Oh, poor DS, what did they do to you?
Aged viewers will recall this reporter's once-burning love for the Nintendo DS. But it wasn't just the appearance on the scene of the younger, slimmer, all-touching-all-the-time iThings that caused the flame to die.
This week, with the Western launch of the 3DS just a few days away, I went back to the old stager for one last hurrah, to see what I'd missed in what's now almost two years of iOS-focused gaming and also to see how it felt to use a so-called "real" handheld console again. I found out some things, and have written them down here because I'm old and I forget stuff.
1. Since 2009 the DS has been the sole property of pre-teen girls.
To catch up, I headed over to the invaluable information repository that is Advanscene and skimmed through their comprehensive list of releases since the last DS game I remembered spending any significant time with – Space Invaders Extreme 2, which came out two years ago next week.
Incredibly, AS listed just over 2000 releases since then – a whopping 36% of the total number of titles the machine has seen since it appeared in late 2004, which means the rate of game release has actually increased since I wrote the Console Of The Year 2008 piece. But to a quite astonishing extent, the demographic focus of those releases has shifted. In overwhelming proportion, those 2000 releases comprised titles like these:
Florist Shop, Imagine: Babyz Fashion, Nursery Mania, Baby Animal Zoo, Pony Friends 2, Let's Play Ballerina Sparkle On The Stage, Samantha Swift And The Hidden Roses Of Athena, Dream Salon, Petz: Hamsterz Superstarz, Dora The Explorer: Dora Puppy, Petz Pony Beauty Pageant, Smart Girl's Playhouse 2, Barbie: Groom And Glam Pups, My Little Baby, Wedding Planner, Hello Kitty Party, Girls Life Jewellery Style and Horse Life Adventures. Want some more?
Princess Lillifee – My Dearest Friends, Princess Angel, Princess Melody, Figure Princess, Princess Isabella: A Witch's Curse, Princess Bakery, My Horse And Me: Riding For Gold, America's Next Top Model, I Love Horses, Wedding Dash, Peppa Pig Fun And Games, Tinkerbell And The Great Fairy Rescue, Petz Nursery, Diva Ballerina, Best Friends Tonight, My Baby First Steps, Paws And Claws Regal Resort, Element Girls – Style Your Life, Busy Scissors, Dancing On Ice, Nancy Drew Model Mysteries, Fashion Tycoon, Imagine: Boutique Owner and finally what's perhaps the ultimate nadir of videogames, if not humanity itself: Let's Play Flight Attendant.
("Put up your hair, choose your lipstick color and dress yourself in your favourite uniform! You could have the chance to serve a famous person in first class! Will it be a millionaire or a movie star?")
I haven't made any of those up. Quite the aspirational rollcall for tomorrow's young women, isn't it? But lest you fear I'm exaggerating, that's barely the tip of the iceberg. We've listed just two of them, but there are over 30 distinct games in the Imagine series alone, ranging all the way from Cheerleader and Babysitter to Makeup Artist, Salon Stylist and Happy Cooking. Girl power!
For all I know they might all be fantastic games, of course. But it's pretty clear who's supposed to be playing with the DS these days, and it's not us.
2. Real buttons are good. But they're not THAT good.
On loading up Pang: Magical Michael (if you're wondering, it's Pang again), it was hard to escape the memory of the horribly uncontrollable iOS version of Pang. But terrible virtual controls are the exception rather than the rule nowadays, with even fast-action precision platformers like League Of Evil and Ready Action! offering pixel-accurate leaping and shooting, thanks to being designed from the ground up to handle touch controls.
What was more unexpected, though, was playing Trackmania Turbo and finding myself wishing for the analogue delicacy of Pole Position Remix, Real Racing or Final Freeway as I bounced off walls with TT's full-lock-or-straight-ahead-and-nothing-in-between digital steering.
The other thing that struck me was how having a multiplicity of controls encourages developers to use them all, just because they're there, which is rarely a good thing. The way that so many DS games made me jump back and forth between stylus and d-pad and face buttons and shoulder buttons was suddenly bewildering and horrible, and it seemed amazing that people had ever come to tolerate it.
