Ahem almost all titles on your list were arcade ports to the commodore 64, if you really want to list original c64 games, better use impossible mission, or almost everything done by epyx.
sim city and civilization relied on the game mechanics which were invented by Dani Bunten for Mule and Seven cities of gold.
Panzer General was not the first iso turn based strategy game either but one of the best ever.
Wing Commander and Tie Fighters game mechanics resembled earlier space shooters, I can remember having played a storyless space shooter on my Atari XL computer in the 80s (actually 3, one the famous lucas arts one, the other one being a game half adventure partially hosted on a planet in full 3d (only lines but nevertheless 3d)
Dune2 I can give credit for, I cannot remember similar earlier game mechanics, Warcraft I would not call innovative though.
But the 90s were highly creative, you forget about the outstanding works of Looking Glass by delivering the Underworlds before Wolfenstein 3d, full blown 3d RPGs, with physics and full blown rpg mechanis in a real time combat system, something matched up until recently only be other looking glass games, or looking glass game derivatives.
Also the Ultima 7 series was at its peak with outstanding 2d physics mechanics in a sort of real world simulation, I cannot remember something similar except maybe Ultima 6, before.
After Wolfenstein 3d innovation went on a downfall on the pc side, I would call the 90s era after Wolfenstein 3d the innovation downfall era, because mostly shooters were pushed, while the innovation on the console side started to pick up at the same time it went down the drain on the pc side.
The funny thing is that innovation now goes down the drain on the console side and seems to go way up on the handheld side.
It always seems that platforms which are faster and cheaper to develop for with enough power to bring the concepts into life spawn innnovation while those were the production costs run sky high, bring innovation to its knees.
Ahem... 3d jump and runs were invented in Pandemonium, also Tomb Raider was earlier to my knowledge.
I am not sure if Pandemonium really was the first 3d jump and run game, you the earliest which sort of pseudo 3d graphics could have been q-bert and one of the jungle hunt sequels which were isometric jump and runs, Pandemonium was really 3d.
There might be earlier examples then Pandemonium of Jump and Runs using real 3d.
Sorry to jump in here, Super Mario 64 never was a 3d adventure, it just was a time when everything was labeled as an adventure, but neither mario nor tomb raider, both were marketed as 3d adventure games were those, strictly spoken, they were 3d platformers.
3d adventure games at that time existed, but not on consoles, the most prominent which comes to my mind, probably was the Tex Murphy Series on the PC side and to some extent also although they are more action games and rpgs, the underworlds and system shock, but those titles still were more on the adventure side than mario 64 ever was.
I came from the pc side and was heavily dissapointed by Mario 64, the sheer size of the world has been beaten on the pc side and even on the playstation, due to the fact that the world only was a number of smaller levels.
huge gameworlds existed with daggerfall and TES and a bunch of other games on the pc side at that time, and even tomb raider had bigger levels than the huge gameworlds of Mario 64.
The concept on how Nintendo brought the jump and run genre into the 3d world was interesting, they were not the first, pandemonium was way earlier but that one basically relied on pushing the characted back into a pseudo 2d.
I do not know if Tomb Raider was not earlier than Mario 64 though (it definitely was the superior jump and run however, I despise the later parts, but the first one was excellent by bringing back the concepts of prince of persia into the 3d area)
I cannot comment on the technical background of the XScale except that I constantly had the feeling the design was rather old. You constantly could read about new ARM generations, new extension modules like a hardware java acceleration etc... yet XScale was XScale no new features only a bunch of more MHz while others moved towards newer ARM cores.
The reason why you can find mostly XScales in pdas probably is, the intel brand recognition on those devices, speaking of windows + intel, which basically pushed many wince makers towards xscale although neither wince nor the intel xscale were any compatible to their pc counterparts. And of course, back in the early days of WinCE the XScale was one of the fastest ARM based processors around, this advantage basically was kept up about one year and was a result of the DEC takeover, Intel inherited basically what the Alpha people at dec did with the ARM core and screwed it up majorly, by not pushing the technology really further. I constantly had the feeling the XScale was the unwanted stepchild of intel, there, because it sold in pdas, but not really wanted, because it was no x86 and shock not even an intel design and even worse, the core was licensed from outside (no matter that ARM are still currently the best processor designers in the area of low power embedded procs)
It is not emerging, but being very strong, it is just that pdas are dying but you can find an arm processor in millions of phones worldwide, but not from Intel, mostly...
