How Nintendo's dual-screened wonder captured my imagination and reignited my passion for video games.
It's hard for me to imagine a time when I'd seriously consider leaving video games behind. I can't think of any circumstances that would precipitate my abandonment of a hobby that brings me so much joy and consistently inspires me and stirs my imagination. Quite simply, I hold the video-game medium in the highest regard, and I know that its wonderfully creative, inspirational works will forever have a place in my life.
Yet that's not how things were back in 2003, when I had grown so disenchanted with video games that I was thinking about moving on from them.
For a variety of reason, I had lost my love for consoles. The first was that I was let down by all of the sequels that I'd been anticipating. I was looking forward to the follow-ups of many of my favorite games (Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Mario Golf, Super Smash Bros., Metroid Prime, Ratchet & Clank and Grand Theft Auto III) from current and previous-generation consoles, and each one disappointed me because it wasn't appreciably than its predecessor. Each one played it safe and chose iteration over evolution.
The second was that games were getting too long and too complicated. At that point, I no longer wanted to spend 20-30 hours playing a single game, and I didn't want to deal with games that had dozens of complex control inputs and systems piled atop systems.
The third was that all of my genres (platformers, puzzle games, adventure games, and simple arcade-style games) were slowly disappearing as publishers began chasing trends and consequently the market became saturated with big-budget first-person shooters and countless "experience games," none of which interested me.
And the fourth was that games in which I'd taken interest because they were said to "reinvent old formulas" (those like Rygar: The Legendary Adventure and Mega Man Network Transmission) also left me feeling underwhelmed because their "reinvention" entailed the adherence to the aforementioned trends, the majority of which I completely disliked.
Otherwise, the Game Boy Advance wasn't exactly lighting my world on fire. I mean, I had some fun with its Castlevania games and Mario vs. Donkey Kong, yeah, but I just couldn't get excited about a system whose aim was to recreate the SNES era but do so with hardware that was compromised in a number of troubling ways (its screen wasn't backlit, its resolution was a meager 240x160 pixels, its audio processing unit was crummy in quality, and it had two fewer buttons).
At the time, my GBA collection totaled a paltry five or six games, and one of them was the game that came bundled with the portable: Super Mario Advance. The most noteworthy of them, honestly, was Wario Land 4, which I considered to be one of the most boring games I'd ever played. I credit it as the game that pushed me past the threshold and forced me to start being honest with myself. It put me in a position in which I had to start questioning whether or not I actually enjoyed playing video games anymore.
The fact of the matter was that I could no longer generate any enthusiasm for new games. If I was buying them, then I was only doing so because some inexplicably derived sense of obligation was compelling me to. Whenever I was forcing myself to play yet another formulaic 20-hour-long sequel, my eyes would frequently drift toward a nearby clock, and it wouldn't be long before I'd check out mentally and start to wonder why I felt impelled to partake in this activity when my time and energy would probably be better spent elsewhere.
Inevitably I had to admit to myself that I was simply throwing away countless hours of my life by continuing to partake in a hobby that was no longer offering me any reward or stimulation.
Consequently I stopped buying new games, and I ceased being active in the console and portable scenes. From then on, all I did was play old games on emulators, and all the while I wondered if this older form of gaming was all that was left for me.
It was simply the case that my passion for video games was gone.
In truth, I didn't really know what I wanted from video games. I didn't figure that out until years later, when it became clear to me, in retrospect, that what was actually happening to me was that I was thirsting for something new and different--for something revolutionary--but at the time, I honestly couldn't think of anything--of any game or any product--that could truly make me care about video games as much as I once did.
That's when Nintendo announced it out of the blue.
It was called the "Nintendo DS, and let me tell you, man: It was met with the most massive wave of negativity I'd ever seen!
Everyone around me believed that Nintendo had gone crazy: Game journalists held round tables to discuss how Nintendo had lost the plot and created the next Virtual Boy. Analysts predicted that the DS would tank and that Sony's upcoming PlayStation Portable, to which they said the DS was a "response," would absolutely wipe the floor with Nintendo's "gimmicky handheld." And forum-goers everywhere, including those who posted on Nintendo's official NSider message board, declared the company dead.
It was all over for Nintendo, they confidently proclaimed. Soon, they believed, the company would be thoroughly humiliated, and Miyamoto and friends would be forced to abandon hardware manufacturing and develop games for PlayStation- and Xbox-branded systems.
Celebrations of Nintendo's imminent demise could be witnessed in all corners of the Internet.
Oh, it got really bad.
