I had been successfully resisting the, latent, urge to buy a Nintendo DSi, since its original announcement.  After the latest E3 I found myself with a bad case of “must buy something”.  And so a DSi it was.

I bought mine at CostCo, mostly on account of me never wanting to give GameStop another penny, but also due to CostCo’s still unusually generous return policy.  As is typical from CostCo, it came in a value-added package – in this case with several “Power A” accessories.  More about those later.

You can read any number of reviews and comparisons of the DSi vs. the DS Lite on many popular gaming-centric sites, so I will not labor the differences here.  Suffice it to say that the DSi is 10% smaller, by volume, than the DS Lite, feels more solid, and while the controls feel stiff and “off” they do actually work better than those on the DS Lite.

Without saying anything else, if you have as DS Lite right now then save your money and stick with what you have.  There is simply no reason to upgrade today.  If, at some point, there are games available via the DSi store that you really want to play and that are not available for the DS Lite then, by all means, upgrade.  But there is nothing about the DSi that warrants the expenditure today.

Still reading?

Then I will go on …

The DSi is a nice piece of hardware.  It feels solid, the screens are bright with good viewing angles (another minor plus over the DS Lite) and it works.  I am keeping mine, despite it not being a reasonable upgrade over the DS Lite.

A lot of what the DSi is currently about is very gimmicky however.  Not unlike the Wii …

The two built in cameras are, outside of the DSi camera application, essentially useless.  At VGA resolutions (640×480 or about 1/3 of a megapixel) they are not going to be taking pictures you will want to use outside of the DSi’s functionality.

Sure, if you have a couple of DSi-equipped friends, you will have an enormously entertaining time with the DSi camera applications and “lenses”.

For about 10 minutes.

After that, if you are more than 12 years old, you will likely never use that application again.

The same can be said for the “music player” application.  Quite why Nintendo chose to only support AAC files is beyond me, unless it was down to license fees.  But still, most people will have their music in either some protected format or MP3 form, so some conversion will be necessary.

Neither the DSi or Sony’s PSP can be taken seriously as music players.  The interfaces are awful, the storage pitiful, and the physical size of the units compared to their competition is a joke.  Never mind the battery life, which is just not worth comparing.

So far there is nothing about the DSi that is universally better than the DS Lite.

The DSi supports WPA/2 encryption/security for wireless networking (the DS Lite only supports WEP, which you do not want to use as it can be broken in seconds).  That was a compelling feature, as I have migrated my wireless network to be fully WPA/2, and that was preventing me from using my DS Lite online.  However, it is only supported for DSi aware games … if you are playing a general DS title, you will still be denied wireless play if you do not downgrade your wireless network to WEP security.

Sorry, but I cannot recommend that for anyone.

As much fun as Tetris DS and Mario Kart DS are online, I am not exposing my network to anyone just to play a game.  It would have been relatively trivial for Nintendo to provide an abstraction here, such that DS games could use the DSi networking capabilities transparently, and not have to work in WEP mode, but they chose not to.

Not cool.

Very weak in fact.

The only DSi-specific games today, at least in the US, are available via the DSi-Ware online store.  Anything else is playable on the standard DS Lite.  In fact, the DS Lite has a MUCH broader array of games available for it than the DSi today, due to its inclusion of a GBA slot.

No doubt Nintendo will be happy to add the GBA back-catalog to the DSi-Ware store over time, and charge you a second time for games you already own.

Through October you get 1000 points free with your DSi purchase. 

Today there is really nothing interesting to buy with those 1000 points ($10 USD) unless you have a particular fetish for Animal Crossing clocks (yes … CLOCKS!) or REALLY want to play Dr. Mario or the half-a-mini-game-composed-of-micro-games “Wario Ware: Snapped” (an excellent demonstration of how fussy image recognition is going to be in DSi games).

The DSi-Ware store is the same brain-dead implementation that plagues the Wii.  Your “account” is tied to the device and not YOU (something both Microsoft and Sony got RIGHT here).  Nintendo simply does not understand the online space yet.

