Slashdot Mirror
DS Pre-Orders Stopped as Sales Soar
GamesIndustry.biz has the story that major retailers Gamestop and EBGames are likely going to stop DS Preorders because they're coming so fast that they won't be able to meet demand when the system launches. From the article: "It appears that six games will be available on day one - Nintendo's Super Mario 64 DS, Sega's Feel The Magic XY/XX, Activision's Spider-Man 2, Ubisoft's Asphalt Urban GT and two from EA - Madden NFL 2005 and The Urbz: Sims in the City." Gamespot also has details on the handheld shortage.
The DS is Nintendo's new fangles dual screen handheld. One screen for games. The second for adverts which will run continuously whilst viewing the first.
Nintendo's new handheld, featuring a pair of screens, and a new control scheme, relying on a D-pad and stylus.
But I've been wondering two things: Why is it so popular that they can't manage all the pre-orders? Nintendo has gone on record saying it's not going to replace the GBA, nor directly compete with it. So it's not just people buying the next-gen (unless, that's what they think it is). Is it the style factor, the wireless connectivity? The hope that it will become so much more?
Also, what is Nintendo's strategy with this device? Testing a market? Trying to figure out what a gamer/consumer wants, so they CAN implement it in the next GameBoy? I mean, it was first revealed this year's E3 (I believe. I don't remember the TGS), and it's already out for the holiday season. It doesn't look like it needed extended hype to get it moving. If someone could just answer the question "What the hell is going on?", I'd really appreciate it.
Try actually following the links or spending about 10 seconds searching on Google...Crazy concept, isn't it?
... The Nintendo DS -- short for dual-screen -- will be unveiled Tuesday morning at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo game industry gathering. ... "
Google for "nintendo DS". 3rd result on the first page -
"USATODAY.com - Nintendo unveiling a new portable
"When it comes to Nintendo, you have to wonder- is this shortage on purpose?"
Nintendo predicted 4-5 million DS systems could be produced and shipped world wide by the end of 2004. That was 5 months ago. Recent guidance says they are on target to nearly meet the upper boundry of that estimate. Remeber the DS ships in North America first then Japan later. This is simply production capacity meeting exceedingly high demand.
One day, a rather ordinary guy sees a really beautiful woman on the street. Before he can move to follow her, he finds himself holding a bag of goldfish. Apparently, the goldfish are ingested by a passerby who bumps into our ordinary guy. After helping him regurgitate the fish, the ordinary guy is recruited into a "superperformance group" called the Rub Rabbits. Their pitch to him is that the best way for him to see the woman of his dreams again is to stage an amazing performance for her. And thus begins your adventure.
I'm not making this up.
We spoke with some people in Nintendo's media/analyst relations department as well as a vice president who said that the company is shipping 1 million units for Nov. 21. This shortage doesn't appear to be an illusion.
If demand really is so high that retailers are stopping pre-orders then there may be a problem on the manufacturing side with a possible component shortage, or a simple lack of manufacturing capacity to produce more. There are a limited number of suppliers for some of the components that go into the DS and those suppliers have other customers besides Nintendo.
A few weeks back, we spent a couple of hours in a hands-on preview of the Nintendo DS and previewing/playing Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt, Super Mario 64 DS, Spider-Man 2 DS and the onboard PictoChat instant messaging software.
We also checked out a few more titles yesterday, and will publish first impressions of those games soon.
In one of the demonstrations that Nintendo gave to the press a month or so ago, they demoed a 'stylus' attachment for your thumb. Essentially you could move your left thumb (or right thumb, I think the DS has ambidextrous support) over the touch screen and use it like an analog stick. The game software seemed to have a bug in it, so it wasn't demonstrated... but it seemed like a really cool. Hopefully not too uncomfortable.
Here is a link to the movie I mentioned (select the "Gameplay Demonstration" movie listed at the bottom), with the thumb 'stylus' thing is near the very end.
MP3 player developer here :)
CPU is way too slow for DivX - main CPU is just a 66MHz ARM, and the second CPU (33MHz ARM) is dedicated to running the OS services. (Really wacky design.)
The 4MB of RAM is pretty small by PDA standards nowadays. Also, it uses a very proprietary memory card format for its ROM storage, though it has 32-bit addressing, and it'll probably be reverse-engineered quickly anyway. The hardware-level implementation is kinda crappy though, and although there's a basic MMU I don't know if it'll be useful enough for "real" Linux (uCLinux maybe though)
That's a pretty mediocre system spec. Most of the MP3 player CPUs we look at these days are ARM7-90MHz or ARM9E-133MHz and up. Most of the time they're only running at about 20-30MHz or so for decoding, but the headroom is great for the occasional burst of UI activity or database access etc. And they still manage enormous battery life like that. About 30-100mW is the power consumption you get these days. I find it ridiculous that most MP3 players probably have more more CPU power than the DS.
I'm really quite confused by Nintendo's choice of platform. The only reason I can think of for them using:
Actually, this reminds me somewhat of a CPU I've worked with *cough* PortalPlayer *cough* that was seemingly designed around being highly efficient and low power. Trouble was it didn't work out efficient in practice and it just made development incredibly difficult instead.
Here's an example: why didn't they just use a highly integrated ARM-9E 133MHz CPU like you can find from many vendors (i.e Samsung)? Perhaps the answer lies in no-holds-barred cost cutting...
Wal*Mart is still taking pre-orders.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Left-handed gamers have already been considered. The layout of the four buttons on the system's right side mirrors the position of the D-pad. In the Metroid Prime Hunters demo that they gave a few weeks ago, they demonstrated different control schemes that you could select for the game. Two of them were for left handed people, and made the right buttons behave as a D-pad and the D-pad as the right buttons. No worries!
Light is filtering down from above. Would you like to use DIVE?