On GameSpot's message board, where I'd occasionally post, they'd talk down the DS on a daily basis. They'd make a dozen anti-DS threads a day, and in each one, they'd discussed how the system was going to fail miserably. And what was worse was that every other poster's signature was an image that depicted a Nintendo character running toward the PlayStation Portable and had a text overlay that read, "Even [Nintendo character in question] wants a PSP!"
Their hatred and resentment were palpable.
Me, though? I was kinda stunned by the announcement. And honestly, my emotions were all over the place.
To start, I was shocked that Nintendo was apparently going to kill off its big moneymaker, the GBA, which was on pace to sell 100-million-plus units. Thinking about it filled my head with questions: "Is Nintendo in a rush to push this new portable out because it's afraid that Sony's aggressive, disparaging marketing tactics will work to to flatten the GBA's sales and make the portable look completely obsolete?" I wondered. "Or is it that foresight has told Iwata and his fellow executives that the current path, though it will lead them to a place in which they can continue to generate success, is ultimately a dead end, so they're going to take a hit and attempt to get ahead of the coming storm?"
"Is the DS really a preemptive response to the PSP, or was it always planned to release in this particular time-period?" I also wondered. "And what about that 'third pillar stuff? Is it just a cover, or are Nintendo's developers seriously going to endeavor to support three separate platforms at once?"
I didn't know what, exactly, Nintendo was hoping to achieve with the DS, but my interest was certainly piqued. The idea of a portable device that had two separate displays sounded genuinely intriguing to me. I was, after all, a creative fellow, so as soon as I saw images of the DS, a bunch of ideas immediately started forming in my head. And when Nintendo later announced that the DS would also feature touch-screen input and wireless play, my enthusiasm only intensified, and I started dreaming about the possibilities--about all of the possible combinations of inputs and displays that could be implemented into games.
The DS was looking to be a very versatile little system, and I couldn't wait to see the types of games that Nintendo was planning to bring to it!
Still, I couldn't deny that I was worried for Nintendo. I was able to deal with the negativity because I'd been an Internet denizen long enough to become desensitized to it, but at the same time, I was concerned about what it might breed. I wondered if third parties would see these reactions and reactively limit their support.
"Will they fearfully pass up the opportunity to showcase their talent and creativity on the DS because its unique values are incompatible with the traditional devices for which they've been developing since the 80s?" I was forced to consider. "Will they want to make games for a 3D-capable system whose specifications are modest in comparison to the currently available consoles' (the DS was speculated to be "somewhere between the N64 and GameCube" in terms of power, but we were all hoping that it would lean more toward the latter)? And will they allow their decision-making to be affected by detractors and system warriors, who will surely attempt to throw a wet blanket on the DS--distort Nintendo's messaging and stamp out any potential excitement?"
Truthfully, I didn't fear Sony or its marketing, no. Rather, I was much more concerned about the potential influence of the hordes of angry "hardcore" gamers and nasty forum-dwellers, both of which were "video-game enthusiasts" in the same way that I was a "succinct blogger."
It was those types who had the potential to do the most damage. They, more than any other group, were most capable of using their voices to drive both developers and prospective consumers away from the DS.
I mean, they certainly tried to make my forum-going experience miserable! So I worried about what they could do to people who were on the fence.
But still, I didn't let their negativity get to me. I continued to be excited for the DS' impending release. And when it went up for pre-order on Amazon.com, I wasted no time in grabbing myself a bundle!
In the months leading up to the DS' release, all I could think about were potential applications for its distinct technologies. I spent many hours enthusiastically wondering about all of the imaginative, groundbreaking ideas that Nintendo was surely dreaming up. I had interest in the new 2D Super Mario Bros. game and the Metroid Prime-style Metroid game, certainly, but what I was hoping to see was a large focus on new types of games. I wanted Nintendo to let its creative spirit run wild. I wanted the company to take me to exotic new places and thus show me, in the most eager manner imaginable, that it was tired of making the same three games over and over again.
I wanted Nintendo to be its true self and once again use its power to change how we played games.
I have vivid memories of the day that the DS arrived at our doorstop. From morning till noon, the atmosphere was one of excited curiosity. And in the moment when I reacted to the doorbell's ring and started heading toward the front door, a feeling of expectancy began to permeate the air around me; and that feeling peaked when I stepped outside and took possession of the UPS package that contained my new Nintendo DS.
As I was hurriedly unboxing the DS in the den, my brother, James, walked in because he was curious to know what, exactly, all of the rustling and plastic-crumpling noises were signifying. I told him that I just got a new portable game system, and he reacted to that news in a surprisingly enthusiastic manner (I knew that he didn't care about portable systems, so I wasn't expecting to have any reaction).
In fact, he was as eager to see my new toy as I was to show it to him!