Same goes for the automotive embedded market where power processors rule the world there, but nothing from Intel.
Pretty much the entire embedded market is intel less.
The XScale design was inherited by DEC, I constantly got the feeling once Intel took over they simply had it as a sideprocessor, never being happy with having a licensed core instead of their own.
I did not look into the XScale development over the years too much, but did Intel ever integrate newer arm cores, or modules like the java vm extensions.
I just wonder because most ARM processor manufacturers ramped up their procs with newer designs, why I had the feeling from an outside perspective that intel wanted to have this processor line die, but was surprised with cold feets once they became sort of defacto standards in all windows ce based pdas.
Re:I had my doubts about WinfFS
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes BE is the most prominent example of having failed with a VFS on a relational storage and rowing back.
There are others, ask all the CMS vendors how good VFS systems on relational storages perform, some CMS systems I have seen doing this, implement a lot of caching or basically spool out the entire filesystem into the real one during publish stage.
The reason for all this is, that relational storage systems basically despite having indexes etc... get a serious performance hit on recursive calls, especially if they are unpredictable within depth.
The relational model is a set model with linear possibilities of querying. The filesystem structure however is a tree like object oriented way of storing data.
So if you take a normal sql server push something ooish on top of it which has a serious demand for speed you end up with a slow mess. Be recognized that, rowed back and used a normal filesystem with transactions and added an index on top of it. Guess what, you end up basically with a normal ooish data store:
Can store data
Can index meta data
has an oo like storage structure
Can do transactions
Most modern filesystems can at least do 3 of the four criteria, so all you need normally is an index for meta data. Be recognized that around 92, Apple recognized that upfront around 2002 when they hired the Be Guy, while Microsoft is simply stepping in Bees footprint and in the footprint of many CMS system developers, having failed with such an approach blatantly.
Microsoft could have had it cheaper, get the Lucene search engine, push it into.Net and add meta data parsers for their own documents, done and one point more for selling.Net.
Basically what Beagle does anyway.
To sum it up, if anyone at Microsoft would have read papers and would have looked deeper into the issue instead of jumping onto it they would have seen others have failed before with this approach, BeInc being one of the first.
The problem is deeper than not simply being able to pull it off, it is not pullable.
The reason for this is the relational model, which basically interferes hugely with tree like oo structures of a filesystem.
If you come from the db side you probably are aware of these issues, you can pull off a vfs on top of a relational storage, but you will get a significant performance hit, unless you have a fixed structure and can optimize upon that one.
The problem is, that relational models, do not match with recursive callable structures very nicely and you run into exponential performance hits once you dig deeper into the recursively called tables.
Sure there are ORM mappers which pull such stuff off like saving a tree etc... but face it most of those mappers also cause serious performance hits and everyone who has programmed with such a beast knows that things have to manually be optimized once you hit a certain complexity point (often with a relational fallback to achieve the desired performance)
So Microsoft is another one along the lines of having tried it, the sad story is, is that as usual in their arrogance did not do an upfront research and why the people before them failed, so they utterly repeated probably all the mistakes others stepped in 10 years ago when they gave up and simply moved towards indexed filesystems.
Apple was wiser, they simply hired the guy who did all this for BeInc and they were not forced to repeat the mistakes again and ended up with an indexed Desktop search the proven way.
Oh my, when I was six, I was afraid, afraid of Ghosts, I learned about nuklear weapons by the age of four, thanks to being directly at the frontier lines of the cold war between the west and the east. I learned about wars also when I was four thanks to the family stories of people in my family, having lived through two wars. And when I was seven, I already became aware of being the one getting beaten by the class bully. Thanks no thanks I do not want to be a child again. The problems are the same as an adult (instead of getting beaten by the bully, the bully is your boss) but you at least have sex and you do not have this typical childish fears (instead of being afraid of ghosts the chances are high that you have talked to dead members of your family in dreams;-) ):-)
I agree here, there is no handheld more unfriendly to the homebrewers than the psp, it is a wonder that the scene is as vivid as is despite sonies attempts to close it.
Bascially you named the situation as is.
Nintendo Ds, buy some hardware and you are set, you dont even void your warranty since it is all modules.
PSP, old one you are set, newer one, you need a game extra and for heavens sake never play one of the newer games because they force you to upgrade your firmware. New one, no chance until it is opened again, and then Sony releases the next patch to close it and the game begins again.
I think in the long run either sony will change its attitude or the psp homebrew szene will move towards greener pastures until the psp is phased out and no patches to the firmware will be done anymore.
