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E3 - First Nintendo DS Pic
Ravi Hiranand writes "Steven Kent has a look at the Nintendo DS -- along with what appears to be the first picture of the unit (which doesn't look anything like any of the wild rumours suggested it might!). It's still unclear whether the game pictured (a Mario Kart title!) is really a DS game or whether the whole thing is just a render, but the image is credited to Nintendo, so it appears to be genuine..."
This thing has no chance of succeeding. It looks just as atrocious as I had imagined. Oh well, I'll buy it used in a couple a years for $20. Works for me.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of
serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't
believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code
that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3
machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't
even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was
supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had
experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted,
Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't
a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines
instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the
Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the
free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the
old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to
compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows
98/NT/2K are your only choices.
I will never understand these handhelds. I have only ever used these devices when I was a small kid. The graphics are terrible and the screens tiny. Why do you want to use them.
I can never use them even if on a journey. They are annoyingly small and the controls are flimsy. They don't stand up to the likes of the XBox and PS2. I understand that those are two different types of products, but these machines seem useless.
Surely these devices are aimed mainly at the 5-12 age bracket. Anyone older would need something more stimulating than these. What does everyone else think?
take a look at what Nintendo puts out on their consoles: stuff about Mickey Mouse or Zelda. It's a far cry from GTA: Vice City or Halo. /important/ things to spend money on. However, if i did it would not be beacuse i want to play Quake. It's a fun game, admittdly, but it's not in Nintendo's market.
Their market is not to people wanting to play Quake. Personally, I think side-scrolling games were great. I'll probably not buy this thing, because i have
Won't matter how quickly emulators get developed, any game using the touchscreen simply won't run properly.
If someone posted this already I apologize. There's just too many posts to read. :)
After looking at that pic for the past hour (not constantly, but off and on) it just looks like a digital mockup of a possible design. There's no Nintendo logo, the black space in the middle looks off, and if those are speaker holes at the bottom, it must be a joke. Perhaps Nintendo leaked a fake pic on purpose to get people talking about how lame the design is, then they'll unveil the real thing and blow our socks off.
I purchased by GBA SP full of joy that I would at last be able to play some decent games on the road. But what a big disappointment it was!!! the GBA SP is way too small, the buttons are too small, the screen is too small, and the games quality is that of SuperNes!!! I expected something better than outdated 16-bit graphics. It was a great disappointment.
Now on to DS: Is Nintendo sure that DS will succeed ? I really doubt it. Why should there be a 2nd screen ? it would not be for the stats, because it would be a problem in fast games (racing, for example) to take your eyes from the main screen. Another camera, perhaps ? but will the 2 simultaneous cameras assist the player ? or will he/she be confused from going back and forth ? players would need very good spatial perception if they are to handle two cameras at the same time.
Nintendo's double-screen Game&Watch games simply used the 2nd screen for extending the playfield, not for simultaneous action. The DS is something that has never been attempted before, but I smell another Virtual Boy.