About a minute later, we took the DS to the kitchen and set it down near the red counter's most accessible wall outlet and next to the counter's usual occupants: the coffee-maker and the pastries. And even though the DS' instruction manual suggested that we not do so, we decided to boot up the system as it was charging and immediately start testing it out.
As I examined the DS, I couldn't deny that it was a rather unattractive-looking system, but honestly, I was with fine that because, well, this was Nintendo we were talking about. This was a company that was known for producing big gray bricks. Having that particular design was part of the character of Nintendo's products. It was a distinguishing quality.
"This is how Nintendo's portables should always look," I thought.
And in a moment when we were in need of a system-showcasing game, we didn't have to look any further than the little folding cardboard case that was included in the packaging. It contained the specially crafted Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt--a playable demo that was to designed to "demonstrate the touchscreen's accuracy and promote the system's wireless capability." (Only the former was of real interest to us.)
First Hunt's uniquely styled gameplay was quite revelatory, yes, but I'll always remember this demo more for the lively conversation that it sparked. James and I had a great time talking about how this platform would be great for first-person shooters and particularly old-school shooters like Doom and Quake due to the fact that its touchscreen could basically function as a tiny mousepad and, at the same time, a persistent map.
I got excited just thinking about the idea!
The burgeoning FPS scene that we envisioned never materialized, unfortunately, because of publishers' dismissive attitudes toward the DS and the system's graphical limitations, but we did, at the least, have a lot of fun talking about and imagining the possibilities!
And conversations like those are a big part of the the reason why I have such strong nostalgia for the events of that day.
As for the demo, itself: My experience with it was all about experimenting with the pen and thumb-strapped styli and testing out their accuracy and comfortability.
Both had their strengths and weaknesses: The pen's pointed tip allowed for greater precision, but when you were using it, you were required to hold the DS with one hand and thus sacrifice balance. The thumb stylus allowed for more-desirable two-handed control, but the downside was that its use required you to stretch your fingers in unnatural-feeling ways and created a situation in which your strapped hand would block a large portion of the bottom screen.
I settled on the pen because I valued actually being able to see what I was doing.
But in truth, Hunters played well either way. I wasn't sure that its particular type of control input was a good fit for Metroid games--because they were normally heavy on precision-platforming, and I wasn't convinced that double-tapping was a quick- and reliable-enough form of jump input--but I didn't spend a great deal of time dwelling on the subject because I was otherwise too busy being amazed that Nintendo was able to make a game that looked remarkably similar to Metroid Prime run on a system whose power was roughly equivalent to the N64's!
"What kind of sorcery did they use to make this game?!" I frequently wondered as I examined the demo's visuals.
Also, I was strangely enamored with the game's sound effects, which had an indefinably remindful vibe to them. They were similar to sound effects that I'd heard regularly in some past system's games, though I could never figure out which system or games they were reminding me of. All I knew was that hearing them filled me with nostalgic feelings.
That quality, alone, was what made them so appealing to me.
So First Hunt made a very good first impression. It did well to keep me engaged and get my mind and my imagination stirring.
I couldn't have asked for anything more from it.
Metroid Prime Hunters, the game for which it was a demo, was delayed when Nintendo bowed to pressure and decided to implement online play. It arrived 14 months later. By then, my interest in it had waned considerably, but still I was curious to see what it was.
And, well, it was an OK game. I considered it to be a solid action-adventure game but only a middling Metroid game. It was obviously a vehicle to draw in FPS fans and the multiplayer-seeking crowd, and I honestly didn't know how to feel about that.
I still don't.
So I'll just say that I had a pretty good time with the game and I derived some mild enjoyment from its online-multiplayer action.
As soon as the DS finished charging up, I took it back to the den and popped the amply suffixed Super Mario 64 DS into it.
Truthfully, though I was intrigued to know that the game featured more content than the original (it had three additional playable characters, extra worlds, more collectible stars and local multiplayer), I was kinda cold on it. Because I wasn't convinced that I needed to play an otherwise compromised version of one of my N64 favorites.
What concerned me most was the control scheme and particularly the thought of using a d-pad to simulate analog control. It just sounded impractical to me.
And in practice, it certainly was. The d-pad controls were so cumbersome, really, that I considered simply not playing the game. And there was no way that I was going to engage in further use of the touch controls, which proved to be entirely insufficient for accurate 360-degree movement.
The only reason that I stuck with Super Mario 64 DS was because I was short on options. I had two games, and the other one was the rather-short First Hunt demo. So I felt as though I had no choice but to continue playing the former and finding ways to work around its mostly inadequate control scheme.
Still, though, it felt surreal to me to be playing Super Mario 64 on this small, compact device because just eight years earlier, you needed a large, bulky machine to run such a game.
