Why I Despise the Nintendo DS

To begin with, I should make it clear that I’m a huge Nintendo fan. Mega Man games aside, probably 90% of the games I really like are made by Nintendo, and all of them are licensed for Nintendo consoles. I once had Zelda games active on my NES, my Super Nintendo, my Nintendo 64, my Game Boy Color, and my Game Boy Advance all at the same time. Maybe the GameCube too. (Not all of them were visible of course because there was only one TV screen.) But I am not a fan of the Nintendo DS. Splitting the screen is fundamentally wrong because you limit the amount of contiguous space you can use for any given purpose – having to cross that huge gap between the screens is totally unreasonable. And as if to confirm this prejudice, Nintendo went ahead and produced approximately zero games for the system that I consider worth playing. (I say approximately zero because I did like New Super Mario Bros well enough, but it easily could have been made on the Game Boy Advance. More on that later.)

So, lest I appear to be making unfair generalizations, let me recount my experiences on the DS:

Metroid Prime Hunters

I beat the first three areas of this game and then gave up. Not because it was hard – after all, I had just opened up two new planets and hadn’t even gotten to any hard parts there yet. I quit because I was bored. This is a totally unprecedented thing for me – I don’t normally quit a game after playing for that long unless I don’t have access to it or it’s too hard. But this game just didn’t live up to the Metroid name. Here’s why:

1. First of all, there are no Metroids in it.
2. There are no suit upgrades, either, just lots of limited-use weapons that all act about the same.
3. The boss battles are all variations on the same two themes.
4. The control just drove me nuts. You move with the directional pad and aim by sliding the stylus across the touch screen. You also switch weapons and go in and out of Morph Ball mode using the touch screen. You also jump by tapping the touch screen. So if you’re not careful and tap in the wrong spot, you’ll end up doing the wrong thing and waste missiles or totally change your view by rolling into a ball. Another huge problem comes when you're trying to circle an enemy – say clockwise. You hold left on the directional pad while sliding the stylus to the right, so you’ll continue to face the enemy. But when you reach the end of the pad, you have to pick up the stylus, move it to the left, and start dragging again. In the time it takes to do that, you’ve stopped turning, so you’re either out of position, or you’ve been standing still and probably been shot at a few times. It’s really, really frustrating.

Super Princess Peach

This was kind of interesting; if you like Mario games, then a game where you play as Peach is sort of a novel twist. (Sort of. Mario 2 was really about Peach, and you also play as her in parts of Paper Mario.) Peach can activate elemental powers by triggering various emotions, like catching fire as she becomes angry. You activate and deactivate powers by touching one of four large areas on the touch pad. That’s all you use it for. They could have had you cycle through and active powers using the L and R buttons, or even X and Y I think. But instead you have to play the game with the stylus in your hand, or get fingerprints on the screen for no good reason.

New Super Mario Bros

I don’t really have complaints about this game. (Although I wouldn’t say it was memorable enough to replay.) But the only thing it uses the touch pad for is to contain an extra item that you can carry around and activate at any time. There is absolutely no reason why they couldn’t have gotten the same behavior using the other buttons. Out of spite (and to add a bit of challenge to the game), I never used the item box. Take that.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

This is another game that doesn’t deserve its title. To be fair, I haven’t exactly played this game. But I saw my brother-in-law playing it, and I was not impressed. I don't like the fact that you "explore" mainly on your boat that you control by charting a course and then jumping over obstacles and firing your cannon. Exploring by water was a downside of Wind Waker, but at least it was a novel way to load screens. More of it, with extra water theme stuff, is just not Zelda-y. And you keep returning to the same dungeon and going deeper as your time limit increases, which just feels tedious. I also don't like that you move to a spot by touching it on the screen, or attack by swiping the stylus. You shouldn't have to block the screen with your controller. I haven't seen Spirit Tracks, but it sounds like more of the same, but with... trains.

Anything else?

So that’s about it. Maybe Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is cool, but again we all know that you don’t need a touch screen to play a Golden Sun game. And I guess that Star Fox game might have been okay. But you’ll notice that I haven’t played it. In the end, though, I’m kind of grateful to Nintendo for making a bypassable system. I don’t have time to play all the good games that come out, so by making some lame ones they were actually saving me some trouble.