Hello man on the tube who asked me if I had a DS! I am the girl you spoke to on the train this morning! Don’t sell your DS Lite! It’s GRATE! I mentioned Phoenix Wright and Nintendogs, they are both KILLER APPS and you should get them! Brain Training be worthy, but it’s not much of a “game”, is it? Keep it, and also get Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, Trauma Centre: Under The Knife, and all other games which have a colon in them (haha in Trauma Centre this is LITERALLY TRUE mwahaha)!
So! This isn’t the first time someone has started a random conversation with me on the train about the DS! (Although from my strange slightly embarassed reaction you might think it was the first time anyone spoke to me EVER, sigh). Yesterday, you could have spotted me being incredibly stuck on Trial #4 in Phoenix Wright: Justice For All (hurry up and release it in Europe y’all so I can talk about it without spoilers!!) and thus very FRUSTRATED, but this is the only time that use of a DS during commute didn’t make the usually hellish experience fly past merrily (and that’s because I was sh1t at finding the right evidence)! The DS is built SO APPROPRIATELY for commuters that it’s almost as if someone at Nintendo put thought into it – it’s robust enough to survive happily at the bottom of a bag with zero worries about getting the screens scratched and subsequent fannydangle about cases (haaallloo PSP owners who don’t even TAKE IT OUT OF THE HOUSE), on shutting the console, the system goes automatically into standby which is PERFECT for that changing the train/moving seats/giving up seat to nice old/nice pregnant ladies and even my bulky silver Old School DS feels beautifully compact – I can’t speak for DS Lite owners here but I’ve never heard anything negative about them.
PSP owners will sa: “oh no, portable stylus based gaming = disaster”, but how different is using a DS stylus to er, USING A PEN on a crossword for goodness sake? Even when my stylus has gone temporarily awol, I’ve had more than satisfactory results substituting a passing bamboo needle to stroke the Nintendogs (I am aware most of you will not have this resource available, but this isn’t the place for my ‘knitting is cool yo!’ speech)! However, they’re generally too busy watching the drivel trickling out on soon-to-expire-like-the-dog-it-is UMD format discs to actually notice other gamers and travellers.
The social aspect to the DS is therefore fairly new to me – this is the first console where I’ve had success into persuading other people to it’s merits, and the first time that random strangers are motivated to bring up conversations based on yr gaming system! There’s also a group of people who play DS in Sam Smiths pubs – except to be fair this seems about beating people on Mario Kart, which I object to after traumatic experiences on the N64 where I ALWAYS LOST to my IDIOTIC EX BOYFRIEND argh argh argh argh…. and relax. I’m not good at driving games (unless it’s Micro Machines). Never EVER give me a real driving license. But anyway – the DS is already growing to be more than just a simple gameplaying device – it’s a networking device! And I think it’s utterly awesome. Now, if only Pictochat had any actual USE eh readers? :)