"It's amazing how quickly technology advances!" I thought to myself in that moment.
And I actually was able to extract some enjoyment from the game. I had fun playing as Yoshi, Wario and Luigi and using their unique abilities to advance through the game in new and unexpected ways. Doing so made for an interesting experience.
I played the game for about two hours or so before making my final judgment: I recognized that it had a number of obvious flaws, yes, but overall I liked what I was seeing from it. And I came away from the experience thinking that the DS would be a great platform for games whose values were a match for those from the 32- and 64-bit era--more so if Nintendo was able to find a way to sneak in an analog stick or sell some type of analog-simulating accessory.
"Actually, that's probably exactly how it'll work out," I figured, "because it's a very Nintendo-like thing to do."
But right about then, my heart quickly sank because a completely deflating thought suddenly came to mind: "But if it does become the case that the DS' library largely consists of traditional 3D games," I started to wonder, "then who would want to choose it over that other portable device, whose superior power will allow for it to run games that closely resemble those on currently available consoles? If both devices wind up offering the same types of games, then who would choose the one whose versions of games have blocky last-generation visuals?"
It was a very troubling thought.
That was my mood as I switched over to the game's Rec Room mode, which was home to a collection of touch-based mini-games. At the time, I was feeling a bit dispirited, so I wasn't terribly interested in messing around with some random mini-games--mostly because I didn't think that there'd be much to them.
But surprisingly, that's when it all started to make sense to me.
Let me tell you: Playing these mini-games was an eye-opening experience for me. They weren't shallow and lacking for substance, as I expected them to be, no. Rather, they were wonderfully inventive, fully realized, and just plain fun to play!
I'd honestly never played anything like them before!
Suddenly the DS was showing me its true potential. Smoothly sliding puzzle pieces across a grid, tossing objects around a playing field at different velocities, frantically poking at aerial objects to keep them afloat, tapping objects in a certain ways to create rhythm, drawing platforms of any shape and size and placing them at any angle--there was so much exciting new stuff that you could do with this touchscreen technology!
Over the next few hours, I had an absolute blast smashing shells into each other, defensively launching cannon balls into armies of parachuting Bob-ombs, and drawing bouncy platforms to assist groups of helplessly plummeting Marios.
It all amounted to one of the most impactful experiences that I'd ever had with a new system.
"This is exactly what I've been looking for," I thought to myself several times as I played these mini-games.
But then, unfortunately, I was quickly brought back down again by the sudden emergence of another troubling thought: "But you know what?" I fearfully considered. "With just these twenty or so mini-games, Nintendo has probably already hit upon all of the best ideas and perfected them in a way that's likely to steal everyone else's thunder and render many of its partners' games redundant before they even hit stores!"
"The company may have unwittingly exhausted all of the possibilities right at the start!" I began to think. "I mean, what if the possibilities aren't as endless as I thought, and this, right here, is really all that you can do with touchscreen technology?!"
That's when I started to consider the possibility that this new system just wasn't going to work out well for Nintendo.
And that appeared to the case. Because nothing else could have explained the following weeks' dearth of innovative and compelling new games. Even Nintendo had little to offer.
So as the months dropped off, I simply didn't get much use out of my DS.
I mean, I tried to remain interested in the system: I continued to mess around with Super Mario 64 DS' mini-games and Sega's bizarre Feel the Magic: XY/XX (which were my first non-bundled purchases). And against my better judgment, I bought myself a copy of the shallow-looking Yoshi Touch & Go, and I did so with the hope that it would provide at least a little fuel to the dwindling fire.
Predictably, doing so was a bad call. The game was seriously lacking for real substance, and it did absolutely nothing for me.
The most worrying sign, though, was that Nintendo thought that a game that was as vapid as Yoshi Touch & Go was worth $40.
"They can't really think that a game that's so horribly bereft of substantive content is worth that price, can they?" I questioned in a mystified manner. "And they can't possibly believe that such a game will do anything but make the DS seem like a joke to anyone who has been an enthusiast for more than two years."
The writing was on the wall: The Nintendo DS was in trouble. It had no clear focus. The majority of its games were of subpar quality. And the big third-party companies seemed to be avoiding it.
Sadly, the system's future looked bleak.
And as we headed into spring, I wondered if maybe it was time for me to jump off the wagon and do what I'd planned to do before the DS was announced: leave video games behind and start looking for a new hobby.
But then along came the game that helped to turn everything around. It was the game that changed my world and consequently made the DS for me.
Its name was Pac-Pix, and it was one of the most inventive, breathtakingly original games I'd ever seen. I knew that I needed to have it in my library the moment I saw it in action.
