BIn 2004, video games were well into their adolescence. The war between Sega and Nintendo that defined the early 1990s was in the rearview mirror. PlayStation knocked both companies off their seats, and Microsoft launched Xbox. The critical and commercial hits of the time were not comic book platformers but operatic space shooters (Halo) and anarchic crime games (Grand Theft Auto). There were lots of guns, and most games featured increasingly cinematic cutscenes.
Meanwhile, Nintendo fell to third place with its home game console GameCube, but still dominated the portable game market with its Game Boy Advance. Everyone was expecting the next version of the Game Boy family. But instead, Nintendo released a strange-looking silver clamshell console that was controlled by a stylus.
The Nintendo DS celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. Despite its strange appearance and unconventional controls, it became Nintendo’s biggest hit ever, selling over 150 million units. It catered not only to people who wanted to play Mario on the go, but also to people who had never thought of picking up a video game console before. Intuitive touchscreen controls have made video games accessible to millions more people than the Game Boy. With DS, you can play Sudoku, language learning games, and raise virtual pets. Many people bought it not for Pokemon, but for Dr. Kawashima’s brain training.
The idea of a dual-screen console has been floating around within Nintendo for some time. This was an idea that Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president from 1949 to 2002, was particularly fond of, and often mentioned it to his successor, Satoru Iwata, and Nintendo’s creative lead, Shigeru Miyamoto. Mr. Iwata says: “The desire to create something with two screens has been with us for a while, and it’s been a constant source of motivation for Miyamoto and I to basically reverse engineer it.”
Although Iwata had always been confident in the idea, the market and the public viewed DS with great skepticism. “At first, a lot of people were confused,” he recalled. “When we announced that we were going to launch a console with two screens and a touch panel, I’m sure most people thought Nintendo had gone too far.”
In retrospect, the Nintendo DS prepared the world for the explosion of touchscreen smartphone gaming that would obliterate the iPhone and, ultimately, the entire concept of handheld gaming consoles. You no longer need them anymore, because you can do everything from getting directions to taking photos to playing games with one device that fits in your pocket. The DS was a half step between the Game Boy and a smartphone, a device that could do more than just play games.
Of course, I was there for the game. When I bought the DS, no one knew that it would greatly expand the gaming population. And there were some great games, including some weird and wonderful ones. DS’s new control methods seem to have encouraged developers to do all sorts of playful and unexpected things. While touchscreen controls were the console’s most enduring innovation, the DS’s dual-screen clamshell was surprisingly adaptable and suited for a variety of uses.
In Brain Training, you hold the console horizontally like a book and write answers to simple math and logic questions on the touch screen. A puzzle in the adventure game Another Code allowed me to open and close the DS to stamp documents, and tilt the screen to reflect each other to decipher symbols. In Electroplankton, we draw a path for tiny creatures that play music. There was also a Guitar Hero game that came with a small attachable fingerboard and pick. In the DS Zelda game Phantom Hourglass, you have to shout at a character through a microphone to get them to lower a bridge. You can also talk to Nintendog.
influenced DS more than anything variety. I have a huge collection of DS games, ranging from the unexpectedly heartbreaking Desert Island Simulator (lost in blue), the basketball game Mario Hoops 3v3, rhythm games and visual novels (the brave and heartfelt lawyer drama series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has never been better than on the DS). Among the bestsellers were, as you might expect, New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart, but also Brain Trainers, Nintengs, and Professor Layton (a charming puzzle game about a British professor and his apprentice). The catalog was by no means homogeneous.
The 3DS, released in 2011, was a worthy successor with its own excellent lineup, but by then smartphones had already dealt a fatal blow to handheld game consoles, and the industry was becoming more conservative. It was becoming. The wide-ranging, free-for-all experimentation that defined the DS catalog will likely never be seen again. The world will remember the DS as the console that pioneered touch screen controls. But for me, the DS will always be the console with the most diverse selection of games of all time.
what to play
The most obvious classic DS picks are: mario kart, advance the wars: dual strike, Nintengs (please don’t @ me) and Animal Crossing Wild World. But since when did I serve you the obvious?
Osu! Fight! cheering squad (called elite beat agent (Outside Japan) is the perfect encapsulation of this experimental era in handheld game console design. This is an interactive musical opera manga where you control a team of cheerleaders to help people through life’s toughest moments, set to a massive J-Pop soundtrack. Use your stylus to tap and swipe in time to the music as you lead a cheering squad to help a potter rediscover his muse, help a student pass an exam, and help a ghost find love in his still-living wife. I’ll help you tell them what’s going on. eBay has carts under 15 pounds.
Available: Nintendo DS
Estimated play time: best 4 hours of my life
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what to read
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of grammy awards The nominees for Best Video Game Soundtrack have been announced. It is as follows: Avatar: Pandora’s Frontier. God of War Ragnarok: Valhalla; Marvel’s Spider-Man 2; Star Wars Outlaws. and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. We recently profiled the people who worked on the music for Star Wars: Outlaws in our High Score Video Game Music column.
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According to Deadline, Amazon Prime’s stars are amazing fall out It is scheduled to be made into TV Macaulay Culkin will join next seasonas a “crazy genius type character.”
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sony and Nintendo announced This week’s quarterly results. Highlights from the PlayStation side: Sony has now sold 65 million units of the PS5 and 1.5 million units of the fun Astro Bot. On the Nintendo side, the number of Switch consoles currently sold is 146 million units, which is still far behind Nintendo’s best-selling game console in history, the DS (154 million units).
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The next Nintendo console will be backwards compatible and switch Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa confirmed this at a press conference. Further details about the new machine are expected to be announced by the end of this year.
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leader Lewis ask:
“I love playing all kinds of mobile games, but the one I play most often is puzzle bobble/bust a move Counterfeit products that I unconsciously useStress after a long day (I’m level 5,264). The only problem with these games is that they are confusing and bombarded with long, weird ads. Do you have any suggestions for solid, well-designed free puzzle games that will help me stop doomscrolling?”
Sadly, the price of free games on mobile phones is about Always terrible advertising. My first thoughts are: Netflix Subscription? It comes with a ton of smartphone games, including some very good puzzle games like Monument Valley, Paper Trail, Arranger, Cut the Rope, and a variety of match-3 and word games that defy fascinating thinking. Included.
We also asked some talented people Blue Sky will considerand here are the recommendations they came back with (thank you everyone): Slice & Dice, Konami’s Pixel Puzzle Collection, Township, Threes, and Match Factory! And twenty. The developer gave a shoutout to their game Vectic Lite, which includes negligible banner ads, alongside another banner ad-only puzzle game called Nokama. There are also independent puzzle game websites. thinking gameyou can search our database for recommendations.
If you have any questions for the questions block or anything else you’d like to say about the newsletter, please reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.
Source: www.theguardian.com
