** WARNING! A HUGE ELITIST -- DRINKY CROW -- IS APPROACHING FAST **
(fanboys, you were warned. Talk about my posting style and NOT the DS and I *will* place my boot in your teenboy asspants and send you packing.)
Anyhow.
No points for a correct guess, motherfuckers; yes, I got a Nintendo DS. One of my co-workers traded me his for an old Seagate 80 GB HD and a PCI GeForce FX 5200.
Man, WHAT THE FUCK. You thought I mocked this thing before? Now that I've put some play time in Super Mario 64 DS (I couldn't be bothered to take Fellate the Magic or Wario Ware -- he can keep that shit), I can NOT believe what a chintzy, cheap-ass piece of dimestore crap this thing is. It FEELS like it came out of some damn UFO catcher unit -- and it doesn't help that the unit he gave me is scratched to fuck. I'm feelin' ripped off.
Shoulda known better when he became a little too chipper when I agreed. He's putting together a machine for his wife and got really excited when I said "fuck, alright, I wanted to play Castlevania and Advance Wars anyhow" instead of alternatively asking for, I dunno, sixty bucks or something. He couldn't foist the games on me fast enough.
OWNED.
First, my few positives:
+ GBA games do in fact look nice and colorful on the screen. That's actually a pretty big plus.
+ D-pad is a little bigger than the GBA's, and the shoulder buttons feel alright.
+ uh, shit, I thought I had another plus. I don't.
Negatives:
- JEEZUS CHRIST THE 3D IS AN ABOMINATION TO MY EYES. Mario 64 looks like a pixellated, noisy mess -- and I hafta play as fucking Yoshi to start? WHAT THE HELL.
- JEEZUS CHRIST THE TOUCH PAD SUCKS. You really gotta press on that beast. My Pocket PC is so much more sensitive and responsive it isn't even funny.
- JEEZUS CHRIST THE WHOLE THING FEELS CHEAP. The plastic case scratches as bad as my PSP screen, the thing is cumbersome as hell, and it's just. So. Damn. Ugly.
- JEEZUS CHRIST DO NOT PLAY A PSP BEFORE YOU CONSIDER A DS. Ghosting issues on the 60 fps PSP games aside, the DS seems like a frickin' relic in comparison, and without any of the quaintness that might make it palatable to a certain breed of gaming dork.
The thing actually makes me wanna play my GBA SP despite the "superior" screen quality afforded by the DS just because the SP seems so tiny and elegant now. Y'know, I'm going to refuse to compare the DS to the PSP, not because the comparison is unfair, but because the PSP is something so significantly superior that the entire idea of comparing the two becomes disingenuous and pointless, like comparing a sports car to, I dunno, a rickshaw pulled by a retarded kid.
Anyway, while I waited for the good folks at Canyon Park Goodyear to put new tires/brakes on my wife's car, I meandered down to GameCrazy to see what else was available for the DS. I tried to enlist the assistance of the clerk, who just laughed at me. He mentioned that they had seven used DS units in stock that were traded in for PSPs, and in the best facsimile of a Nintendo fan that I could muster -- basically a piping feminine chirp mixed with a sort of mincing gestural style -- I informed him that the SONY POOSTATION PORTABLE DID NOT SELL OUT ITS FIRST MILLION UNITS SO HAW HAW. Much to my feigned horror, he didn't seem to care in the slightest, and with the nonchalance of a man used to the mental titanship of the average Nintendo fan, he informed me that I might consider Zookeeper which had just dropped in price to $30 -- not bad for a game you can find for FREE on most Flash-gaming web sites in a marginally less portable form.
"I don't like puzzle games or mini-game compilations!" I squeaked.
"Yer fucked," he observed to some point just past my head, probably the massive wall of Gamecube used games.
"Wanna Picto-Chat?" I asked. "You can be Luigi and I'll be Mario and we can create a sort of collaborative emergent game experience from just our imaginations!"
"Get the fuck out of my store," he said politely.
So much for trying to use fandom in lieu of common sense. Now I'm REALLY stuck with a shitty piece of scratched silver plastic and no cognitive dissonance to make it palatable until Castlevania or Advance Wars shows up. I watched some of the Kirby movies, and admittedly, I felt a LITTLE less of the bone-aching, soul-smothering ennui that overcomes me when I see the pictures of Jak Team Racing or Ratchet and Clank's Genre Miscegenation 2005. But not MUCH more. Not much more at all.
So seriously: WHAT THE FUCK. I mean, I'm embarrassed that I gave a few of you dopes enough credence that I actually ACCEPTED the DS -- what I got for my iota of trust was an ugly, lumpy Gameboy Advance with backlighting. I refuse to consider its 3D abilities relevant, because I hope to never play another piece of 3D content on it EVER. When it isn't a GBA, the thing is actually UNPLEASANT to play. This thing couldn't be more misengineered if Tiger Electronics had hired Diamond Multimedia to make a handheld portable.
And how the hell to they expect me to use a stylus when playing Castlevania. Do I take my right hand off the jump/sword button and grope about for my stylus, then cast it aside whenever the unnecessary little touch task is done with?