One big kudos to Nintendo for that, they did all they needed to make things a little bit harder, but they so far never have tried to shut down the homebrewers entirely. (there only was one firmware update which closed a huge security hole which opened the console without big efforts, the other ones really only improved the hardware and left the backdoorfs for the homebrewers open, old consoles do not get those updates or enforce them via new games anyway)
I can recommend Castlevania DS if you are into jump and runs, Ace Attourney if you like adventures, Hotel Dusk also looks very promising and the DS homebrew stuff simply is amazing (especially since you do not half brick your console like you have to on the PS, thanks to the enforced Sony firmware upgrades which leave you the option either homebrew only or newer games)
I am glad I bought one of those DS suckers, the current games lineup while being good, is somewhat thin but the future lineup for the rest of the year is amazing (just like the first half has been). The console is really taking off currently.
And gaming is fun, long battery life.
I am really looking forward to a lot of games coming out the next half year.
(I am not too interested into the new mario, I will get it used probably in a year or so)
The ngage did not sell badly due to the fact that it could do decent gaming, face it most phones have a lot of games, but the input controls are lousy as hell.
the ngage had serious design flaws and made switching the games an interesting experience, it was way too big etc...
Its successor had removed all of these design flaws but the ngages rep already was flushed.
I think the idea has a future and we will see a merge between handheld consoles and phones in the long run (same as phones slowly are gobbeling up the organizer and mp3 market currently), but the ngage had the same problem as the newton, lousy first execution second excellent execution, bad rep at the time its fixed successor came, no sales anymore.
It probably will take another palm to open the market, which clearly is there, cellphone games are advertised overe here in europe everywhere, so there must be people buying and playing that stuff, despite the fact that most of them are close to being unplayable due to the lousy input controls most phones except the ngage have.
Only in the us it is close, in Europe the DS sells twice as much average than the PSP, there is a reason for that, the US is the only market where the DS and the Playstation portable is close pricewise.
In Europe the PSP is 200-250 Euros (one euro resembling a little more than one 1.20 USD afair) and the DS between 100-140 Euros depending whether you want a game with it or not.
It is a wonder that we do not get numbers like in japan with the DS outselling the PSP 10:1 yet;-)
This is a serious question, am I the only one. I constantly had the feeling Thief 3 was the best of the series, despite the loading zones. I always hated the mission and nothing except videos in between approach of T1 and T2. Thief 3 felt like a real world game, just like the underworlds. Sure you had the loading zones, but the overall feeling of the game was much better.
The funny thing is, that the new ds has a very appleish design, seems like nintendo has hired the same designers this time.
could be sold with any apple would not make a difference except for the logo.
I agree here, I think within a years timeframe we see a bunch of full fmv games on the ds, due to the lowering of flash prices.
It was a smart move of nintendo to go to an sd like format instead of using disks...
RTS, only if you can consider worms, to my knowledge 2-3 turn based ones, one being one of the best of the console. But I am the wrong one to ask there, I am not really interested into strategy.
The stylus currently besides turn based strategy games, is used in one point and click adventure, in 3d games often as mouse replacement (metroide uses it to my knowledge as mouse replacement, splinter cell as camerae replacement and inventory control scheme)
and besides that in unique games like the operation simulation it is clear where it is used.
So it is used, but not by every game and on the same level.
Castlevania for instance uses it as a mouse replacement for the inventory handling screens which also can be controlled by the keys and the control cross, thats it, while in metroid ds it is used directly as integral and not replacable part of the control scheme.
I assume the scummvm port uses it entirely as mouse replacement.
Yes, the DS uses SD cards with a slightly bigger form factor (heck even the form itself is almost identical)
the funny thing is, for now they are a tad to expensive to be a full blown cd replacement but in 1-2 years time I can see some old cd based games or new cd based content being 1:1 ported to that thing. The DS is an amazing litte machine in its way, it is absolute bare minumum hardwarewise (processorwise) but with a connectivity almost like a dream come true.
Ahem, the DS is an exceptionally bad example if you name a console lacking third party titles. The sony lineup of Sega is excellent, then there is project rub, Castlevania DS is one of the best in the series, you have another code, and rayman ds and advance wars.
I would say none of these titles is subpar as for the point and click adventure category there is another one coming out soon which will be film noir style...