"This game is mind-blowingly awesome," I thought to myself as I watched Namco's representatives demo Pac-Pix, "and I'm going to purchase a copy of it the moment it goes on sale!"
And that's exactly what I did. I bought it on day one.
And it worked just as advertised: I could draw the most hideously deformed and mangled Pac-Man imaginable, and suddenly, my horribly misshapen creation would spring and start moving all around the screen! I could even draw two or three of them at a time, if I so desired, and have multiple mutant Pac-Men roaming around the play field! And, amazingly, I could redirect my ghost-chomping monstrosities by obstructing their paths with specially drawn directional lines!"
"This is wild!" I enthusiastically uttered as I experimented with the game's mechanics. "What a brilliant concept!"
I'd never played anything like it.
And I was so glad that I didn't listen to those jaded game journalists who dismissively labeled Pac-Pix a "glorified tech demo." It wasn't. It was much more than that.
It was, truly, the type of game that I loved. It was kin to all of the "arcade-like" games of which I've spoken fondly in the past (Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Excitebike, Wrecking Crew, Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, et al.)--the games that were able to so effectively establish new formulas and create strong foundational pillars for newly released systems.
Forget Super Mario 64 DS, Feel the Magic: XY/XX, Yoshi Touch & Go and the rest. It was Pac-Pix that showed me the DS' true potential, and it was the game that I considered to be portable's true proof of concept.
Above all, Pac-Pix showed me that there were indeed plenty of new ideas that could be explored on the DS--far more than I realized. It was as inspirational as it was fun. I loved it to pieces!
I played through it multiple times in the first few months, and thereafter, I continued playing it in bite-sized play-sessions whenever I could find the opportunity to do so. Whenever I was bored or in desperate need of a way to kill an hour, I could always count on Pac-Pix to fill the void and keep me entertained and amuse me in a way that few other games could.
Pac-Pix was exactly the kind of game that I'd envisioned when Nintendo announced the DS. It was what I was there for. My decision to go all-on on the DS was sparked by my desire to get out of my comfort zone and try new things--to seek new types of experiences and let them take me wherever they may--and Pac-Pix was the game that helped me to achieve that goal. It took me by the hand and showed me a new way forward.
And in doing so, it helped me to reignite my passion for video games.
That's why I consider it to be such an important game in my history.
But those in the online community and the gaming press didn't share my enthusiasm for this exciting paradigm shift, no. Their attitude toward the DS and its software was still highly negative. They were still as disdainful as ever.
It was sad how most of them were trying to will the DS to fail, sometimes for the pettiest of reasons. They'd do anything to tear it down. The shining example of this was IGN's coverage of the DS' Japanese release: Anoop Gantayat, the journalist who was chosen to report on the event, pointed to the muted activity of a single district and used it as anecdotal evidence that Japan simply wasn't interested in the system, and he ignorantly contrasted the "lack of excitement" for the DS with the festive atmosphere surrounding the concurrent launch of Dragon Quest VIII, which was a hotly anticipated game release for an enormously popular console (the PS2).
The reporting was proven to be bunk, of course, because the DS had actually sold very well, but naturally IGN's editors stood by their man and continued to downplay the numbers.
They clearly had contempt for the DS. It didn't fit their vision for what they wanted gaming to be, so they sought to bury it at every turn.
But at that point, honestly, I didn't care about the detractors' ignorant opinions anymore. I didn't care if I was alone in my thinking. I was excited for the DS' future, man, and there was nothing that was going to bring me down!
And soon something really wonderful happened: The tide turned in a big way. The DS caught fire and suddenly became one of the hottest gaming products on the market. And within a year, it was topping sales charts all across the world!
So, too, were its games. Dozens of innovative, industry-changing DS games were winning over old and new customers alike and helping the system to achieve astronomical success!
For an enthusiast like me, it was the best of times. I was once again deriving great joy from video games and excitedly keeping up with them. I was having an enormous amount of fun with the DS and its games fervently immersing myself in the scene. Hell--I was picking up a new game every week, which was a far cry from the days when I was playing exclusively on consoles and buying only three or four games a year.
The DS was dominating my life. It had proven to me that dual-screen, touch-controlled gaming was for real, and I simply couldn't get enough of what it was offering!
There were so many DS games that meant something to me. There were so many games that positively impacted my life, sometimes to a profound degree, and changed how I thought about video games. I wish that I could talk about all of them here, but sadly I have to refrain from doing so because I don't want this piece to be an unreasonably long 10-hour read. So what I'm going to do instead is take a few moments to present to you a small sampling of the games that heavily impacted me and helped to make the DS my new favorite system!
