Nintendo DS is the world’s most successful handheld console. Another closest competitor, Sony’s PSP, according to some sources, did not sell even half as well as the DS did. Not to mention the fact that there are several times more games released for the brainchild of Big N.

This small retreat was for those residents this country, who, like me once, have no idea that in the 2000s there was something other than PSP on the portable market. And it wasn’t just that, but in many parameters besides dry statistics.

When I first got acquainted with the DS, it became obvious to me that this is not at all a weak analogue of the PSP with a cool gimmick, but as I thought before. It’s something more. Following their own policy with the Wii, Nintendo made not just a portable console, but a real pocket companion, which, according to the big N’s plan, should have appealed to both gamers and everyone else. This is evidenced by both the abundance of casual games, which even a person who has never played games can easily get involved in (hello Funny Farm), and an impressive number of games like Brain Age, which were more of a kind of companion application for the older generation.

And with the release of the DSi, the console turned into a real pocket companion, where you could leave notes, take photos, music, use a calculator and what else PDAs can do.

So what to do with all this??

If you are reading this article, most likely you already have an interest in the topic, so I will omit the details, why everything that will be described below is great, even despite its age. Instead, in this paragraph I will give a little structure to everything I want to write about. We will go from the most superficial things that can be done with DSKa to the most profound and interesting ones, which the possible reader may not even be aware of.

Tip of the iceberg

Simple games for Nintendo DS. There’s really not much to talk about here. Just open any top games, or just a list of games with gameplay on YouTube to find something to play. The main thing is not to grab onto everything at once, otherwise you will never stop at anything.

When I first got DSka, that’s exactly what I did: I went through the most popular games, got my fill and realized that this wasn’t enough for me. I quickly discovered that not only exclusives were released on the platform, but also ports of other games. In addition to the well-known Resident Evil Deadly Silence, which, in my opinion, is the best way to play the original Resident, since it is the most complete version, I, to my great surprise, discovered ports of such games as Farm Frenzy, Plants vs Zombies and even Peggle, each of which is more than perfectly playable on two screens. The latter, by the way, was also released on PSP, but having touched both versions, I can say with confidence that it is the version for DS that provides a full-fledged Peggle experience.

Search ports large games for small DSKi has become a separate entertainment for me. It turns out that many famous adventure games at one time received ports for DS. Here you have Siberia, and Broken Sword, and even Myst . In other words, all those games that you’ve been wanting to play for a long time, but really don’t want to start.

Meanwhile, the third Sims were also ported to the DS, and this is the closest portable version of the Sims to the original. If the versions for PSP, PS2 and even the second Sims for DS offer some strange sets of mini-games, story campaigns and similar unnecessary gimmicks, The Sims 3 for DS are those same classic Sims in a portable package. As far as I know, even in the 3DS version, the developers could not resist and cut something unnecessary, which made the game lose some of its charm.

Of course, these are not direct ports, but slightly chopped versions of big games. Both in Siberia and in Broken Sword, there is no voice acting, and all dialogues are exclusively text. But in the latter this is compensated by the pleasant integration of the second screen into the game. So, for example, during cutscenes, we are shown the action from two angles, on two screens.

A separate type of perversion is playing ports of really big games. Now I’m talking about games like Call of Duty. With the release of each new part of the series, a version for the DC was also released, which had little in common with its big brother. And now we’re not even talking about the graphics, which, for obvious reasons, were very limited on the weak hardware of the laptop. Gameplay often included the bare minimum of what was available on home consoles, and controlling the camera with a stylus often resulted in breaks from the game. There is a whole series of reviews of portable versions of Kolda on the LEXX channel, if anyone is interested in diving deeper into this topic.

Closer to the water

Being a big fan of portable consoles, at some point I found it very interesting to compare the PSP and DS versions of different games. At the time when they were both at the peak of their popularity, it was common practice to release portable versions of games to coincide with the release of versions for home consoles. Actually, according to the same scheme as with the above-described Call of Duty, although in that case, the PSP was slightly deprived, releasing only one game for it, versus four for the DS.

But Harry Potter was https://monixbet.uk/withdrawal/ luckier in this regard. Ever since the days of the Gameboy, games from this franchise have been trying to get kids into their pockets. Thus, four games in the series were released for the DS, starting with Goblet of Fire, which was something of a parody of the version for PSP and PC, and ending with Deathly Hallows, which was perhaps a little better than the home version.

The game GTA Chainatown Wars can be analyzed admirably, since it was originally released for the DS and later, a version with improved graphics, but cut mini-games, was released for the PSP.

Dive

Then I became interested in really obscurity games. Unfortunately, I was able to find few of them, but fortunately I can tell you about them all.

Nanashi no Game is a little-known Japanese game that, for some reason, no one talks about except for a small circle of initiates. The ambience of something little-known, a game that you found by chance on an abandoned site and about which you know nothing, greatly plays into your hands Nameless game, so I won’t talk much about her. Let me just say that this game is the first in many years that managed to make me turn off the console in a panic.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to call this game truly obscene, considering that it even has a Russian page on Wikipedia, unlike the same Brain Age, which, for a moment, is in the top three best-selling games for the platform. One way or another, I would advise you to walk into this terrible world without knowing anything.

Contact is Earthbound from the creator of Killer7, Suda51. Actually, what else is there to add?. Okay, actually I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. But judging by the reviews of those who played it, I’m missing out on a lot. And her visual style is, to put it mildly, interesting. For those in the know, the author’s name alone should evoke approval.