I would say the ds is a console with a good mixed lineup and now that the thing really has taken of the lineup grows stronger, I expect a very expensive christmas season for me this year;-)
no, the nintendo DS is a hybrid, you have a stylus input which works perfectly for point and click adventures, rpgs and rts, and it has the usual control cross (which I still consider subpar to a joystick system) for action games.
The main problem is that organizers have the stylus input, and the button inputs are subpar, while the ds has both system on an equal level quality wise.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem the money Eidos sunk into ION storm indeed kill Looking Glass partially.
Ahem almost all titles on your list were arcade ports to the commodore 64, if you really want to list original c64 games, better use impossible mission, or almost everything done by epyx.
sim city and civilization relied on the game mechanics which were invented by Dani Bunten for Mule and Seven cities of gold. Panzer General was not the first iso turn based strategy game either but one of the best ever. Wing Commander and Tie Fighters game mechanics resembled earlier space shooters, I can remember having played a storyless space shooter on my Atari XL computer in the 80s (actually 3, one the famous lucas arts one, the other one being a game half adventure partially hosted on a planet in full 3d (only lines but nevertheless 3d) Dune2 I can give credit for, I cannot remember similar earlier game mechanics, Warcraft I would not call innovative though. But the 90s were highly creative, you forget about the outstanding works of Looking Glass by delivering the Underworlds before Wolfenstein 3d, full blown 3d RPGs, with physics and full blown rpg mechanis in a real time combat system, something matched up until recently only be other looking glass games, or looking glass game derivatives. Also the Ultima 7 series was at its peak with outstanding 2d physics mechanics in a sort of real world simulation, I cannot remember something similar except maybe Ultima 6, before. After Wolfenstein 3d innovation went on a downfall on the pc side, I would call the 90s era after Wolfenstein 3d the innovation downfall era, because mostly shooters were pushed, while the innovation on the console side started to pick up at the same time it went down the drain on the pc side. The funny thing is that innovation now goes down the drain on the console side and seems to go way up on the handheld side. It always seems that platforms which are faster and cheaper to develop for with enough power to bring the concepts into life spawn innnovation while those were the production costs run sky high, bring innovation to its knees.
Ahem... 3d jump and runs were invented in Pandemonium, also Tomb Raider was earlier to my knowledge. I am not sure if Pandemonium really was the first 3d jump and run game, you the earliest which sort of pseudo 3d graphics could have been q-bert and one of the jungle hunt sequels which were isometric jump and runs, Pandemonium was really 3d. There might be earlier examples then Pandemonium of Jump and Runs using real 3d.
Sorry to jump in here, Super Mario 64 never was a 3d adventure, it just was a time when everything was labeled as an adventure, but neither mario nor tomb raider, both were marketed as 3d adventure games were those, strictly spoken, they were 3d platformers. 3d adventure games at that time existed, but not on consoles, the most prominent which comes to my mind, probably was the Tex Murphy Series on the PC side and to some extent also although they are more action games and rpgs, the underworlds and system shock, but those titles still were more on the adventure side than mario 64 ever was.
I came from the pc side and was heavily dissapointed by Mario 64, the sheer size of the world has been beaten on the pc side and even on the playstation, due to the fact that the world only was a number of smaller levels. huge gameworlds existed with daggerfall and TES and a bunch of other games on the pc side at that time, and even tomb raider had bigger levels than the huge gameworlds of Mario 64. The concept on how Nintendo brought the jump and run genre into the 3d world was interesting, they were not the first, pandemonium was way earlier but that one basically relied on pushing the characted back into a pseudo 2d. I do not know if Tomb Raider was not earlier than Mario 64 though (it definitely was the superior jump and run however, I despise the later parts, but the first one was excellent by bringing back the concepts of prince of persia into the 3d area)
I cannot comment on the technical background of the XScale except that I constantly had the feeling the design was rather old. You constantly could read about new ARM generations, new extension modules like a hardware java acceleration etc... yet XScale was XScale no new features only a bunch of more MHz while others moved towards newer ARM cores. The reason why you can find mostly XScales in pdas probably is, the intel brand recognition on those devices, speaking of windows + intel, which basically pushed many wince makers towards xscale although neither wince nor the intel xscale were any compatible to their pc counterparts. And of course, back in the early days of WinCE the XScale was one of the fastest ARM based processors around, this advantage basically was kept up about one year and was a result of the DEC takeover, Intel inherited basically what the Alpha people at dec did with the ARM core and screwed it up majorly, by not pushing the technology really further. I constantly had the feeling the XScale was the unwanted stepchild of intel, there, because it sold in pdas, but not really wanted, because it was no x86 and shock not even an intel design and even worse, the core was licensed from outside (no matter that ARM are still currently the best processor designers in the area of low power embedded procs)
It is not emerging, but being very strong, it is just that pdas are dying but you can find an arm processor in millions of phones worldwide, but not from Intel, mostly... Same goes for the automotive embedded market where power processors rule the world there, but nothing from Intel. Pretty much the entire embedded market is intel less.
