130 for a DS with Mario 64 and demos of Wario Ware Touched! and Metroid Prime Hunters. Oh, and a T-shirt that says "Touch Me" on the chest and is roomy enough for two fatbeards to wrestle in. Seemed like a good deal to me.
The DS is awesome. It's appealingly chunky, with a pleasingly Game 'n' Watch feel to it (although my flatmate is of the opinion that it's a little bit too chunky to really be comfortable to hold without some hand contortions), the screens are pin-sharp and bright, the battery lasts forever, and the stylus, which seemed like utter lunacy to me when it was announced, is marvellous.
Wario Ware Touched! is the game that's most obviously designed for the system; in fact, it almost feels like the idea for the game came before the idea for the DS itself, so perfectly are they suited to each other. I've played Wario Ware Inc. on the GBA before, which is hilarious and hugely fun, but Touched!, if this demo is anything to go by, is even better. Five-second bursts of completely random problems solved with the stylus on the bottom screen, completely intuitively: bursting balloons, striking matches, punching cats (they seem to like it, oddly), skeet shooting, drawing trampolines to help a grinning potato bounce to the moon... I can't believe I doubted Nintendo's ability to make the stylus work. Touched! is bursting with applications for it.
Metroid is another DS innovation that I doubted. Firstly, the idea of stripping the slow and steady exploration element of the (fantastic) GameCube Metroid and turning it into a frantic multiplayer first-person shooter seemed rather to miss the point of the defiantly non-shootery original. Secondly, early reports suggested that the stylus control was frustrating.
Again, I was wrong. Hunters keeps all the spooky atmospherics of Prime, and successfully replaces the 'scan everything, take your time' philosophy with a more fluid, conventionally FPS control system that is much more intuitive than the slightly cumbersome Prime, which took me a while to master. In fact, I'd say that using the D-pad to control movement and the stylus to look around is the closest console gaming is ever going to get to the PC's perfect mouse-and-keypad FPS control system; the stylus screen is so accurate and responsive that going back to the dual-analogue-stick control system of most console FPS's will be a disappointment. As for Hunters itself as a game, its hard to say how good it is from the demo; while it looks lovely and the controls are perfect, it's ultimately designed to be a multiplayer game, and as no-one I know owns a DS yet, I can't testify to how well it works. It feels like it'll be a success, though, and it bodes extremely well for the upcoming DS port of GoldenEye... wireless multiplayer GoldenEye, with a control system that far outstrips the Nintendo 64's for accuracy and ease of use, sounds like the Best Thing Ever to me at the moment.
And lastly to Mario, simultaneously the best and most frustrating of the three bundled games. The good parts: it's Mario 64, and it's still benchmark gaming. 'nuff said on that score. Nintendo have added the unlockable ability to play as Luigi, Wario and Yoshi, and it adds some freshness and unexpectedly strategic elements to the gameplay. There are a bunch of unlockable Touched!-style minigames that range from the fun-but-pointless to the fun-but-dangerously-addictive.
The bad parts: the controls. If N64 veterans are wondering how well the legendarily perfect analogue controls of the original work in this version, the answer is: um, quite well, I suppose. I've found that using the stylus as a kind of analogue-controller replacement and the d-pad to control jumping etc is the best way, but it lacks the crispness that's required to guide Mario around those precarious ledges with complete confidence. Sometimes it works perfectly, and other time even the most routine jumps can feel like a lottery.
It's not enough to stop you enjoying one of the finest games ever created (it's eaten way too many hours of my life already), but it's enough to frustrate in a way that the N64 version never did, and makes me wonder if other games which require pinpoint control (other 3d platformers or driving games, for example) are going to feel as if they're being crammed onto a system that simply isn't best designed for them. The spectre of endless hours of frustration at shonky controls looms in the back of my mind; I've heard that the DS Ridge Racer is emblematic of the potential for lazy N64 ports with appalling controls. Hopefully Nintendo won't fuck up the DS Mario Kart...
So, anyone else got a DS? Anyone else want one? How do we think it'll do against the PSP in the long run? etc... |
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