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Just had twenty-four hours in the company of a DS and a PSP.
DS:
Unfortunate physical design. It's not all that much wider than an original GBA, but it's far fatter. Some of that's unavoidable because of the second screen, but it's not helped by the strange DeLorean angles. Smooth curves would have made it appear smaller, I think. Screen quality is great - really clear and the backlight doesn't wash out the colours in the same way that the GBA SP does. Very effective stereo sound.
Bottom half is sturdy. Hinge feels solid. Top half is a little worrying - feels hollow and fragile, like it'd crack if you weren't careful. At least it prevents the unit from being any heavier, I suppose.
But anyway, games. Only played two, and neither of them were really created with the machine's peculiarities in mind - I know for a fact that I've not seen the best it has to offer. Mr Driller: Drill Spirits is as much fun as Mr Driller always is (in other words, an enormous amount of fun), but the touchscreen tech is wasted. You can play it with the stylus if you want, but you'll die a horrible squishy death pretty quickly. The two screens are used quite well, though - being able to see more of what's above you really adds to the game, and the extra height is also put to good use in the Pressure Driller mode. Lovely game, just not the best example of what the DS can offer over other consoles.
Mario 64. Not too good to begin with. Using the stylus is impossible here - if you're right handed, you're going to want pen-like items in your right hand, yeah? Tough titties. Do that and you won't be able to jump, crouch, attack, long jump, crawl... You need to switch over to the thumb tack straight away, really, if you want to actually do anything (and you do need to use the tack - yr naked thumb is far too imprecise). That’s well short of natural, though. They’ve set the sensitivity far too high – you’ve got a tiny circle of influence on the touchscreen, with no way of altering it. Move your thumb outside of that circle, and you take the entire circle with you. It means having to constantly lift your thumb off the screen and put it back in the centre in order to recalibrate.
Still a great game, once you've got used to putting up with the daft controls. Quite a lot of things have been thrown into the mix - more rabbits to catch, which give you keys to minigames, you start the game as Yoshi (only got ten stars so far, so I don't know when you get to control the other characters), there are some new star challenges, new areas, and so on. Visually it's far more detailed than the original, but that's not such a good thing. The use of colour feels wrong. Remember the vivid green of Bob-omb Battlefield? It's a more 'realistic' yellowish brown now. Boo. It's like throwing photorealistic dolphins into Super Mario World - a pointless concession to current trends that feels out of place. In purely technical terms, though, it shows that the DS is more than just a miniaturised N64. There's more power under the bonnet here.
The minigames are the only place where the DS is used properly (as in, for things thnat couldn't be done on any other console). They're great diversions, new games in a Game & Watch style. But there's something odd about them. Playing them feels like playing those Flash games that the Internet's swimming with, the stylus control feeling strangely like a mouse. For example, there's a superb one where you've got Bob-ombs falling down the screens towards you. You're equipped with rocks in a catapult a the bottom screen and have to manually pull it back at the right angle to take them out before they hit the ground. Dead enjoyable, but not anything that you couldn't get on any number of websites. I half expect to open up that "walk the drunk man home" one any minute.
And that, imo, is a very good thing indeed. Flash games are massively popular with people who otherwise wouldn’t dream of even touching a console, and if Nintendo can build up a catalogue that focuses on that style of play I think the DS could do an awful lot of business with entirely new demographics. I always thought that, tbh, but playing it just reinforces the idea.
I like the machine, overall. I’ll be getting one, if only for Wario Ware and giving non-gamer friends something to play that they’ll actually enjoy. Nintendo deserve to do well with this.
PSP:
Holy shit. The screen. TEH SCREEN!11!!!ones!!1 In all honesty, it's so good that what you see as screenshots in magazines is far lower quality than what you see in your hands. You expect to be able to see the pixels that make up the screens in handheld devices. Not here you won't.
Sound quality from the speakers is disappointingly tinny and make head/earphones a requirement. It's slightly longer than the DS, but doesn't look as bulky and is a bit lighter. A couple of times, it refused to load the UMD when I stuck a new one in. I don't know what was causing that - maybe I just wasn't closing the tray properly.
Like the DS, I'm not certain about certain aspects of the design. The power switch is temperamental. It's not one that clicks into position like on the GBA - this one's on a spring, and you flick it up to turn it on or off. Only, sometimes you flick it up and nothing happens. Silly, and could have been sorted out if they'd gone with a regular switch. Makes little sense.
Ridge Racers. Holy shit. Again, only more so. The best game I’ve played so far this year. I was talking to somebody a while back about how one of the greatest gaming moments there has ever been was rubbing a victory on Ridge Racer Revolution in your opponent’s face by pulling off a prefect reverse 1080 spin on the last corner of the race, and we were complaining about how Namco now are a shadow of what they were then.
This disproves that. The handling is spot on – they’ve finally got the analogue working with the RR drifting, and it’s perfect. It’ll take a while to figure out the analogue nub, because it’s so unlike any other controller out there. Works just right when you do, though (but I’ve got to say, I’m slightly concerned that it feels a little fragile). The music is fucking fantastic – new tracks (Phase Pulse [or is it Pulse Phase?] is the track that Basement Jaxx have spent their entire careers trying to write), old tracks (including the awesome Pac-Man homage Eat ‘Em Up, as featured on Type 4 when you unlocked all 321 cars) and remixes of old tracks (the best of which is a stupid, stupid, stupidly mental gabba version of old classic Rare Hero). Just one thing – those bloody awful speakers. RR music is a heady mix of squeaky blips and farting basslines, but all you get out of the speakers are the squeaks – these things only output treble. If you really feel the need to draw direct comparisons between the DS and PSP, the DS wins the sound battle hands down.
Anway. RR looks stonking. So fast, so smooth, so detailed. There are a couple of minor negatives, mind. Jaggies are very noticeable at times, presumably because of the quality of the screen. The other complaint is a personal one – as with Mario 64, I miss the original colour schemes. They’ve made everything look like Type 4 here – subtle shades. Me don’t want no subtle in Ridge Racer, ferfuxache!
Oh, three negatives. I wish they’d included more of the Rage Racer courses, rather than those from Type 4. Rage had the most dizzying climbs and drops of any racing game around, whereas Type 4 was, again, trying to ape reality.
I want Ridge. I would buy a PSP just for Ridge. It’s not just The Best of Ridge Racer, it’s Ridge Racer Megamix Alpha Plus Super Turbo Complete. |
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