The XScale design was inherited by DEC, I constantly got the feeling once Intel took over they simply had it as a sideprocessor, never being happy with having a licensed core instead of their own. I did not look into the XScale development over the years too much, but did Intel ever integrate newer arm cores, or modules like the java vm extensions. I just wonder because most ARM processor manufacturers ramped up their procs with newer designs, why I had the feeling from an outside perspective that intel wanted to have this processor line die, but was surprised with cold feets once they became sort of defacto standards in all windows ce based pdas.
Can store data
Can index meta data
has an oo like storage structure
Can do transactions .Net and add meta data parsers for their own documents, done and one point more for selling .Net.
Basically what Beagle does anyway.
Most modern filesystems can at least do 3 of the four criteria, so all you need normally is an index for meta data. Be recognized that around 92, Apple recognized that upfront around 2002 when they hired the Be Guy, while Microsoft is simply stepping in Bees footprint and in the footprint of many CMS system developers, having failed with such an approach blatantly.
Microsoft could have had it cheaper, get the Lucene search engine, push it into
To sum it up, if anyone at Microsoft would have read papers and would have looked deeper into the issue instead of jumping onto it they would have seen others have failed before with this approach, BeInc being one of the first. The problem is deeper than not simply being able to pull it off, it is not pullable. The reason for this is the relational model, which basically interferes hugely with tree like oo structures of a filesystem.
If you come from the db side you probably are aware of these issues, you can pull off a vfs on top of a relational storage, but you will get a significant performance hit, unless you have a fixed structure and can optimize upon that one. The problem is, that relational models, do not match with recursive callable structures very nicely and you run into exponential performance hits once you dig deeper into the recursively called tables. Sure there are ORM mappers which pull such stuff off like saving a tree etc... but face it most of those mappers also cause serious performance hits and everyone who has programmed with such a beast knows that things have to manually be optimized once you hit a certain complexity point (often with a relational fallback to achieve the desired performance)
So Microsoft is another one along the lines of having tried it, the sad story is, is that as usual in their arrogance did not do an upfront research and why the people before them failed, so they utterly repeated probably all the mistakes others stepped in 10 years ago when they gave up and simply moved towards indexed filesystems. Apple was wiser, they simply hired the guy who did all this for BeInc and they were not forced to repeat the mistakes again and ended up with an indexed Desktop search the proven way.
Oh my, ;-) ):-)
when I was six, I was afraid, afraid of Ghosts, I learned about nuklear weapons by the age of four, thanks to being directly at the frontier lines of the cold war between the west and the east.
I learned about wars also when I was four thanks to the family stories of people in my family, having lived through two wars.
And when I was seven, I already became aware of being the one getting beaten by the class bully.
Thanks no thanks I do not want to be a child again.
The problems are the same as an adult (instead of getting beaten by the bully, the bully is your boss) but you at least have sex and you do not have this typical childish fears (instead of being afraid of ghosts the chances are high that you have talked to dead members of your family in dreams
I agree here, there is no handheld more unfriendly to the homebrewers than the psp, it is a wonder that the scene is as vivid as is despite sonies attempts to close it. Bascially you named the situation as is. Nintendo Ds, buy some hardware and you are set, you dont even void your warranty since it is all modules. PSP, old one you are set, newer one, you need a game extra and for heavens sake never play one of the newer games because they force you to upgrade your firmware. New one, no chance until it is opened again, and then Sony releases the next patch to close it and the game begins again. I think in the long run either sony will change its attitude or the psp homebrew szene will move towards greener pastures until the psp is phased out and no patches to the firmware will be done anymore. One big kudos to Nintendo for that, they did all they needed to make things a little bit harder, but they so far never have tried to shut down the homebrewers entirely. (there only was one firmware update which closed a huge security hole which opened the console without big efforts, the other ones really only improved the hardware and left the backdoorfs for the homebrewers open, old consoles do not get those updates or enforce them via new games anyway)
The DS does not have region codes, and Nintendo even advertises that feature heavily...
