I'd hate to spout doom and gloom because I do think the Nintendo DS is a cool system at $149, but you'd have to be blind if you can't see the huge leap of technology a mere forty or fifty bucks will get you on the PlayStation Portable. This $185 announcement was indeed meant as a kick to Nintendo's crotch with its soon-to-be-released dual screen portable. It's going to be a joke when Sony shows up on Japanese shelves just days after the Nintendo DS with versions of Ridge Racer and Tiger Woods that are night and day differences from the games made on the DS hardware.
Nintendo can't ignore this glove-slap from Sony, especially if it wants to give the system market penetration. Fifty bucks is a significant gap, but it's not far enough. My suggestion would be for Nintendo to drop the price to $129, and give away Super Mario 64 DS with the package. Really give gamers something meaty. At the same time, give the GBA SP one more small kick down to $69 to widen the gap between it and the DS to keep both platforms alive.
I'm still gung-ho for the Nintendo DS, but you just can't ignore the PSP now. It's coming...with a vengeance.
-- Craig
"The WiFi functionality of the system will let as many as four players play together, walking around in the same village. Players will be able to chat using the touch screen and show off their own rooms."
I'm pointing here at the WiFi functionality, is this a typo, or is it for real? Since a big dicussions turned up about this, and alot people think you made a type. So will it REALLY have WiFi ( so you will be able to play it online with other people from diffrent country's ) or just use nintendo's wireless protocol for wireless gaming with your local friends?Thanks alot already for your time and answer!
Brian
The news is based on Japanese information that tends to interchange wireless and WiFi. So, honestly, it's still up in the air until Nintendo steps forward and says "It's ONLINE!!! INTERNET PLAY!!!" then we'll just assume it's local area. But we'll certainly give Nintendo hell if they do cheap out and skip Internet connectivity with Animal Crossing...it's their "killer app" when it comes to the Nintendo DS and WiFi.
-- Craig
Sean
Ridge Racer has many different control schemes for steering, including D-pad (great, but not analog) and touch-screen (tough, but fully analog steering). There's apparently an option in the game for Nintendo's thumb stylus for even more analog steering, but I haven't seen that one running yet.
-- Craig
a guy
I honestly wouldn't jump to this conclusion. It has been a while since Nintendo's had any sort of hard competition in the handheld market, but you have to remember the days when the original Game Boy came out, Sega and Atari pushed out some great color handhelds with the Game Gear and Lynx. They failed. Turbo Express, failed. They were more expensive and more poweful than the crappy green screen of the Game Boy system. It was the cheaper cost and the fact that it was the only system you could get a portable Tetris on.
Times may have changed in favor of Sony taking over. The company may get in there with a higher priced and much more powerful system...but the company's got some killer apps brewing, and some heavy third-party support. Nintendo can't relax anymore.
-- Craig
Kenny
1 GB of RAM would cost more than the DS system does right now. Duh. PSP has 32 megabytes of RAM to play with, which is waaaaay more than the DS, and is just another reason why Nintendo needs to bring the price of the DS down after the bomb Sony dropped. Consoles have always played with less RAM than on the PC because RAM is the element that takes up most of the money in a system and it's the easiest thing to strip out of a standard to significantly reduce the cost.
-- Craig
dan
When you make a 3D model, you need a "skin" to cover the wireframe, and you need "bones" to tell the animation cycle which parts of the body can be moved. If a snake model, for example, only has one bone, you couldn't bend it for animation. And if it only had a couple of bones, it wouldn't bend naturally. So, you need to give it as many bones as you think you need to make the snake bend and move as fluidly as possible. The more bones means more processing cycles, so it's a balancing act in real-time animation.
-- Craig
Nick Robinson
You were only reading a part of the story. When Yoshi grabs a Mario cap, he'll turn into Mario. But he'll still be Yoshi inside that Mario, so while he'll look like Mario, and act like Mario, he'll still sound like Yoshi. As for the controls in Super Mario 64 DS, I didn't see that option when I played it. But I'll keep looking when I get my copy very very soon...
-- Craig
Alex Knotts
It's up to the gamer. There's an option in the Nintendo DS menu to choose the upper or lower screen for the GBA.
-- Craig
xxx
Like the AGB-Capture device to grab footage and screens from GBA titles (something we've been using since the first year of the GBA's life), Nintendo has something called the DS Capture unit. It's a blue box that plugs into the USB port of a PC and grabs screenshots and video footage directly from the display RAM of the Nintendo DS system. It's a very expensive piece of kit, but we're hoping that by the time Nintendo ships the Nintendo DS we'll have one for our extensive Nintendo DS coverage.
-- Craig
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