I was very skeptical of the Nintendo DS when it came out. A touch screen seemed like a reasonable idea, but putting two separate screens in a handheld seemed like a gimmick.
My skepticism was also likely due to my disappointment with the Game Boy Advance. There are some truly great games for it—Advance Wars, Golden Sun, Wario Ware—but they are far outnumbered by the endless Pokemon games and lame movie and TV tie-ins. The majority of titles seem to be aimed at those teenage or younger.
When Sony launched the PSP, I hoped that things might change. I guessed that just as the PlayStation targeted a more adult gamer than Nintendo, so the PSP would go after those who didn’t want to play with Pokemon, Bratz, Jimmy Neutron or Spongebob Squarepants.
And it did. But unfortunately, when I finally got a chance to try a PSP, I discovered that the load times were just cripplingly awful. In addition, most of the games seem to be sequels or ports of PS2 games; and unfortunately, things which work well on a full size console don’t make for a good experience on a handheld.
Meanwhile, Nintendo had taken things in a strange new direction, releasing titles like Electroplankton, Brain Age and Nintendogs. It wasn’t exactly the blood and guts approach to mature gaming that Sony favor, but it wasn’t kiddy gaming either.
I’ve a real soft spot for experimental games. I love Katamari Damacy, I bought Nobody Can Stop Mr Domino!, I have Sentinel Returns and Stretch Panic. Even if the game is flawed, I’d rather play something artistically interesting and new, than yet another First Person Shooter.
So before heading off to Hamburg I bought a DS Lite and a copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World. Sure, it’s cute animals, but cute seems to be almost obligatory with Nintendo. Behind the cuteness, though, is an interesting Sim-like open ended gameplay focused on exploration.
The game world exists in real time, with different events happening throughout the year and at different times of day. This encourages you to drop in for a few minutes on a regular basis to see what’s going on, rather than spending hours playing like a conventional console game. In other words, it’s a good game for a portable. Walk into a cafe, buy coffee, sit down, and go see what’s happening in the game world. Since it’s Internet enabled, you can go online via WiFi and see what’s happening in a friend’s game world too, or see if there are any new extras from Nintendo.
Brain Age has a similar design philosophy. It’s something you can play for 10 minutes a day for a quick break. And unlike the PSP, the DS has practically no boot time, so you won’t find that your bus arrives just as you get past the loading screen.
In fact, the DS Lite shows an attention to design that’s typical of Nintendo. Just as the GameCube was a much better piece of hardware than the original PS2, so the DS Lite seems to fit its niche much better than the PSP. It’s iPod-like, white and smooth. The rechargeable battery is easily replaceable. It flips shut, automatically putting the game into pause/sleep mode and protecting both screens. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket. All of this means you can put the game away and return to the real world in a second or two.
The DS memory cards are like slightly enlarged (and much more robust) SD cards, and will stand up to more abuse than a Memory Stick, let alone a UMD disc. The extra slot for GameBoy back-compatibility doubles as an accessory slot for rumble packs and other add-ons. There’s an iPod-like headphone socket that will take regular headphones, or a special DS headset with microphone.
As with the GameBoy, the game cards are both ROM game and flash memory for game saves. This is neat as, unlike with a full size console, you never have to worry about swapping memory cards or finding space for your game saves.
Overall, it’s a really nice piece of design. If Apple made video games, it’s the kind of thing they’d release.
Tagged: ACWW, DS, DS Lite, flash memory, Golden Sun, Jimmy Neutron, Nintendo, Nobody Can Stop Mr Domino!, pokemon, PSP, Sentinel, Sony, UMD, video games
October 21st, 2006 at 17:47 -0600
Yes, PSP boot and loading times are an utter disaster and very few games are unspoiled by them. Gamespot has a hall of shame.
The problem is mainly in the choice of media: Sony chose to use UMDs because they were promoting the PSP as a portable movie-watching device (and perhaps because optical media are cheaper to manufacture than cartridges). But UMDs don’t work very well for games. On the one hand, you can’t afford to keep the UMD spinning because it will run down the battery in no time. But if you let the UMD stop spinning, it takes what seems like forever (several seconds) for the PSP’s rather feeble motor to spin it up again. And even once it’s spinning, the latency is huge (it takes a decent fraction of a second to open a file).
So you might think that games could try to predict what the player is about to do next, and do some predictive loading in the background while the game is going on. But it turns out when you try this that when streaming data off the UMD something in the kernel uses so much of some resource that the rest of the game can’t run at full framerate. So you can only really afford to load stuff when nothing else is going on. (I don’t know the reason for this but the most probable cause is something in the hardware design, such as UMD–RAM being on the same bus as CPU–RAM.)
The best thing to do is to design the game so that it doesn’t need to load stuff from the UMD very often, but of course everyone likes to push the power of the console by having lots of graphics and music, which means frequent loading.
Some of the really huge loading times are undoubtedly caused by inept programming, because you can fill the PSP’s memory from the UMD in about 10 seconds. So any loading time that’s longer than that is the fault of the developer. For example, if you have a hundred assets to load (textures, models, sounds, etc) the naive approach of having one file per asset, which would be quite acceptable on a console like the PS2, is disastrous on the PSP: you’d incur a hundred seek times, inflating your load time to 60 seconds or more. By packing all the assets you need for the next level or whatever into a single file you only incur one seek penalty.
The Nintendo DS, by contrast, is a joy for the user. Open it up, push the power button, and in a second or two you’re playing. There’s no latency in getting data from a ROM!
October 25th, 2006 at 06:32 -0600
Course cried one hand. Wild water is some increased building. The uniform quality grouped some window jovially. Hi, one building is much less sad than some bare keno games. I fought that woman circa that girl. I understood that period on board a tax. It’s mighty to be spat! This civic situation spoke opposite some nearby point.
October 30th, 2006 at 09:11 -0700
I think you make a bigger deal out of the PSP load times than you’d really find it.
The massive load times (and I accept that they are horrible) are when you initially load the game - the first time you put it in and power up. Coming back from standby (which is what you’re doing most of the time) is near instant and few of the games I’ve played have load times of more than a few seconds during the games.
All of which makes it very noticable when you’re tinkering with one when you don’t own it - you’ll be swapping games in and out seeing what’s what - but not that big a deal once you’re playing. Train stops, you flick it on to standby and walk off. On the next train, sit down, flick it back on and it resumes from where it was with no delay.
Now OK, I’m generally not playing the sports games that score so badly but even so I’m not seeing anything that is showing wait times of a minute, or anywhere close to it, under the sort of conditions I’d term regular use.
Should they have done better? Yep. Is it that big a deal? No.