I can recommend Castlevania DS if you are into jump and runs, Ace Attourney if you like adventures, Hotel Dusk also looks very promising and the DS homebrew stuff simply is amazing (especially since you do not half brick your console like you have to on the PS, thanks to the enforced Sony firmware upgrades which leave you the option either homebrew only or newer games) I am glad I bought one of those DS suckers, the current games lineup while being good, is somewhat thin but the future lineup for the rest of the year is amazing (just like the first half has been). The console is really taking off currently. And gaming is fun, long battery life. I am really looking forward to a lot of games coming out the next half year. (I am not too interested into the new mario, I will get it used probably in a year or so)
The ngage did not sell badly due to the fact that it could do decent gaming, face it most phones have a lot of games, but the input controls are lousy as hell. the ngage had serious design flaws and made switching the games an interesting experience, it was way too big etc... Its successor had removed all of these design flaws but the ngages rep already was flushed. I think the idea has a future and we will see a merge between handheld consoles and phones in the long run (same as phones slowly are gobbeling up the organizer and mp3 market currently), but the ngage had the same problem as the newton, lousy first execution second excellent execution, bad rep at the time its fixed successor came, no sales anymore. It probably will take another palm to open the market, which clearly is there, cellphone games are advertised overe here in europe everywhere, so there must be people buying and playing that stuff, despite the fact that most of them are close to being unplayable due to the lousy input controls most phones except the ngage have.
Only in the us it is close, in Europe the DS sells twice as much average than the PSP, there is a reason for that, the US is the only market where the DS and the Playstation portable is close pricewise. In Europe the PSP is 200-250 Euros (one euro resembling a little more than one 1.20 USD afair) and the DS between 100-140 Euros depending whether you want a game with it or not. It is a wonder that we do not get numbers like in japan with the DS outselling the PSP 10:1 yet ;-)
This is a serious question, am I the only one. I constantly had the feeling Thief 3 was the best of the series, despite the loading zones. I always hated the mission and nothing except videos in between approach of T1 and T2. Thief 3 felt like a real world game, just like the underworlds.
Sure you had the loading zones, but the overall feeling of the game was much better.
The funny thing is, that the new ds has a very appleish design, seems like nintendo has hired the same designers this time. could be sold with any apple would not make a difference except for the logo.
I agree here, I think within a years timeframe we see a bunch of full fmv games on the ds, due to the lowering of flash prices. It was a smart move of nintendo to go to an sd like format instead of using disks...
RTS, only if you can consider worms, to my knowledge 2-3 turn based ones, one being one of the best of the console. But I am the wrong one to ask there, I am not really interested into strategy. The stylus currently besides turn based strategy games, is used in one point and click adventure, in 3d games often as mouse replacement (metroide uses it to my knowledge as mouse replacement, splinter cell as camerae replacement and inventory control scheme) and besides that in unique games like the operation simulation it is clear where it is used. So it is used, but not by every game and on the same level. Castlevania for instance uses it as a mouse replacement for the inventory handling screens which also can be controlled by the keys and the control cross, thats it, while in metroid ds it is used directly as integral and not replacable part of the control scheme. I assume the scummvm port uses it entirely as mouse replacement.
Yes, the DS uses SD cards with a slightly bigger form factor (heck even the form itself is almost identical) the funny thing is, for now they are a tad to expensive to be a full blown cd replacement but in 1-2 years time I can see some old cd based games or new cd based content being 1:1 ported to that thing. The DS is an amazing litte machine in its way, it is absolute bare minumum hardwarewise (processorwise) but with a connectivity almost like a dream come true.
Ahem, the DS is an exceptionally bad example if you name a console lacking third party titles. The sony lineup of Sega is excellent, then there is project rub, Castlevania DS is one of the best in the series, you have another code, and rayman ds and advance wars. I would say none of these titles is subpar as for the point and click adventure category there is another one coming out soon which will be film noir style... I would say the ds is a console with a good mixed lineup and now that the thing really has taken of the lineup grows stronger, I expect a very expensive christmas season for me this year ;-)
on multiplec sclerosis as well, I have a friend suffering from it, this is a dreadful disease, and also based on inflammation of the brain.
no, the nintendo DS is a hybrid, you have a stylus input which works perfectly for point and click adventures, rpgs and rts, and it has the usual control cross (which I still consider subpar to a joystick system) for action games. The main problem is that organizers have the stylus input, and the button inputs are subpar, while the ds has both system on an equal level quality wise.