Jez went to the US on a training course and managed to locate a Nintendo DS and a couple of games for me whilst he was out there, and it’s very lovely indeed.
It’s a pretty sturdy piece of kit – about the size of two of the original GBAs sandwiched together in a clamshell-type arrangement. The two screens sit in the middle of each half of the clamshell; the lower one is touch-sensitive (you get a stylus and a sort of weird thumb-nubbin thing to stop you getting smeary marks all over the screen), and has the d-pad and action buttons arranged around it. The shoulder buttons are, as you’d expect, on the shoulder of the device.
In use, it’s a nifty piece of kit – when you power it up, you’re presented with a sort of set-up screen thing, from which you can launch games (you can have a GBA cart and DS game in the system at the same time, and pick which one to launch from the menu), use the Pictochat system, change system preferences (language, time, date of birth, that sort of thing) and start a wireless download. The screens are clear and bright, and the touchscreen seems pretty responsive (and hardy – I’ve played it for about three hours now and there’s no sign of any marking or any indication of use at all).
With the system, you get a demo of Metroid Prime: Hunters, which is very much in the vein of Metroid Prime on the GameCube – a first person 3D shooter with strong exploration and platforming elements, basically. I was unconvinced as to how well this was going to work – firstly, 3D on a handheld never really struck me as a great idea, and secondly, control without an analogue joystick was going to be difficult. In practise, though, it works really well: the graphics are slick and smooth, running at a constant 60fps; and the control mechanism works better than I’d thought – you can use the stylus/thumb nubbin as a sort of mouselook, and the d-pad to run around. The shoulder buttons fire, double-tapping the touchscreen jumps and you can select weapons and change to/from the morphball using icons on the touchscreen. It takes a bit of getting used to, but pretty quickly I was circlestrafing, strafejumping and all the rest. One to stick on the pre-order list, I reckon.
The other two games I got are kind of variations on the same kind of theme: Feel The Magic (released in the UK as Project Rub) and WarioWare: Touched! Both games utilise a large number of minigames, strung together in some kind of order: In Feel The Magic, you’re performing tasks in order to win the heart of your beloved; in WarioWare, there’s a different “story” for each character, but to be honest they’re all pretty flimsy and superfluous. With Feel The Magic, there are a smaller number of games, but more variety within each game; each game also lasts considerably longer – in WarioWare, you get about 5 seconds to figure out what’s going wrong and complete the task, whereas in Feel The Magic, the tasks can sometimes take as long as you need to finish them (which, in the case of the Antlions game, can be a frustratingly long time).
Presentation-wise, Feel The Magic blows WarioWare out of the water. It looks great, with a wonderful, cohesive visual style not entirely dissimilar to the Apple iPod silhouette adverts; Sega have put a huge amount of effort into making this game look and feel really great and it shows. The game flows well and never feels disjoint. WarioWare, on the other hand, doesn’t look anything like as good: disparate artistic styles are thrown together in a sort of mishmash of ideas. The overall look of the game isn’t as polished or well thought out as Feel The Magic.
But both games live or die by their playability, and they’ve both got it in bucketloads: WarioWare is a videogame created by people with ADD – perfect if you’ve got zero attention span – whereas Feel The Magic is a bit more laid back, although equally bonkers. It remains to be seen how much replay value they each have, but for now, I’m very pleased with them. Hooray for crazy Japanese games developers, that’s what I say.