I played 25 games in all, covering every genre from FPS to platforming and racing and cards, and Pang Magical Michael was the only one where I really thought "Man, it's nice to have proper buttons again". The truth of the matter is, it's just not a big deal. You get used to it.
3. DS racing games look like they come from 1993.
Need For Speed Nitro, there. And below: Real Racing 2 (iPod version), released less than a year later and playable on hardware costing just £40 more than a new DSi.
4. Atari are STILL trying to get people to pay £30 for Pong.
Two of the most recent releases I looked at were Atari All-Time Classics Vols 1 and 2. What must be almost 20 years after they first started selling official Atari retro packs for the PC with Asteroids, Battlezone and the like in them, the company is still flogging the same handful of exhausted horses, padded out with dozens of the VCS games nobody cared about.
Each volume of the latest offers just nine ancient coin-ops, the most recent of which (I think) is 1983's Crystal Castles, and with the vast majority horribly unsuited to the DS either by dint of being a vector-graphics game (Black Widow, Major Havoc, Red Baron, Space Duel, Gravitar – the last of which is essentially unplayable because on some planets the resolution isn't sharp enough to be able to see which way your ship is pointing), a portrait-mode one requiring hideous sideways contortions or graphical mangling to get it into landscape (Centipede, Millipede), or just plain rubbish (Super Breakout).
In addition you get 40 or so VCS titles per pack, featuring absolutely none of your favourites (no Space Invaders, no Pac-Man, no Galaxian, no Donkey Kong, no Pole Position, no Frogger, no Pitfall, no Enduro, no River Raid) but lots and lots of absolute garbage like BASIC Programming, Breakout, Super Breakout (again), 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Math Gran Prix, Casino, Video Checkers and the famously awful Video Olympics. The VCS games have the full original customisation options, but idiotically none of them saves a high score, thereby obliterating any possible point there might have been in playing them.
In fairness, apart from that the actual execution of the compilations is mostly pretty superb, and I'll forgive a lot simply for the fact that there's FINALLY a decent handheld version of Tempest (the previous DS port and the PSP "Atari Evolved" one both having epically horrendous controls). But really, splitting this thin fare into two full-price boxed products in 2011 is pretty weak.
(The carts are only 32MB each – an eighth of the size of the latest Pokemon games – so it's not like there wasn't room to squeeze it all, and maybe even some games less than 30 years old, into one half-decent package.)
5. There's a You Don't Know Jack game for the DS.
There's a You Don't Know Jack game for the DS! It's awesome, as all You Don't Know Jack games are. Why is there no You Don't Know Jack game for iOS yet? Have someone killed immediately.
6. Not having a built-in hardware screenshot function sucks.
You have no idea how many times I got to something I wanted to take a picture of for this piece, reached for the Home and power buttons, then remembered they weren't there. I'm sure the absence of a screenshot function is a significant part of why there was never a dedicated DS games magazine or even a decent website, despite it being the most popular and successful videogames console of all time.
(Coupled with the games industry's insane, inexplicable preciousness with press-release images, its boneheaded reluctance to supply actual in-game images rather than renders from cutscenes, and everyone and his dog's immensely cuntish propensity for slapping watermarks all over stuff they don't own, it'd simply have been far too much trouble to illustrate one.)
7. Goldeneye DS is impressive, but it chugs like a thirsty Australian.
Activision's reboot of one of the greatest first-person shooters of all time commendably takes the moral high ground on DS, by trying to port the Wii game properly rather than making some weak unrelated 2D spinoff as has traditionally been the case. It looks fantastic and captures a lot of the atmosphere of the original (despite the levels being all-new), but the hardware just isn't quite up to the job.
The framerate lumbers along like an old Freescape game on the Speccy (I exaggerate, a bit), which also makes the controls sluggish, and a bit like Perfect Dark on the N64 you're left slightly frustrated at how stupendous a game it could be if only the CPU had a little more oomph to cope with the ambitious things being asked of it.
