Magic in a Little Clamshell Console…

New Year’s never feels like a new beginning to me. I think it’s a combo of being Jewish and being a student: both the lunar year and the school year start in the fall. The real new year for me is the solemn liturgy demanding I reflect on my actions of the past twelve months and the frantic scramble to hand in forms on time and sign up for classes that don’t conflict with my teaching-assistant-ship. In other words, forgive me if this entry lacks the profundity one might expect of the first post of 2009 – I used as many big words in this opening paragraph as I could, okay?

So I may be nine years old at heart, but, for my 24th birthday last Monday, I asked my parents for a Nintendo DS Lite.

You know, it’s strange: for some reason, in my head, “video games” is a lesser form of entertainment than almost anything else. A book or movie, no matter how bad, is better than “video games”. Board games are better than “video games”. Somehow, “video games” connotes all that is trite, superficial, and childish, while the same sort of antisocial behaviour is more acceptable if your nose is buried in National Geographic instead of a portable console. Maybe it’s because books were strongly encouraged in my parents’ house, but “video games” were something my sister and I weren’t allowed to have until we reached puberty. And yet, the whole “video games” attitude seems to be shared by most of the wider community. I admit there are stupid video games, but there are also stupid books, movies, television shows, plays, etc. Why should the former be any more silly than the latter? Game design intrigues me: I love planning things for people to play with… as I guess is obvious to anyone who’s been on one of my treasure hunts. But I digress.

If you’re going to play video games, I’ve discovered, the best way to do it is to have played some when you were a preteen about a decade ago and then get back to it. That way, you’re familiar with most of the games and gameplay (especially since Nintendo seems to be re-releasing a lot of its SNES games), but the hardware seems amazing because all you remember are those tiny, poorly lit, black-on-tan, pixellated original Game Boy screens. And now there are two screens of blinding colour that seem like a movie by comparison! Also, you no longer have to eat up four AA batteries every time you want to play: the DS Lite is rechargeable. See, isn’t it more fun comparing the latest system (well, second-latest – the DSi is out in Japan) to the very first prototype than to its immediate predecessor?

The top screen is a regular screen, but the bottom one is touch-sensitive, made for use with a special stylus like a Palm Pilot. This works pretty well in some games, and others (like MarioKart) have enough sense to avoid it. It also makes the DS Lite pretty easy to pick up and play, even for someone like me who sucks at video games. No wonder it’s selling so well: the console comes in shiny colours, it’s light, it’s portable, it’s pretty, and it’s simple. Even people who don’t do much gaming can enjoy it.

I have to admit, I also like the variety of games available. I know there are lots of cool games available for XBox 360, Playstation 3, and PC, but so many of the titles out there seem to be variations on first-person shooters: fight this, kill that, or DIE. I’m not into that intensity. Sure, I appreciate the atmosphere in Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulhu, but the part that draws me is the fact that I don’t have to worry about crazy things jumping out and biting my head off: instead, my job is to solve clever puzzles and take as loooong as I want doing it (and then, when I’m done, I can feel ever so clever and pretend I never consulted online walkthroughs, nope, no sir, not me).

So a console like a DS Lite, with silly racing games like MarioKart, relaxed action-adventures like Zelda, PG13 RPGs like Chronotrigger, cartoony platformers like New Super Mario, and colourful puzzle games like Tetris, is perfect for me. I especially like that there are DS equivalents of point-and-click adventures: right now, I’m particularly enjoying Professor Layton and the Curious Village (despite the fact that its description seems to boil down to “run around the town and talk to people and they will make you do a puzzle like the type you find in give-the-kids-this-“activity”-book-for-long-car-rides booklets”), and I’m excited to try out Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which bills itself as a “mystery novel”, not a game.

There are also some weird experimental offerings, like Daffy Duck: Duck Amuck, which seems like it’s trying to be an interactive cartoon that makes fun of video games while still being one, like the SBZone and Dungeon Man games from the guys behind Homestar Runner. Of all the DS games I’ve tried so far (and by “all”, I mean “the four”) Duck Amuck is the only one I’m not yet sold on. It’s basically a collection of minigames that you have to unlock by tormenting Daffy in some way, but sometimes that just means you have to wait around long enough until some randomly triggered action occurs on your touch screen. Parts of it are creative and it’s mostly faithful to the Looney Toons franchise (though when Daffy said some other long word that starts with D instead of “despicable”, that was nearly it for me). It’s just… weird.

Finally, I also really like how the DS Lite is backward-compatible with Game Boy Advance games – since I haven’t been playing much over the past decade, it’s like two whole banks of games opened up to me instead of just one.

What else? I know the graphics suck compared to traditional consoles and even to other portables like Sony’s PSP, but they still look great to me. I don’t have trouble telling what things are or (surprisingly) even where I’m going; everything looks sharp and realistic enough to make me slightly sick when taking Luigi and his vacuum cleaner for a spin on Rainbow Road. I understand that the rule of thumb is new-gen portable consoles have roughly the same processing power as last-gen regular consoles, so the DS Lite seems to be roughly equivalent to the Nintendo 64, and that suits me just fine. Any complaints I have are minor: sometimes the R and L buttons are awkward to push; I haven’t yet been able to connect to wifi (which I’m sure has more to do with my family’s wireless internet than with the DS); every single game contains the product warning booklet, which is surely a waste of trees.

Last but not least, getting a Nintendo DS Lite has led me to something unexpected: now that I have a DS, I’m interested in buying games. And I’m the sort of person who, when interested in buying games, reads reviews. And reading video game reviews has opened up a whole new fascinating world for me. It’s really cool to see how things like control design and balance affect people’s opinions of games – and how having the audience interact with a story changes what makes that story effective both emotionally and logically. More on that later, but, for now, two conclusions: 1) I like my DS and the games I have for it (thanks, Mom and Dad and Deb!); and, 2) happy New Year everyone! Gear up for 2009!