MrAngryFace said:
Am I? So far the only game that seems to really use the Second screen for anything decent is Advanced Wars 2.
Look, I love Advance Wars as much as the next guy, but from what we've been shown so far (which isn't much), I'm not entirely sure how the second screen is being put to great use. Seems to me your judgement is being clouded by your love for the series. Now perhaps the screen set up interacts in a way we don't know yet, but I don't see why you couldn't just press a button on a single screen system and bring up the sky battle scene.
Don't look at the two screens as something seperate from the touch screen. Oh sure, some games will use the second screen without the touchscreen, as a basic map or whatever, but I think the reason for two screens is basically that there are going to be plenty of games (like Metroid Prime: Hunters) where you're going to be using the touchscreen so much and it's so fast moving, that blocking the view with your hand/stylus (as you would be on a single screen) is less than ideal.
Maybe Nintendo didn't plan it that way, but I don't see much innovative coming from having two screens alone (maybe a few things, Zelda Four Swords comes to mind). Combine it with one being touch sensitive though, and I do.
As for Advance Wars being the only game to take advantage of it, I don't agree at all. Yoshi's Touch & Go, Kirby...whatever it's called...Wario Ware, Puppy Times, Jam With The Band, Pictochat, that ermmm...puzzle game (I forget what it's called) all seem to be great uses to me. There's other games we don't know about yet in terms of how they're going to control, so I won't comment on them. And, while I realise we're talking first party here, you have third party titles like Pac Pix and Feel the Magic making good use of the system's unique capabilities too.
[qoute]So what does that leave you with, graphics that exceed the GBA SP by a small margin. And I mean small, nothing about mario 64 DS looks better than the N64 version.[/quote]
You've probably just not followed it closely enough, but that's not true at all. Despite the lack of texture filtering (I honestly don't know why it's not in there, thoguh apparently it's not a huge issue on a smaller screen), a lot fot eh game looks considerably better. Better textures, higher ploygon count, higher framerate.
Just seems like people are making this gigantic allowances for a hand-held that refuses to actually push any real boundries despite its release being founded on the idea of a 'revolution in gameplay'.
I don't believe it will, but even if it turns out that the DS doesn't come up with anything revolutionary, surely just the fact that it can do things better is good enough. Let's take realtime strategy games as an example. They've never taken off on consoles, and the reason is obvious...no mouse. It's just so awkward to select troops or units with an analogue stick or D pad. You can do it, sure you can...it's just crap and slow. The DS on the otherhand doesn't have this problem. The stylus may even be
more accurate than a mouse, we'll see. It's certainly good enough though.
You could now argue that RTS on a small screen doesn't sound very easy to control, but that's where the two screens come in. You could control detailed, smaller areas of the overall map on the bottom screen when you need to work in close detail, and you can see the entire map on the top screen. And when you want a different portion of the top map, you press a button and they switch screens, you draw a square around the part you want to zoom in on and that pops up on the bottom screen.
Or you can look at Advance Wars if you like, as you brought it up. As far as I'm aware, there's nothing we've seen so far which you couldn't do with a single screen, it'd just be more awkward. The DS's capabilities (in this case two screens) just make it
better. Not innovative, just better. Is that not enough? You don't have to believe in what nintendo says to buy a system you know.