Dual Screens I Guess

King of Posters
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I guess I just wanted to ramble about the hardware design among the DS lineage, without making a coherent point or contributing to a particular thread.

The clamshell design never really caught my attention. The Switch and Vita had the right idea of using a single screen as both a game monitor and tablet interface. I’ve never had Hinge Problems with any of my DS systems, becase I was always a meticulous child when it came to handling my hardware, but to me the hinge is just another point at which the system could break.

The touch screen is basically a mouse pad, and I do like that a lot. One of the first games for the DS (for many people it was a pack-in cart) was a Metroid Prime: Hunters demo. The game basically controlled like a PC shooter. You used the touch screen to move a cursor with high precision and inconspicuous latency. Many shooters on the DS used this formula, like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Brothers in Arms DS. This fascinated me as a kid, because I was never allowed a PC with internet access, and I didn’t have a PS3 or Xbox 360. Modern FPS games were super foreign to me, but the DS gave me a glimpse of the genre.

Metroid was frustrating because it required the user to designate an entire hand for aiming. This works for a mouse and keyboard, but the DS doesn’t offer much to do with your off hand. With the d-pad and L button used for walking and shooting, other actions were mapped to touch screen controls which ate up precious screen space. In order to jump (which is something you do a lot of in Metroid Prime: Hunters), you double tapped the touch screen, which is pretty awkward. I ended up trying to play the game with the “dual stick” option, which uses the set of face buttons as a separate d-pad, but this would get me smashed in online deathmatch mode.

Not to mention it’s just uncomfortable to hold a DS in such a way that you can use the d-pad and scribble on the touch screen. Kid Icarus: Uprising directly addressed this by including a 3DS STAND WITH EVERY GAME, which hoisted the system on a little table so that it could be played without having to use a hand to support its weight. But like… why make a game that controls like that in the first place? We eventually got the Circle Pad Pro (by “we” I mean “I imported one for Monster Hunter 3U”) which is a hilarious mech suit for the 3DS; its only provision is an extra circle pad. Nintendo were clearly privy to the increased complexity of camera controls for games on their handheld system, and this is such a goofy workaround. I think the only games I ever played that utilized the add-on were MonHun and Resident Evil: Revelations. Both of these games actually played worse with the Circle Pad Pro. They were clearly designed foremost for single-stick control. Like, I used a bow in MonHun 3DS, and it was a huge disappointment to learn that I still could not move the character and the camera simultaneously while aiming. I had already gotten used to playing with “the claw” technique, due to the PSP versions basically requiring this.

Whenever I use a 3DS in 2019 I just think how that space could have been utilized for something else, like a physical keyboard, or a trackball, or a heartrate monitor, or a crank. Petit Computer and its followup SmileBasic were great for demonstrating how the DSi and 3DS systems could be used as programming environments. However, typing code with a virtual keyboard, on a screen which only registers a single contact point, is, really, tedious. Still, I appreciate games that aren’t afraid to use a keyboard as a primary interface. The DS homebrew roguelike Powder was unique for allowing full digital keyboard control for all character actions, similar to how these kinds of games play on PC. Not necessary, but cool.

The DS really could have been a good all-purpose personal device. It definitely wanted to pretend to be one. Pictochat was really fun for like, an hour, until you realize it’s just a gimmick that takes up space on the home menu. Journal entries and calendar planning would have been more helpful features. Y’know, or anything that utilized the touch screen to its full potential. The 3DS eventually had calendar and alarm clock apps that you could buy for $5 each, which is kind of a joke. They’re jokes right? I hope none of you bought them. SwapNote for the 3DS basically picked up were PictoChat left off. The free app allowed users to draw and send notes to people via personal inbox. I would constantly be getting drawings, messages, audio clips and photos from anonymous people on my friends list. This totally could have and did become a disaster, so the service was taken down and replaced with a similar app that could only transmit drawn notes. It was a really neat little experiment that showed how the 3DS could be used for social media, for better or worse.

Oh, also, the 3DS had a working internet browser, which I used a lot. The PSP had one too, but it was basically unusable compared to the direct mouse and keyboard control that the 3DS could emulate. Anyway I don’t know what I’m saying. The Switch is a really interesting piece of hardware. It’s just a little less exciting now that Nintendo is shifting the focus to pure gaming hardware, rather than all of the goofy gimmicky things the 3DS could do. The Switch touch screen almost never gets used–it feels like a byproduct of the previous handheld system.

What are some of your favorite DS/3DS games that utilize the hardware in unique ways? Bangai-O Spirits is a given, thanks

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Oh, I’ve also dabbled quite a bit in M01D, which is Korg’s M1 Synthesizer, emulated for the 3DS, including a sequencer. It’s a pretty fantastic piece of music making software. You get what you expect out of the small package. Tons of rich sounding instrument patches and the ability to write full length compositions. You can even export MIDI sequences to the SD card, so you can rework them in a DAW of your choice, or just upload them. Great for doodling music, great for composing. Two systems can be synced together to act as a modular workstation. Cool Cool Cool!! It has a companion app called Korg DSN-12, which is basically a digital polyphonic synthesizer modeled after the MS-10 analog hardware.

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I loved the shit out of Metroid Prime Hunters. Aside from Destiny, it is the only online shooter I really got into, and the controls felt really good to me. I know there were a lot of blank faces at my school when Metroid Prime 3 was announced with motion controls, but to me it felt like a natural extension of what they had nailed on the DS minus some of the awkwardness.

Really it’s only when the game’s glitches started being abused in every lobby that I gave up on it, otherwise I would have played until the very end probably.

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Kid Icarus deathmatches were great times.