(Oh, and while we're mentioning the controls – despite all the real buttons it's no easier to play than a well-made iOS shooter like Zombie Infection, and their presence means the developers haven't been able to resist throwing in annoying and superficial touch-screen bits even when you're playing with the all-button option. I honestly wouldn't entirely rule out a fucking blowing-into-the-mic bit later on.)
8. Paying £30 for a handheld game buys you a lot of splash screens.
Man, I really had forgotten that "normal" games were like this. Nintendo boot-up screen! Publisher splash screen! Developer splash screen! Sub-contractor splash screen! IP owner splash screen! Middleware splash screen! Different piece of middleware splash screen! Unskippable intro animation! Title screen! Awesome! Now we've only got 20 minutes of compulsory tutorial to go and we might get a shot at the actual game!
If there's one thing I truly love about iOS gaming it's that the time between thinking "Ooh, I fancy a quick go on Flight Control" and actually drawing your first plane's approach path is about six seconds (I checked).
On the DS you're doing well if you can manage it in five times that, and changing games will double the time again, whereas with iOS it adds an extra 0.1 seconds to press the Home button. People often criticise the iPod Touch and the older iPhones for their battery life, but they forget that they're always on and ready to go, in a way the DS and PSP aren't.
(And of course, all that's leaving aside the fact that if you restrict yourself to legal methods of playing your game collection on your "proper" handheld, you have to go and find the cartridge and plug it in first, assuming that you had the foresight to be carrying a bag around with all 600 of your games in it.)
9. I still love Dragon's Lair.
God help me, I do. The DS version has been a long time coming (it was first announced way back in 2007), but it's brilliant. It's nowhere close to the stunning graphical sharpness of the iOS version and it's roughly 50 times as expensive, but it's nice to discover after all this time that all the screens have names, and better yet is the terrifically minimal front end which launches straight into the coin-op attract mode on loading and after every game.
(Also, if any game deserved to have its screen unobstructed by thumbs, it's surely this one, particularly in the light of how atrociously badly the iThing port's developers positioned the virtual buttons.)
More so than any other version, the DS port's (lack of) interface really makes it feel like you're carrying a tiny arcade machine around in your pocket (only without all the disc-accessing delays), and those of us of a certain age have never really wanted anything more from videogames than that.
10. Puzzle Quest 2 is 32MB on DS and 1.2GB on iPhone.
What's that about, then? How in the name of Sweet Zombie Jesus do you manage to make a match-three game take up over a gigabyte? And also, how come the huge one is £2.99 and the teeny one is £30, eh?
Anyway, I can't remember what my point was. The time of the DS is over now, and we may not see its like again. The comically inflated prices of 3DS games, and Nintendo's legendary incompetence and greed in the online arena, will more than likely conspire to deprive the new machine of the library of fun, accessible titles the DS has accumulated in its six-year life, and it seems destined to battle with Sony's NGP rather than the iThings.
So let's offer a valedictory salute to the DS as it shuffles towards the exit door. I'd love it for eternity if the only game it had ever run was Bangai-O Spirits (almost certainly my single most-played videogame of all time), but it offered so much more. From Advance Wars to Slitherlink, from the greatest Space Invaders reboot ever to the first Castlevania games I found at all interesting, from quirky obscurities like Scotland Yard and Subbuteo to the sheer batshit majesty of Ouendan and Rhythm Heaven and the oldskool uncompromising brutality of Contra 4 and Metal Slug 7.
The DS single-handedly revived my love of videogaming at a time when it was dying from boredom and repetition, and for that it will always hold a special place in my heart. The torch was passed some time ago, but if any device ever earned its retirement it was Nintendo's twin-screened wonder. That it's still producing quality gaming in its last days, even weighed down with a thousand shovelware developers hanging off its arms vomiting drivel onto its shoes, is testament to its mighty stature.
Farewell, the DS. Your power light is flickering now, but we will remember you the way you were, bright of eye and fleet of foot, and not as the tired and weary workhorse of today. Farewell, and thank you.