Flower, Sun and Rain is Twin Peaks (or Deadly Premonition) from the aforementioned Suda51. Actually, this is a rare example of a PS2 port. Exactly what the port is, the game is actually the same, although with heavily cut graphics. But only the portable version was released in the West, so for people who don’t speak Japanese, there’s no choice.

Ni no Kuni – considered by many to be the best RPG on the platform. Recently, the franchise entered the mainstream thanks to the release of both parts on Steam, but few people realize that in addition to the PS3, the game was also released for the DS. Few people, because it was published only in Japan and Spain.

Actually, these are completely different games that are united by plot and style. A little more about them. Ni no Kuni is primarily known as the very game to which the masters from Studio Ghibli had a hand. In addition to giving the characters and environments their signature charm, they also created about half an hour of animated cutscenes. But the influence of Ghibli, oddly enough, is felt not only in the style, but also in the story, which from the very first frames grabs the viewer by the heart and ties them to the characters until the very end of this long journey.

The game has a very entertaining gimmick, that rare case when platform features not only do not harm the gameplay, but, on the contrary, make it stand out very favorably even against the backdrop of the technically more advanced version for PS3. I’m talking, of course, about the Wizard’s Companion – the physical book that came with the game cartridge. On the pages of the Companion you could find a list of spells with descriptions, some interesting facts from the world, a unique alphabet that you have to use from time to time to decipher inscriptions and writings both in the book and directly in the game itself, and much more. The textbook itself consisted of more than 300 pages.

Thanks to enthusiasts, we have the opportunity to get acquainted with this game not only in English (for which many thanks to these guys), but also in Russian, for which I sincerely thank these guys.

Halfway to the abyss

Above I already wrote about DS as a series of devices. In fact, there were four of them: the original Nintendo DS, DS Lite, DSi and DSi XL. The first two are notable for the fact that they had backward compatibility with GBA games and, accordingly, a separate slot for them. This slot was used not only for games, but also for gadgets for individual games. For example, to play Guitar Hero for DS, a special grip was used to simulate pinching the strings, while the touch screen was used to hit the pinched strings. The guitar-shaped controller for the console version of the game works in approximately the same way.

There were, in fact, a lot of interesting accessories. Here you have a miniature keyboard, one octave of keys for playing a synthesizer, and even a TV tuner. In theory, all this stuff can be used for various homebrew applications, but this topic is very subtle and requires additional research.

The two DSi, while not having a GBA slot, did have some other very interesting features. First of all, Ike had its own operating system with some small amount of internal memory. Thanks to this, users had the opportunity to use online functionality – among the applications there was a portable browser, about the same caliber as the browser on the PSP, but it was much more convenient to use thanks to two screens and a sensor. In the Big H online store you could buy and download small games, the so-called DSiWare. These included both versions of existing DS games, such as the aforementioned Farm Frenzy, and new ports of classic games, such as the original Rayman and Earthworm Jim, slightly expanded with DSi features (namely, they sometimes used the camera). There were also new games developed specifically for DSiWare, for example, Shantae: Risky’s Revenge was originally released there.

In addition to games, you could also find very small applications in the online e-shop: a clock or a calculator, stylized as games like Mario or Animal Crossing . Now that the servers with all this stuff have been lying around for a long time, lists of these applications can be found somewhere on the lower levels of the Internet.

Lights of the deep sea

Having said all this, we still haven’t touched on why I originally wanted to write this article – homebrew. The scene of home game development for DS was very large. Of course, you can play Doom, Quake and Hexen here . Moreover, the second screen in some ports is used for the card. A whole bunch of ports or parodies of other popular and not so popular games have also been released.

But the most important advantage of the DS homebrew scene compared to the same PSP is the presence of a second screen, which sometimes allowed you to do very interesting things. For example, turn the console into a portable computer running DOS, which I often dabbled in during my student years. Most of the games, especially if they were at least a little demanding, were slow, but even so, there was something to see. With minimal graphics, you can even run Ultima Underworld on a laptop. At one time, albeit slowly, I managed to play my favorite Masters of Orion on it, and I can’t count how much time I spent in Hocus Pocus.

DOS is far from the only system that can be perfectly emulated on DSK. There is also an emulator for Apple II, MSX and God knows what else. Thanks to the touch screen, there were never any problems with input or lack of keys and I was quite comfortable playing the first Metal Gear in between classes.

It was thanks to the DS that I first plunged into the world of ancient computers. In some ways, this trinket changed my life.

An extensive list of well-known homebrew developments with their descriptions can be found on the gamebrew website.org.

Wonderful unknown world

In conclusion, the most profound thing due to its inaccessibility to the common man are games that were released only in Japan and have not received translation in any form. In fact, here you can find any games that the reader would like to play, but cannot due to the language barrier. For me, at the moment, the most desirable game in this regard is Nora to Toki no Koubou. Apparently, this is Atlus’s attempt to make his own Atelier. For those who don’t know, Atelier is a series of games where we play as cute girls and basically collect ingredients for a potion. The series has existed for a very long time and was only partially published in the West.

Nora looks very charming and someday I will definitely learn Japanese and complete it.

Conclusion

In this article, I shared the things that most keep me coming back to my old DSi after all these years. Of course, many, many more things could be mentioned, but then the article would turn out to be even more crumpled than it is.

If I managed to interest you and you have questions a la “what to play”, I will be waiting for your comments. Below are links to me.