Ardent Meridian

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.

More »