In the previous years, I had never before played a WarioWare game, so WarioWare: Touched! was a revelation for me.
Before I played WarioWare: Touched!, the idea of "series of three-second mini-gamers" sounded suspect to me because I interpreted it as Nintendo tending toward its worst trait: trying to make the most amount of money with the cheapest, most-bare-bones product possible.
"A game based around that idea can't be anything but shallow and throwaway in nature," I thought. "It could never come close to being great or even substantially above average."
I couldn't have been more wrong in my assessment. It turned out that the WarioWare series' core concept was actually brilliant!
Touched!, I discovered, was a fully realized, high-value video game. It represented Nintendo at its most creative and showed what the company could do when it freed itself from the shackles of its iterative design-formulas (to which its increasingly rigid core-consumer base demanded that it adhere) and endeavored to entertain players in genuinely new ways.
More so, it was just pure fun to play! Its action was frantic and frenzied in the most delightfully engaging way!
It was certainly one of the best choices when I desired some quickly accessible entertainment and especially when I needed to fill a half-hour or so while I was waiting for company to arrive or while dinner was cooking. It always gave me what I was looking for, and that's why I was so fond of it.
I put it in the same group with Feel the Magic: XY/XX (which it clearly inspired) and Pac-Pix and considered it to be another one of those foundational games off of which future DS games could springboard. And, like I did with the aforementioned, I continued playing it for years!
It doesn't seem to be anyone's favorite game, but that's OK. I still love it! In fact, it's my favorite entry in the WarioWare series!
In the previous years, I never would have imagined that anyone would want to make a game about a humdrum procedure like surgery or that I'd actually be interested in playing such a game, but there I was, in 2005, eagerly and hyperactively making incisions, suturing lacerations, and zapping highly mobile parasites with my surgical laser!
"Now this is fun!" I thought to myself whenever I was frantically pulling glass shards out of arms and chests and patching up wounds and doing so while battling the pesky little creatures that were roving about the patient's innards.
Though, honestly, sometimes all of that frenzied swiping and tapping left me feeling more concerned for the touchscreen's health (I was always paranoid that I'd accidentally scratch or crack the screen if I pressed or tapped too hard on it).
Still, I had an amazing time with Trauma Center. I couldn't get enough of its excitingly new style of action. It was so addicting!
Seriously: I couldn't put this game down! "Just one more operation," I'd always say to myself before predictably playing for another two hours.
I mean, who knew that surgery could be so entertaining?
The answer, of course, is "Atlus," and I was thankful that its talented developers had endeavored to show me the light.
Trauma Center wasn't some slapdash mini-game collection wrapped in a surgical theme, as I expected it to be, no. Rather, it was an ambitious, fully fleshed adventure game that paired engrossing storytelling with fun, often-intense touch-based gameplay. And it proved to me that you could make a worthwhile game about anything if you had a solid vision.
And the DS, I could see, was the perfect platform on which to carry out such visions.
"How did I ever live without these types of games?" I wondered whenever I played Trauma Center and all of the DS' other fantastically new, amazingly eye-opening games.
I was honestly wary of Kirby: Canvas Curse because I wasn't high on any of the Kirby games that I'd played in the past. I found them to be painfully easy, particularly because they allowed me to freely fly over most stages and thus avoid all enemies and platforming challenges. Also, I was skeptical about the idea of taking established genres and replacing their standard button inputs with less-reliable touch controls.
"Basing a platformer's action around touch controls rather than button inputs is only going to make the platforming needlessly complicated and imprecise," I thought. "It just seems like an excuse to shoehorn touch controls into a game from an established property rather than develop a new type of game in which touch controls actually make sense."
But that, I'm happy to say, wasn't at all my experience with Canvas Curse, which surprisingly turned out to be a refreshingly new take on the platformer-action game.
In Canvas Curse, you didn't directly control the characters, which I thought would be the case. Rather, they rolled forward automatically, and your job was to guide their movement and help them along to stages' exit points by drawing assisting platforms and neutralizing surrounding dangers with single or multiple pokes. Also, a drawn platform's degree of curvature would dictate the momentum with which Kirby and his pals would launch off of it, so there was also an element of strategy involved.
It was a simple idea, yeah, but still it was pretty brilliant, and Hal Labs made a strong effort to build an expansive game around it. And consequently they created a truly special, very memorable platformer.
Canvas Curse had it all: a novel concept, great level design, a wonderfully whimsical visual presentation, and a whole lot of quality content.
It turned out to be my favorite platformer of 2005. I thoroughly enjoyed playing it, and I returned to it several times in the months that followed.
