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DS Game Port Wishlist
LATRINE! writes "Brittlefish has posted a wishlist of games that would make great ports to the Nintendo DS. While this isn't a comprehensive list, the idea of Starcraft on the DS is very exciting." From the article: "The Nintendo DS has given developers a chance to put forth new and innovative games. And with the addition of the touchscreen it has enabled developers to create game ideas that were previously impossible (or at best awkward) on any kind of console. Games like Nintendogs and Trauma Center are proof that new things are happening. One of the great possibilities the Nintendo DS offers is it's ability to emulate a mouse, and thus be able to handle PC ports that are mostly mouse-driven, but so far no ports have been done that utilize the DS hardware well." Any games you folks would like to see on two screens?
In Korea, a well-known language company released Touch Dic, basically a Korean-English, English-Korean, Korean-Japanese and Japanese-Korean dictionary in a DS cartridge. You use the touch screen and stylus to input letters and characters.
I know, the name is quite...err yeah.
"And explain again what's so "innovative" about the DS."
We have to explain it *again*? Ok, but I swear this is the last time.
1) It's a portable console with built-in wifi. Yeah, sony has it too, and there is even better support for infrastructure mode on the PSP, but you know that's a me-too after seeing the DS.
2) It does not have a d-pad as it's main source of input. It has a stylus used on a touch screen. This is unheard of in the set-top console world, let alone for a handheld.
3) It has a microphone and a decent speech api which enables simple recognition. Again, even set-top boxes aren't there yet.
4) It has *two* screens. What the developer does with them is up to them, for better or worse. Name one system, ever, that had two screens. Some obscure arcade game? Possibly. A *console*? Never. A portable console? Why that sounds insane!
5) It still has good 'ol GBA battery life. This is arguably not 'innovative' but damn impressive.
6) It's still backwards compatible with the GBA. Not really innovative again, but come on, you have to give some credit.
You may not like these features, and I agree there have been some silly uses of them, but to not call nintendo innovative for trying this out is ridiculous. Many have already called nintendo's demise when the DS was announced.
**Disclaimer, I own every current gen set-top console, a DS, a PSP and a GBA. Try not to call me a fanboy. I know it hurts not to, but just try. If it helps, check my user name.
-- I have fans? Wow.
An error in the article:
The original control style for Marble Madness was *not* a control pad, or even a joystick. It was a trackball, of course - a touchscreen would make a good replacement, but that's already been done in Pac 'N' Roll.
Apparently Blizzard sent out a newsletter asking fans if they'd be interested in ports of Starcraft and Diablo. Sounds good to me, although I'd prefer the PSP.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Control is not everything. There is still processing power that governs how many enemies can be on screen, and how intelligent they are.
Starcraft's system requirements included a Pentium CPU at 90 MHz. Throw in the fact that the Nintendo DS has hardware acceleration for tile and sprite displays, and you might be able to squeeze it into the 67 MHz of the main ARM CPU.
And then the screen lets you see more on the PSP.
In practice, you need to see enough to tell one type of unit or terrain from another. This was doable in Warcraft 1 and other RTS games of that era, which ran at 320x200 pixels, with 256 horizontal pixels used for the playfield and the rest for the status/command bar, part of which would move up to the top screen.
Bigger UMD allows more levels, more enemy types, in game voice, better music.
Current Nintendo DS games are up to 64 MiB in size. Starcraft was ported to N64, at a size of 32 MiB (256 "megabits"). How big was the spawn install of Starcraft for PC? Audio fidelity doesn't matter as much as it would on a console or PC title, as you typically don't use Sennheiser headphones on a handheld, so you can probably get away with some form of lossy waveform compression on the audio.
An all around better gaming experience.
NOW LOADING is not gaming.
Point is, if you can't easily tell your units what to do, especially in the rapid clickfests of advanced play, the rest doesn't matter. True, good control won't save a bad game, but bad control will wreck a good one.