Dual Screen Part Deux

[K2J]

Just when you thought it was safe to buy a DS Lite after having an original model since launch day...

A CHALLENGER APPROACHES!

It's rumor at this point, but there's some fairly strong evidence that could be presented; a Japanese news article details a "new" DS - which sounds more like a new system instead of just an upgrade. Larger screens, camera and media player built-in. Camera is said to be part of the gameplay.

Er, what? How? I can understand a stationary console, but the extent of portable gaming with cameras sounds somewhat minimal.

Anyone able to translate that scanned article and tell us if it's real?

[Zeta]

I would have preferred a tilt detector to a camera.

[G.Silver]

Pff! You'd probably also rather play games than have a media center.

[Zeta]

I don't mind the SD card thing provided we can use it to load WiiWare games onto it. And I suppose Mp3 playing is so easy to implement these days it's more of a matter of "why the hell not"? As long as there's some option to play your music over the music of the game you're playing.

[DackAttac]

Is anyone saying, "Hell yes, this is exactly what I needed"? I mean, really? Don't most people's phones do this shit regardless of whether they wanted it to or not?

Zeta - Problem with tilt control is there'd be some games that just won't plumb work on earlier models. I'm still fine with my first generation DS. You know, the box-y silver one that doesn't look like an effing iPod. I'd love to see tilt control on the incumbent Nintendo handheld system, but shit gets sloppy once you have incompatibilities within the DS brand.

[Ritz]

So, a portable Eyetoy? Oh, Nintendo, always steering the gaming industry towards revolutionary new directions!

[K2J]

Note that the Kotaku version says the pictures have to be taken first, then used in games. You know what that means...



Get ready to shoot your own face as a final boss!

[Oompa Star]

Get ready to shoot your own face as a final boss!

Now I don't have to be emo to take my frustrations out on myself!

[Zeta]

Get ready to shoot your own face as a final boss!

Hey, some people can do that in real life if they ejaculate hard enough.

[Shadow Hog]

This is all fine and dandy, but is it just another DS, or an actual bona fide update with better graphics and so on? Y'know, something I might actually consider buying.

[Ngangbius]

It sounds like it is just a another DS update instead of a true DS successor. I'm assuming that Nintendo will reveal more in an upcoming conference they are having on Oct. 2nd.

[DackAttac]

Do you get the impression they're gonna ride the DS until the wheels fall out, and then—and only then—craft a successor? I'm just remembering how long they pimped out the fucking Game Boy. The fucking Game Boy color. Pocket. Light. For twelve years they whored it out. Without ever making an upgrade that would keep a new game from being incompatible on an old machine, or a new machine that wasn't backwards-compatible.

[Team Mecha]

A new control imput & games that wouldn't work on eariler models because of it sounds like more than just a redesign.

That SD slot better mean that we'll finally get some fucking GB VC. & the shoulder buttons better not shit again.

[Protodude]

Probably another upgrade, it seems to early for them to release a new system yet. Although if they did it'd still sell like hotcakes.

[gr4yJ4Y]

Maybe we should turn this into a poll. "Do you think Nintendo's new DS is going to be just an upgrade or a brand new system (DS2)?

-Upgrade
-DS2
-Neither. It's just a rumor. They aren't unvieling either anytime soon."


I'm hoping it's a completely new system, but there's no reason for them to. The DS Lite and its games are selling great.

Also Dack, many Game Boy Color games can't be played on a regular Game Boy. A lot of people forget this, since some GBC games could be played on either one.

[Shadow Hog]

http://gonintendo.com/?p=57999

No GBA slot = deal-breaker presently. I'll wait for the full feature list to trickle down (writing this as of 1:09AM EST, so they've got time) before I'm convinced I need to part with my money.

DSWare is an interesting idea, though. I'll bet you they'll make up for it through a sort of "Virtual Console", but for Game Boy games. Still not a good idea (I already BOUGHT Wario Land 3, why do I need to buy it again?) but it might be workable.

[Zeta]

No GBA slot. Apparently, this is for the casual crowd rather than gamers. Or Nintendo wants everyone to start re-buying all the GBA games again as DSiWare. Greedy sobs.

[G.Silver]

For them to be able to provide downloadable content for the DS that you can actually keep, this seems like the right way to go though, unless there were some way to dump it to the GBA slot. I guess that doesn't seem so unfeasible. If that's the case though then they're missing out on the opportunity to sell downloadable games to people who own earlier DSes. That doesn't sound like printing money to me!

[Isuka]

I could bet my two toes that Nintendo, unlike almost every other system manufacturer, makes the big bucks with hardware sales, not software sales (which are fucking big too, but they eventually depend of the hardware itself).
Think about it, they sell a reformed GameCube (U$S 99.99) with a new controller for 250 bucks. How much could the DS manufacture cost be?

In my eyes, this is a great new addition to the money-printing machine.

[James McGeachie]

Predicting some kind of horrible dispute between Activision and Nintendo now for screwing them over with their guitar grip. I don't know if they could even realistically make a DS-i specific version either assuming the only place it could plug in would be the SD card slot.

Typing that made me realise DS-i is an awful name. They could really do with some re-branding before it releases.

[FlashTHD]

- the DS has sold very well, but is hitting its saturation point

According to who?