Then there was the incomparable Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
What really motivated me to become interested in Phoenix Wright was the constant praise that was being directed at it. Before then, I'd largely ignored both the game and the community's reaction to it because for as much as I loved point-and-click adventures, I just wasn't sure that you could craft a compelling narrative and interesting puzzles around a game in which you defended clients in some stuffy courtroom.
It was those like Trauma Center that showed me the error in that line of thinking. They proved to me, as I said earlier, that you could make a worthwhile game out of anything if you had a solid vision, which Phoenix Wright's creators were said to have.
So now I was open to the experience, and I had every reason to believe that there might really be something to "lawyer game."
And without any hesitation, I clicked over to Amazon.com and ordered myself a copy of the game.
And let me tell you: In the time that I spent with Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, I was thoroughly engrossed in it. I remained deeply immersed in its world.
That was true even when I wasn't playing it. In those periods, I couldn't stop thinking about it and theorizing about how its cases would play out. It managed to so firmly implant itself inside my head, in fact, that it took over my life and did so in a way that no other game had ever done before!
I was completely invested in the game's narrative, its mode of interaction, and its characters' individual story arcs. For weeks, all I could think about were the plights of Phoenix Wright, Maya Fey and Miles Edgeworth--about their tragic world and their many bizarre, memorable friends.
It was an unforgettably epic game, and it had a profound impact on my life. It forever changed how I thought about story-based games, and it inspired me to greatly expand my interests.
That's how powerful a game it was.
I couldn't think of a platform on which Phoenix Wright would have felt more at home. And I couldn't think of a better time to be playing it.
"This is fate," I was certain.
So Capcom's decision to port Phoenix Wright over from the GBA turned out to be a genius move. It worked out really well for the company. Also, it did a whole lot for the DS: It demonstrated that point-and-click adventures were a natural fit for the system and that touch controls made investigation-style game segments just as intuitive-feeling as those found in PC games.
After I completed Phoenix Wright, I started hoping that the point-and-click adventure genre would make a big return on the DS. I was so passionate about the idea that I went as far as to email Infinite Ventures and inquire about the company's interest in bringing a new Shadowgate to the system. The respondent gave me the ol' "We have nothing to announce at the moment, but anything can happen!", which I understood to mean "We have no interest in developing such a game, no."
Still, I hoped that I at least planted an idea in someone's head.
Sadly, though, the Shadowgate game that I envisioned never came to be.
But I was OK with that because I was sure that plenty of other point-and-click adventures would be coming along soon. And that's exactly what happened: In the months that followed, games of their type started to appear in large numbers. Among them were the Phoenix Wright sequels, which I snatched up and relished all the same.
And then there was Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
It was my unquenchable thirst for Phoenix Wright-style games that led me to Professor Layton, which looked to have similar values to the former.
"This game is right up my alley!" I thought. "Even more so than Phoenix Wright!"
I mean, here we had a point-and-click-adventure-style game that was said to contain hundreds of brain-melting logic puzzles! To me, that sounded like a dream--an incredible combination of two of my favorite genres!
So purchasing it immediately was an easy call.
And I wasn't surprised that I loved it from the start!
It took pages from the likes of Trauma Center and Phoenix Wright, which I was happy to see, and thus it weaved a complex narrative around its main gimmick. And much like its contemporaries did, it succeeded in telling a story that kept me engrossed for its entire duration.
I was deeply enthralled by the game's tale of a world that wasn't what it appeared to be at first glance, and I was always in a state in which I couldn't wait to see what each new twist would entail. And when I wasn't playing the game, I was constantly thinking about how it was all possible and theorizing about the mystery behind St. Mystere's existence.
Also, I couldn't get enough of the game's ingenious puzzles, which, to my great pleasure, came in great variety! I was always looking forward to discovering the next one in the series, and my appetite was so insatiable that if ever it appeared that I'd cleared an area of puzzles, I'd become so desperate that I'd resort to spasmodically poking all over the screen hoping to find just one additional puzzle.
"Just please give me one more!" I'd beg.
So yeah--this game had me tightly in its grip.
And after I completed Professor Layton, my final judgment was that it did an amazing job of uniquely melding together point-and-click-adventuring and puzzle-solving and that the ultimate result of its labor was a very special flavor of adventure game. It was, I felt, yet another top-tier entry in the genre and also another shiny gem in the DS' ever-growing collection of freshly new, fantastically novel games.
I extracted weeks of enjoyment from Professor Layton and continued to have fun solving its puzzles and mysteries, and in the months that followed, I derived even more enjoyment from it by confronting and solving the free downloadable puzzles that Level-5, its developer, was releasing on a weekly basis.