Glad to see Pang: MM getting some love, albeit briefly.
Found myself getting a little emotional in the final passage there. A single tear, on the end of a stylus.
I came to the DS late, but it has nonetheless grown to become perhaps my favourite console. So much more than the logical conclusion of the Gameboy, something about its quirky inputs, depth of ambition and cartridges (in an age where a cartridge is something you force into your gun before manshooting a person to death) was responsible for inspiring the most inspired titles of the last decade.
I actually hold high hopes for the 3DS, which I've only gone and bloody preordered, with its self-consciously 'hardcore' launch games – including a Julian Gollop turn-based X-Com-alike(!) – and its adoption of Wii's great Virtual Console. I like to think the 3D will put off fair weather shovelware-ists, but also worry it will put off the indies and low budget crazies too.
In any case. Thank you, for this.
A sad (well, not that much really) truth indeed, yet an incredibly enjoyable post. Apparently even people like me that started off by severely disliking them iDevices, have to admit they are pretty great. Despite not sporting Advance Wars, that is.
1. There's still enough good games if you look for them though. There's also a lot of dross on the itunes store as well, luckily we have people like you to give advice on what to buy.
2. Programmers are idiots.
3. The DS came out seven years ago, the 3GS two. I'm shocked by your relevation that games on a newer system look better than a new one.
4. Atari and programmers are idiots.
5. (Runs off to buy You Don't Know Jack for the DS)
6. Fair enough.
7. I dunno, I wouldn't play FPSs on any handheld system.
8. Fair enough, but I get almost as annoyed paying 59p for a game only to then have a 30-second loading screen, then for it to crash, then to crash the second time upon loading, then having to turn the iphone off wait a minute for it to load up and then it finally working.
9. You still have strange tastes.
10. Huh? What the?
I was tempted to have a go on my DS, but turns out I needed the memory card for something. It still has the best Picross and Slitherlink games.
I suppose if I have to go on a long flight or something, I might dig it out just for the battery life.
"I'm shocked by your relevation that games on a newer system look better than a new one."
Not so much that as the fact that while most other genres are perfectly graphically respectable on the DS (eg Goldeneye, which is very pretty), racing games have always looked like shit on it for some reason. I mean, that NFSN screenshot would embarrass a SNES, and the SNES came out 14 years before the DS.
"There's still enough good games if you look for them though."
Well, out of 2000 there were 25 that were worth at least checking out, which comes out to just over one a month. And that was by a pretty generous set of criteria which encompassed stuff like Intellivision Lives, 18 Card Games, a bunch of pub machines like Touchmaster and Foto Frenzy, yet another Tetris sequel and a new DS version of Monopoly.
You must have spent a great deal of money to write this article.
Never mind that, just appreciate the incredible speed with which all the games were delivered. And people criticise the mail these days.
I'd argue that one meaty game a month (like Dragon Quest or Infinite Space) is about enough for me, but compared to the huge amount of equally decent games on iOS I'd concede the point.
I'm probably biased against the iOS because my iPhone 3G has become pretty much useless since the update to iOS4. It's similar to having a PC for a few years and it having accrued so many useless files over the years that it slows down to a crawl.
JeremyPeel — don't get your hopes up too much for "its adoption of Wii's great Virtual Console."
If 3DS were cross-compatible with the Wii Virtual Console, it would be a day one purchase for me. I'd love to be able to play all the stuff I bought on the Wii on the go, like we can do with PSP/PS3 stuff.
Not only is the 3DS not getting the Wii virtual console, it's:
1. Only getting GameBoy, GameBoy Advance and Game Gear titles, at least as announced to date;
2. It's not getting this stuff until May 2011, two months after the hardware launch; and
3. You won't even be able to transfer purchased DSi downloads until that date, pretty much guaranteeing you can't punt your old handheld while it's worth something.
The iOS devices have none of these limitations .. well except they can't play Virtual Console games either. But at least you can move your software among any other device you might have.
Now there's a captive market, anyone want to help me develop "Imagine: Emma Goldman!"