Soooo...yuck. Did they have to stick that closely to the shitty Lite model? As in the final product resembles five minutes' work in photoshop? No GBA slot is extremely retarded, and I was convinced they wouldn't do that because Pokémon Platinum just came out over there. And yeah, Guitar Hero. They better plan to keep selling the Lite and the i in tandem for a while, then. (but maybe this explains why Platinum came out when it did)

Some of the new stuff sounds alright (SD cards though it may kill flashcarts, internal app support, possible Game Boy/Game Gear/Neo-Geo Pocket VC for hard-to-find stuff) and given how much cellphone cameras have caught on, i'm not entirely opposed to those, provided someone comes out with a way to get them on a PC. But this is a lot of stuff they're piling on now. They keep (rightfully) denying DVD playback for the Wii on the grounds that they still want it to be a games-centric machine - despite that, yeah, the extra channels kind of contradict this - but then, Iwata, what is this? It's treading pretty dangerously close to becoming too much a multimedia thing, is what I think it is. To that end, I can see lots of people who already have Tank/Lite DSes buying it for the new features alone. Not sure if that's good.

tl;dr: meh.

Games due out around launch: Valk Profile DS, Kirby (most likely SSU), Kyotaro, Rockman (most likely MMSF3), World Food, Phantasy Star Zero, Momotaro Dentetsu, Mario and Luigi 3

Crap, I was hoping those new Paper Mario on DS rumors would follow through. Le sigh. One last chance to do this right, Alphadream.

- Wii storage solution: WiiWare/software download to SD card
- a demo movie will come pre-installed on new Wiis called “What You Can Do With the Wii”. It will help new users to get online
- in Japan, a campaign will kick off that gives Wii users 500 Wii Points when they help a non-connected user get online
- Nintendo will re-release Cube classics in a new ‘Enjoy with Wii selection’ lineup
- Sin and Punishment 2 for Wii

All sounds good. I remember there was some word going around that Metroid Prime 1 & 2 would get quick and dirty Wii ports with the options to use 16:9 res and the Prime 3 controls. But with SD cards now in the spotlight and no seeming chance of hard drive support, riddle me this: a firmware upgrade to accept card sizes over 2GB. Is it doable?

- Monster Hunter 3 footage

In before LOL POOR SONY

On the specs chart, I spotted "DSi Dedicated Nintendo" under Versions, so, I s'pose this is the DS' Game Boy Color. The differences in the i-only games better be fairly pronounceable though. Input and Output Terminal on the i lists "SD card slot" instead of the Lite's "DS card slot terminal"...is that where it's going on the thing? Couldn't be a typo?

Punch-Out Wii looks ass ugly. Like early prototype ass ugly.

[FlashTHD]

(The above is based on that GoNintendo page alone cause I was strapped for time)

[Ngangbius]

Soooo...yuck. Did they have to stick that closely to the shitty Lite model? As in the final product resembles five minutes' work in photoshop? No GBA slot is extremely retarded, and I was convinced they wouldn't do that because Pokémon Platinum just came out over there. And yeah, Guitar Hero. They better plan to keep selling the Lite and the i in tandem for a while, then. (but maybe this explains why Platinum came out when it did)

I highly doubt they are going to stop selling the DSLite(which is better than that ugly and low-lit orignal DS model) for the very reason that the Pokemon games utilize the GBA slot. Nintendo didn't can the GBASP when the GBA Micro was released. I doubt that Activision really needs to worry that much about the future of the DS GH games.

Some of the new stuff sounds alright (SD cards though it may kill flashcarts, internal app support, possible Game Boy/Game Gear/Neo-Geo Pocket VC for hard-to-find stuff) and given how much cellphone cameras have caught on, i'm not entirely opposed to those, provided someone comes out with a way to get them on a PC. But this is a lot of stuff they're piling on now. They keep (rightfully) denying DVD playback for the Wii on the grounds that they still want it to be a games-centric machine - despite that, yeah, the extra channels kind of contradict this - but then, Iwata, what is this? It's treading pretty dangerously close to becoming too much a multimedia thing, is what I think it is. To that end, I can see lots of people who already have Tank/Lite DSes buying it for the new features alone. Not sure if that's good.

DSi seems very un-Nintendo in design with the addition of a camera and mp3 playback. Maybe they are trying to go for Sony's userbase(though, I think the PSP demo already overlaps with the DS one--at least in Japan). I wonder depending how successful this redesign is if this is a prelude for things to come concerning a true DS successor and just Nintendo hardware in general.

Crap, I was hoping those new Paper Mario on DS rumors would follow through. Le sigh. One last chance to do this right, Alphadream.

I thought the first game was solid, the second one...not so much.

[G.Silver]

http://kotaku.com/5058242/iwatas-speech ... conference

Massive wall of text there, but this caught my attention:

For a number of small children, Nintendo DSi will be their very first camera. For the Japanese female junior and high-school students, DSi can be a digital photo notebook which contains the stamp-sized face seals that they can take with them when hanging out with their friends. It can also be a tool for college students and young-adults to have more fun at parties.

I don't know about you, but when pictochat gets busted out at parties I go to, it's not long before the penis drawings start. Now that there's a camera, well...

I may have to stop going to those parties.

[FlashTHD]

(which is better than that ugly and low-lit orignal DS model)

Hey, it doesn't have buttons that feel shoddy/unresponsive, and I don't think i've ever had a problem with the lighting on it myself. Tank DS forever.

I thought the first game was solid, the second one...not so much.

Oh the first one was more than solid. #2 was a sudden fall from grace if i've ever seen one.