I loved the Korg synths as well

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Missed opportunity that Doom online deathmatch has never been on a Nintendo handheld

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the best use of the touch screen i ever saw was on the original ds’ chou shoujuu mecha mg. a giant robot game with lots of controllable robots, each of which had its own unique touchscreen control panel, with wheels, switchs, joysticks and all kinds of stuff in there.

the original’s biggest strength was that it was more like a portable ps1 in spirit than the psp was. by which i mean that it was such a popular machine worldwide that every commpany from the biggest to the smallest wanted to release every game on it. so there’s an incredibly deep library filled with good, bad, and weird games.

pictochat was the best way to pass notes in class about the one person your friends hate in all my years of education.

here’s a little 3ds tip: everyone knows about the sega ages big hitters like space harriier and outrun, but on of the physical sega ages collections had, as an extra, the master system game 3d maze walker. it has very simple graphics, but it’s one of the most convincing, and solid-looking 3d games on the system

this is so true. me and my friends played a ton of multiplayer games on ds: bomberman, lunar knights, mario kart, bleach 2, and more. doom would have been incredible!

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the best 3D game on 3DS is snake eater because it has a very deep 3D field, and when snake loses his eye the game becomes 2D in first person mode

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The pink 3DS XL is the best looking pink console since the milky pink GBA. Not nearly as good but way better than the competition.

That prototype DS Nintendo showed off at the 2004 E3 was cool. It was orange and silver?

Folks said it was ugly but I disagree. It was Nintendo ugly. It was cool.

The best DS game is probably Shiren the Wanderer or Bangai-O Spirits or New York Times Crosswords. I’m sure I’ll come up with three more as soon as I hit post.

I think the DSi XL is probably the best Nintendo handheld that isn’t the Game Boy Micro. I have sold most of my game hardware but I kept my DSi XL. It’s this very tasteful, very adult brown. And when I say “adult” I’m not talking, like, parents’ movies but it’s the one console you could probably play while wearing a smoking jacket and some silk pajamas* and still look real sophisticated like.

The Switch is cool but the loss of stylus controls is a big loss. I don’t like touching things but I love drawing, and writing. I am still sore that America didn’t get the Mario Maker 2 stylus as a pre-order bonus. If I had some real Fuck You Money I bet I’d make some total hand-cramping stylus-controlled nightmare game that no one would enjoy, not even me, but I’d be proud of it anyway, cuz the world could use more stylus games. It would be the next Kid Icarus: Uprising – a game I admire but cannot be bothered to actually play, not even with the stand. I’m glad it exists though. It is a neat game.

Those are some of my random Dual Screen Thoughts AKA D.S.T.

*This is the official outfit of sophistication. Imagine me wearing those clothes right now.

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The original DS was a lovely piece of hardware, but I still associate it with the fact that after playing New Super Mario Brothers, I genuinely thought I had outgrown video games because if NSMB wasn’t any fun to me, I must hate video games.

(This did not last, although I did have to escape to Sony consoles for a while to convince myself of this)

On the other hand, years later, my 3DS became the console that made me realize just how goddamn good games could be again after a smaller slump right at the end of college. Super Mario 3d Land, Link Between Worlds, and Pokemon X brought me more joy from Nintendo than I had in years, and made me kinda believe that games as a whole were getting better again.

Now of course I’m a hyper-anachronistic gamer, playing things from basically any era that strikes my fancy, but those two consoles certainly felt like Momentous Occasions at the time.

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I love the fucked up missteps on the DS.

I lost a stylus on the bus playing Dawn of Sorrow because defeating a boss involves quickly grabbing the stylus and drawing a symbol. I dropped the stylus doing that and lost it forever.

There’s an RTS whose name escapes me where you would draw symbols on the screen to cast spells. The symbols were difficult for me to remember, would have been way better with just a feckin menu.

Clubhouse Games is very fuckin good if you are me and want to play card games with your spouse every night for like 3 years

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The funny thing about this game is that it was designed from the ground up to be playable on a GBA (I think) including only letting the player and most enemies move in 4 directions. It’s kind of brilliant in that way.

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Best Homebrew on the DS was Warcraft Tower Defense

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There was a homebrew Tetris the Grand Master clone that I remember being really keen but I can’t attest to how accurate it was cuz I haven’t played a ton of TGM

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i resent clamshell and acknowledge 2ds only

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The key to Metorid Prime Hunters is a thumb ring nub.

The singleplalyer content was lame. But the multiplayer was a solid analog of Quake III.

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I’m still bummed out that we didn’t get to play STEEL DIVER: SUB WARS at SBCon 3.0

The game is NOT ONLY the Counter-Strike of subaquatic naval warfare, but it features a morse code messaging system so that you can send “ASS” and “CUM” to all of your local wireless friends

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I will bring my 3ds this time I promise

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Somehow I missed this thread.

Been spending my before my bed time messing withy DSLite and a chinese flash cart I bought last year. Lots of garbage on that but now I have to see if I left clubhouse games on it.

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There was a cute cooking “game” (not Cooking Mama) that was really just a bunch of recipes with pictures that would talk you through cooking iirc. Unfortunately this game out right before smart phones really took off so it was made redundant almost immediately, still neat.

Like almost every Nintendo gimmick all the usage of the two screens was heavily frontloaded around the launch and then mainly tied into first party stuff, otherwise people just made GBA games but kept the inventory or map on the bottom. I think the most I was impressed with it was Hotel Dusk, where you had puzzles where you had to turn the screens vertically to read it like a newspaper or shut it to simulate a stamp or whatever.

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Please do not say this about Pictochat. My ex’s parents didn’t allow us to sleep together at night, so we were in separate, adjacent rooms. That was back when text messages cost money. Instead we communicated via Pictochat by sending ourselves tiny drawn pictures wirelessly for about 30 minutes every night I spent there. It was wonderful!

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