There's your role model for pre-teen/teen girls, right there.
I plan on making a killing on a series of cynical shovelware cash-ins (or is that cashware shovel-ins?) during these dying days of the DS.
Yes, poor children esconced in urban poverty, it is your time to buy:
GIRLS: HATE YOURSELF 1 – with such mini-games as ‘My job is washing up!’ and ‘Mommy looks bad = ugly, mommy dresses nice = whore: That’s daddy’s way of saying I Love You’.
The scintillating follow-up GIRLS: HATE YOURSELF 2 – this time with ‘Child-birth has stretched my vagina, and I must cede my husband to a younger woman’ and ‘It’s not rape when you’re married!’
GIRLS: LOATH THYSELF – upmarket self-hatred with very, very thin women in clothes that are given to them for free even though they are already rich.
And for the boys, some black rappers (MC Patio, Run Run Run The Tap) shooting other minority ethnic stereotypes (e.g. Glaswegians) and slapping the asses of various bootylicious whores on the way.
(I asked my class to consider how they would feel if my name was ‘Bootylicious’ this week. I have no fucking idea how they learn anything).
If you want the new You Don't Know Jack, you might as well import the PS3 version as it's got twice the episodes of the DS game and is about £20 and will work on a UK PS3. The Xbox one is not region free, regrettably.
Well, without commenting further on the sheer expense you incurred writing this article (and good job on the post office), perhaps we can move on to a completely unrelated point, that the typical DS owner that played Contra, Castlevania and other great classic DS games probably owns an R4, or similar. The kids that play with Horse Nonsense 4 and Imagine Make up Prom Queen Flight Attendant are the only people out there still buying games off the shelf at £30 a pop? Maybe the only audience for retail DS games now is the mums and dads of these precotious 9 year olds at Xmas?
The Nintendo DS has some amazing games that wouldn't have been possible on any other gaming console, not even the ipod touch/iphone whatever. Like for example 999 and 'The World Ends With You'.
The Nintendo DS has some of the best adventure games. The Phoenix Wright series and spin-offs/sequels. Hotel Dusk, Last Window, Professor Layton series. That are the games that make me love my Nintendo DS.
The Nintendo DS introduced touchscreen gaming!! Without it, the games for the iphone/ipod touch perhaps wouldn't have taken off the way they did??
The Nintendo DS has some bad shovelware and cheap games, but underneath this all there is a strong basis of innovative and deep games that are worth the money you pay for them.
“The Nintendo DS introduced touchscreen gaming!!”
Not even nearly. But it did popularise it.
Great article! Point #8 is by far my BIGGEST pet peeve about gaming these days, especially on the DS. I loved the days of Final Fantasy 2 on the SNES, where you turn on the console, and the opening music and titlescreen come up. Such a simple thing to make games more enjoyable.
I was evangelizing the app store the way you are many months ago, but I’ve realized something. I know this is a giant wall of text but I can’t summarize this in one little sentence.
I paid a 2.99 for Infinity Blade on the iPad. It’s an on rails game where you rub the screen to make some generic, Gears of War looking knights hit each other with swords while emitting some standard techy glow effects and large man grunting noises. It basically exists to prove that you can put the Unreal Engine on iOS and have some heavy duty shaders going on. It doesn’t use those shaders for anything interesting though. It has generic, boring, gritty realistic Unreal engine graphics that look the same as every other generic, boring, gritty realistic Unreal Engine game on the PS3/360. It has boring gameplay where, as I said, you just rub the screen to engage in 1 on 1 fights between non-descript knights. It has boring, standard fantasy music, a boring, standard fantasy story, boring, standard fantasy characters, a boring, standard fantasy world, and basically not much of anything other than proof that you can have some bump mapping and particle effects on your iPad. It cost me a 3 dollars because that’s what the game is worth to me. Actually it’s worth less than a dollar to me.