Good luck buying DSi-Ware and then having to replace or upgrade your unit.  It is bound to a physical device not a person, so your content licenses follow the unit not YOU.

The Wii actually has an advantage here, albeit a rather “hacky” one, over the DSi.  Wii software can now be played from an SD card (even if it does have to be moved to main storage first).  On the DSi you are on your own for that one!

Bear in mind that the DSi-ware store is just as glacially slow as the Wii store.  Maybe Nintendo have a special implementation of one of the wireless networking protocols, or maybe the Wii and DSi stores are all hosted on an aging IBM AT with a 16Mhz 80286 processor?

I have a 15Mb/s connection.  Downloading the 3.05 GB x64 build of Windows 7 RC only took ~25 minutes, why on EARTH did it take 5 minutes to download the 25Mb of Opera for DSi?

Never mind, I get it, you borrowed Sony’s network back-end!

The summary here is simple.  If you have a DS Lite already … save your money until there is a compelling DSi-only game you simply MUST play.  The DSi offers nothing interesting over the DS Lite today and, indeed, will cut you off from the plethora of EXCELLENT GBA titles that the DS Lite currently makes easily available.

I will be keeping my DSi … only on faith that the few GBA games I still want access to (SMB and FF titles only) will come to the DSi online store.  Otherwise, it is a complete waste of time and money.

Accessories:

I said I would come back to the “Power A” accessories that are included in the CostCo DSi bundle … and here that is …

The car-charger works just fine.  It is not independently fused (read “cheap”), so if you have issues you will be replacing fuses in your car rather than in the charger, but otherwise it is a perfectly acceptable device.

The “Clean & Protect Kit” (spare styli/cleaning cloth/game-pak case/screen protector) is pretty typical.  The game-pak case and styli work well and are perfectly fine.  The cleaning cloth is usable, but nothing that a bit of paper-towel will not surpass.

The screen protectors are best forgotten however.  They do fit quite well, but are stiff enough that they interfere with the responsiveness of the touch screen, which renders them pretty much pointless.  Of course, the DSi’s clam-shell design makes screen protection a bit moot also, something Sony would do well to learn from!

But there is nothing terrible in those two packages.

The Power A “Voyager” case is completely pointless however.  It is a play-through design, and is simply unusable.  It bulks-up the DSi well beyond pocket-able proportions and, while nicely finished, simply impedes the use of the DSi.

The play-through design means that the lower half of the DS is encased in whatever the hell this thing is really made of.  It does not fit well.  There are four “tags” or “labels” in the area that the DSi “slides” into (is forced into) that get in the way of inserting the unit (yes, you can cut them out, but why put them there in the first place?).  The encasement obscures the top 1/8” of the touch screen, which can be game-killing, and the top flap keeps getting in the way of the top screen.

The DSi has a matte finish and a clamshell design … if you really need a case to protect it – stop filling your pockets with rocks, eating paint chips, and generally being a complete wanker.

The “Official Nintendo Seal” …

All of the “Power A” accessories included in this bundle carry, at least according to the packaging, the “Official Nintendo Seal”.

That appears to be something that carries NO value anymore.

That anyone would award the “Power A – Voyager” case ANY kind of “it works, let alone is good” certification is comical.  It is, like all soft-play-through-cases, completely worthless and obstructive.

If Nintendo is really putting their approval behind something like this it should tell you all you need to know.  Nintendo does not seem to give a toss about gamers anymore.  Witness the shovel-ware that is the Wii software catalog, or the epic quantity of bull-shit accessories for the DS Lite and, now, the DSi.

I have purchased, and still own, EVERY Nintendo platform so far released.  But it is going to take more than “Wii HD Sports Resort 2: Motion +++” to make me look twice at whatever it is they release next.

I do not, EVER, want to play another Mario, Zelda, Metroid/Samus game AGAIN.  That shit is 20+ years old.  It is not nostalgia anymore, it is hard-core IP-thrashing prostitution!

Find something current, something new, innovate beyond a control scheme that NEVER worked as advertised and now you want us to pay $30/controller to remedy.  Or go the way of Sega and their stupid blue hedgehog!

Post a Comment