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Nintendo's Busy Week
GameDev.net has a wrap-up from Nintendo's busy week. They touch on the release of development kits, production delays for the DS Lite, and the ongoing DS vs. PSP war. From the article: "It seems Nintendo, who have in the past tended to rely heavily on first-party games, are eager to elicit support from third-party developers. According to some big-name developers who have had their kits for some time there have already been several versions of the kit: the first was just the console and a wired controller, while the second had a few minor tweaks and the third a boost in CPU power."
I remember on my original 8 bit nintendo, most of the games I had were not made by nintendo..... Konami, Data East, Square etc...
Tell you what. My new ipod didn't look tacky when I got it.. It looks tacky now though. A few weeks is all it took to scratch the living shit out of the face of the thing. Same thing with my buddies PSP.
I mean I got the freaking thing so I could jog with it but if you don't keep it in the case (and it's in your pocket) it WILL get scratched. even if you put it in it's case that it came with it will scratch. and if you leave it in the case forget about changing songs while you jog it's just too much work. So tell me whats the point of owning the beautiful ipod when you have to keep it in it's ugly case 99% of the time for fear of scratching it? seriously? whats the fucking point?
Screw buying products based on looks. Atleast I don't have to look at a scratched up ugly screen on my DS because of it's protective clamshell design.
Portable devices need to be rugged not so amazingly beautiful that they scratch at just a glance. I mean the ipod and psp are so fucking delicate and expensive it's SCARY taking them out of the house. Don't even THINK about dropping one cause you can kiss it good bye. I drop my DS all the time.
I'm telling you. Looks aren't everything.
Would you buy a beautiful 200,000 ferarri if the sun shine made the paint peel off and you can't wash it with out scratching the windows up and if you fart on the inside the smell will stick to everything and never go away and if you shift too fast on accident the engine will fall out? fuck no you wouldn't.
'If they wanted to say "DS is for DS games and not a replacement, go buy a GBA if you want GBA stuff", why include the support at all?'
The GBA slot is used as an expansion port for things like rumble packs and game expansion packs (Band Brothers has a GBA cart full of extra songs for example). Since one of the DS' CPUs is the same as the one in the GBA (although it runs double the clock speed in DS mode) it must have been fairly simple to recycle the cartridge port from the GBA and offer simple backwards compatibility. It was more likely a case of "hey we can make GBA games run" than a design goal to make the DS a fully functioning GBA.