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
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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This is a scene out of a lost aughts romance movie.
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