In the current day, I consider Professor Layton and the Curious Village and Phoenix Wright: Ace attorney to be spiritual kin. For how they similarly engrossed and enraptured me, they'll forever be intrinsically linked in my mind. Together they made the Nintendo DS a special place for excitingly new types of adventure games.
And thanks in large part to games like these, the DS blew up and became the hottest-selling video-game system in the world. It won over old and new audiences alike, and it gained so much appeal that it was embraced even by those who had spent the previous two years deriding it and talking down its success. And soon it grew to become a legitimate cultural phenomenon.
The Marios, Zeldas, Castlevanias and other traditional-style games helped it to reach that status, sure, but in truth, it was wonderfully original games like Meteos, Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, Ghost Trick, Scribblenauts, and all of the aforementioned that pushed the DS over the top and made it into a world-changing device that captured the imaginations of enthusiasts and non-gamers alike. They played the biggest role in shaping what gaming would become.
Because of their contributions and their success in helping to establish a new paradigm, people are currently enjoying thousands of games on their touch-controlled devices and having fun in ways that weren't imaginable previously.
So thank goodness for them.
And thank goodness for the Nintendo DS.
Epilogue
By the time the DS was nearing the end of its life, it had become one of my favorite game systems of all time. Previously my top-5 list (which was comprised of the NES, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600, the SNES, and the Game Boy) had been unapproachable, and its entries had been cemented in place, but the DS made a strong case that it deserved to be in that group.
Giving it that honor is something that I've been considering ever since then.
Honestly, though, there's no way that the DS doesn't belong in that group. Because after all: I'd dedicated more hours of my life to it than I had to any other system that I'd ever owned. My library of DS games was enormous and the largest since my SNES', which stood at 80-plus. And for years in following, I continued to gravitate toward the types of games that it inspired.
Those are top-tier credentials if I've ever seen them!
If there ever comes a day in which I'm able to eliminate my nostalgia bias, which gives powerful inertia to the list's current occupants, the DS' chances of making the list will, I'm sure, no doubt greatly increase.
We'll see.
But I can say with certainty that the DS was very special to me. It changed my life. It pulled me back into a world that I was prepared to leave behind and consequently reignited my passion for video games and made me excited to play games again.
Thanks to the DS, I was no longer buying games out of some inexplicably derived sense of obligation. I was no longer watching the clock as I played games and putting myself in a position in which I had to constantly invent flimsy justifications for continuing to engage in such an activity. I'd rediscovered who I was: a video-game enthusiast who was in love with the one of the greatest mediums ever created!
The DS reminded me of why I was an enthusiast, and since then, I haven't forgotten.
These days, I'm nostalgic for the "DS versus PSP" era. It truly was one of the best times to be a fan of video games. It was an exciting period in which two ambitious companies were offering two very different, very distinct types of products and thus giving customers real choice.
The two companies engaged in true competition, and we, as enthusiasts, greatly benefitted from their efforts.
That's why it's such a shame that so many people didn't realize what we had. To many in the games community, the DS was viewed as the enemy. It was different and thus scary, so it had to be marginalized and treated as though it was some type of threat to "true" video games (whatever those were). It was, to them, nothing but a "gimmick" and a system whose library consisted only of "shovelware." They wished every day that the DS would disappear and that gaming would go back to being strictly "normal."
And, well, they eventually got what they wanted. Soon the big third-party companies grew so powerful that they were able to push everyone else out and basically destroy the mid-tier development scene and consequently gain the authority to dictate the market's entire future direction. And because standardization was their priority, hardware manufacturers were forced to conform. The result is today's gaming scene, which is all about the perpetuation of homogeneity and uniformity.
How exactly games are better off for that, I don't know. Maybe some "true gamers" will soon wander on by and explain it to us.
All I can say is that I'll forever miss the days when companies weren't afraid to create and market wonderfully disparate video-game systems. I'll forever miss the days when there was real competition.
But hey: It was a great ride while it lasted. We got an amazing thirteen years out of the DS family (the DS and the 3DS, in all of their different forms). In that time, we got to enjoy hundreds of unforgettable games and have a ton of amazingly unique experiences.
I'm going to be sad to see the DS go. I'm going to miss all of the beneficial features that its distinctly styled hardware provides (even if it's just using a second screen to display maps and inventories, which is an unimaginative use of a second screen, sure, but still a highly desirable feature). Yet I understand that things can't stay the same forever and that eventually we have to open up our minds to new ideas.
And that's the way it should be. It's what the DS strove to teach us.
That's the system's legacy.
So here's to the Nintendo DS: one of the greatest, most-transformative video-game systems ever created. May both it and its successor ride off into the sunset with victory serving as their flag.
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