I paid 30 dollars for Monster Tale on the DS. It’s a full blow metroidvania /virtual pet hybrid game that’s absolutely bursting with personality and character. It’s a side scrolling platformer with wonderful SNES-on-steroids looking graphics. You explore a straight up graph paper Metroid map and acquire all kinds of upgrades for your character while solving puzzles and fighting all kinds of enemies. It has an original, non exploitive female protagonist in this age of nothing but bald angry men and shallow tit vehicle female action girls who act just like the angry bald men. It adds a really neat layer on top of the metroidvania gameplay by having a RPG/Tamagotchi type pseudo virtual pet mechanic where you have a little monster buddy who can grow and develop as you give him items. The game has creative level designs, really appealing graphics and artwork, and cool boss fights where the game basically breaks the 4th wall. It cost me 30 dollars because that’s what its worth to me.
There is a divide here.
Now obviously it’s not like that with everything. I paid nothing for an iPad version Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars. One of the greatest adventure games ever created for free, and on such a fitting platform. It’s an incredibly rich, absolutely classic, almost ephemeral game that stands out like a shining monument to very concept of video games as a compelling art form, played on a device that seems like such a natural fit for adventure games that it’s a wonder we never played them this way before. It was free, and it’s never more than 8 dollars. Such a low price for a game that is almost enrapturing.
Meanwhile they charge 30 dollars for Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest on the DS. A rancid, hideous DS port of a rancid, hideous Wii game shat out of a video game churn house in the name of making a quick buck off a recognizable brand. It’s a horrendous bear turd of a game that represents the downfall of gaming in to a depressing consumer product assembly line. 30 dollars for something that would literally make me want to give up on games if I was forced to play it for more than 5 seconds.
My basic point is that there is no one platform to rule them all if you actually care about games instead of hardware clubs for little boys. If you’re defending iOS over the DS, you’re just as much of a shit eating retard as the kids who argue over whether the 360 or PS3 is better. Play games, not platforms.
I do. But I'm not interested in Tinkerbell – The Great Fairy Rescue, and the DS has been offering little else for the last two years. I scoured a list of 2000 games and came up with 25 I could be bothered even looking at, and that was including Monopoly and an Intellivision emulator. I see 25 interesting new iOS games roughly every two days.
In other news, Nintendo won't allow homebrewers to develop for the 3DS because "We make platforms designed to demonstrate the high value of high quality videogame software," and because platforms like the iPhone "have no motivation to maintain the high value of videogame software".
link to dcemu.co.uk
JacobO – I also believe that it is worth trying hard to get the best. But gaming is not an area where this is strictly necessary. If you don’t know that you’re missing out on a DS import gem, you won’t miss it. If you are happy playing many cheap and good iOS games you don’t need a few expensive and excellent DS games, because you are already playing games.
There are so many games, films, books and musics that it is impossible to get the best of them all. So what if you let some areas slide? You can’t be an expert in all popular, mass-produced culture. There are other things to focus on. Life is about more than X, Y, or Z: and when you put them all together, you haven’t got the time to know everything about each.
I do recognise the passion in your post though and, if we were attacked by Space Invaders, I would want you in one of my pixellated tanks. And not just for the excellent phrase “shallow tit vehicle female action girls”.
I still think the DS has a better software library than the iThing platforms. But it would seem that everyone's moving over to it now, so how long do you reckon it'll be before "Barbie's Horsey Rides" turns up on the iPad?
Will you declare the iPad redundant and move back to a real console then? 😛
worst on splash screens IMO is speedball 2 GBA.. usually lost appetite for a quick game when the start screen appeared..
There's already tons and tons of kiddy crap on iOS. Difference is, with next to zero manufacturing cost it doesn't squeeze out the other stuff.
Any chance of getting a RevStu perspective on Move and Kinect sometime?
You wouldn't have to spend any money buying them. The shops all seem to be desperately shanghai-ing people passing by to demonstrate them as nobody wants to look like a tit in public.
link to wosland.podgamer.com
Princess Bakery is the new Mario Hotel.
There's this group called Nintendo, I don't think they've made a single game for iOS, but a lot of their stuff on the DS was pretty swell. I hope they got a 3DS dev kit…