Monday 5 September 2005

Pic of the day: It may be hard for you to imagine a dignified gentleman such as I playing a handheld game...

Nintendo DS

After watching how much my Sims love their handheld games, I decided to partake in this unique experience of the current young humans. After all, even after this there will be plenty of human experiences left that I am utterly unfamiliar with. And with prices now quite low, and quality quite high, this seemed like a good time.

The two obvious candidates were Nintendo DS (dual-screen) and Sony's PSP (PlayStation Portable). After asking my online friends for advice, and getting only one answer (from the wonderful gamer chick TequilaKitten), a fellow hero from the streets of Paragon City, the City of Heroes. Yay supergirls! Anyway... I decided to take her recommendation and go for the DS. (PSP later, God willing, which is kinda doubtful that He wants. Watch this space.)

Another point in favor of Nintendo DS is that it has a wide selection of games available already. It has been in Norway for months, whereas PSP came here on September 1st. Furthermore, the DS can run many or perhaps all of the games for Gameboy Advance, although it does not add any functionality to them. Games made for the DS utilize both screens and the stylus control. I chose a game called "Urbz", described as "Sims in the city". Actually it is not quite like that, but close enough that it was reasonably familiar. This made the learning curve less steep. (The Sims is one of my favorite games of all time, particularly the new Sims2. A variant of Sims2 will be out for DS this fall, or so I'm told. Those who live will see, well except the blind, who presumably have no interest in these things anyway.)

***

Installation was a snap, as well it should be. Basically you unpack it, put a game cartridge in, charge the batteries, and you are off to play. In fact, you can even play while the batteries are charging, although of course they will use longer time then. One complaint is that the slot where you put in the game is shaped so that you can ALMOST push it in the wrong way. This may tempt the young or impatient player to use force to get the cartridge in place, quite possibly destroying both it and the console itself. Once you've done it a couple times it is probably obvious, though.

The two screens fold neatly together. The machine at rest is fairly compact and looks robust. It opens with some light resistance and "snaps" into its intended shape when you bend it open far enough. It stays in this shape tirelessly until you snap it shut again. The upper screen is where you look for the main action, while the lower screen displays supplementary information in the game and allows you to use your fingernail or a stylus (included) to point and click. There is also a full set of console keys on both sides of the lower screen, and they are often an alternative to clicking on the screen. With games made for the Gameboy Advance, of course, the lower screen is of no help but the keys should be familiar. Or so it seems, I have not actually tried this feature.

Nor have I tried the wireless communication and the "pictochat". I don't think many others try it either, at least the chat program. The wireless signals have a radius of 10-20 meters. So basically it is for people in the same family, or neighbors at most. There is really no reason why they should use a chat program instead of just wandering into the same room and chat together the old-fashioned way. Playing together may be more realistic, but I'm not sure of that either. Because let's face it, most people don't have the game. It is simply not very likely that there will often be two people with a DS within 20 meters of each other, both of them in the mood to play. So Nintendo and their associates need to make games that can be played alone. In that case, multi-player features will only be a cosmetic add-on.

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That said, the Sims seem to enjoy playing their handhelds together, but then again they enjoy playing alone too. In The Sims 2 there is another bug, or perhaps feature... Sims that play handhelds may spontaneously develop a crush on the person they play against. Or on themselves, if they play alone. I hope that doesn't happen in real life...

Be that as it may, it is fascinating to see how technology creeps forward. I have told before that I expect the future of the PC to be handheld, more exactly a compromise between a pocket PC and a mobile phone: A PDA with continual wireless broadband access. It will have the processing power of a computer, but most of the data will be stored elsewhere and just streamed to the datapad when you need it. The current pocket PCs and mobile phones are approaching this from different sides. And it seems to me that the handheld game consoles are moving toward the same goal. The PSP is one further step the same way. In the future, if any, I expect them all to converge in a unit small enough to carry anywhere, but big enough to display movies and web pages, and with controls that let you surf the web, play games, and use IP telephony or voice chat while doing it. We certainly have some distance to cover before that.

But already: Hi fate, you still conspiring to give me a longer commute? Bring it on! I won't mind an hour or two on the bus now.