Review: Nintendo DS Lite

Awesome flickr site on retro handheld games

Well, I finally got my hands on a nice sleek white Nintendo DS lite. Packaging and attention to detial of design was very reminiscent of Apple's ipod. The obligatory game for this handheld review seemed to be brainage since that was what everyone was talking about eversince Nintendo release the new updated DS product. Functionality, esthetics, playability, etc. from an adult's perspective will be given here based on brainage.

Let's first begin how I begin most of my posts, i.e. first a retro look back in time. Anyone recognize the handheld game pictured above? Yes, this was a highly prized toy when I was growing up. During the early high school years was when Galaxian II came out on the market. I was growing up in Bancroft, so I'm still not sure how I got my hands on one of these babies, probably through the Sears Christmas catalog. Anyhow, I got hassled too often at the arcade, and this machine allowed me to play independent of any nasty venues. Great color graphics, I think it was LED gas display because after a while the screen stopped displaying even with new batteries. The Galaxian also had great sound effects to go with the two person play capability. At that time nothing I thought was in the same class although there were plenty of other portable video games. Factors for that conclusion included design, playability, features(such as 2 persons could play), it was just the coolest Christmas gift any Atari, space invaders video game junky could treasure. I just wish I knew where it went.

Transport into the 21st century and we have voice recognition, hand writing recognition, touch screen, artificial intelligence, wireless network capabilities, the list keeps growing. I have a Palm III from the 20th century and graffitti was kind of cool at the time. But the DS touchscreen is very smooth. Sometimes however, the number 4, can give me problems, since if you pause too long or the DS moves to fast and it takes your first stroke and converts it to 2 before you can finish the middle line, that can be annoying. Anyways, the touch writing recoginition part just requires a little practice and patience. However the voice recognition can be a little more annoying depending on the game, which in this case is brainage. Before you can begin any of the games or puzzles, brainage wants to measure the age of your brain...sounds cool?
It does this by displaying 4 different words of color, as in red, blue, yellow and black, but the text is in one of the four colors that may or may not match the word. So the trick is that you are to say the color of the word, not the word itself. First I was graded at 62(old fogie, probably cause I wasn't paying attention to timing and that I wasn't pronouncing the color blue correctly. It would say "try again" 3 or 4 times on the blue colored word. At first I thought this was part of the test, repeating to make sure I was convinced the answer was right. But this feature only happens with the word blue. So, is there a bug in the voice recognition software? Or will later someone show my ignorant ways and explain the AI behind my stuttering "blue", "blue", "blue dammit!"



Not relying on the voice recognition feature in order to play sudoku was more than alright with me. Btw, I admit that I am a sudoku addict. Being able to take it on the road(the DS with soduko that is) to the cottage was very convenient. I could exercise my brain when I had nothing else to do, except relax :o). I tried sudoku on published paper books and magazines but found that less than appealing and motivating. I usually stuck to playing an online version written in java. Much more visually and interactively appealing. But the Nintendo DS lite, with a brighter and crisper screen display from the original DS plus new game releases such as brainage made the experience more aggreeable, and addictive. Including soduko into brainage was a nice surprise for this review. Brainage sudoku included some training exercises to get you to understand the basics of the game at 2 different levels, basic and intermediate. I suspect the separate DS cartridge solely running soduko included many more game panels and difficulty levels which I found myself wanting more of in the brainage version. On the long weekends I kept challenging myself to finish faster and faster with each game. A good sign of playability from both the perspective of the game device and the design of the game, in this case brainage.

Overall, I was very impressed with esthetics, design, playbility, and features of the Nintendo DS Lite. Although I will have to do a followup review of the wireless features and the game "big brain academy".

High Availability - does it have a role in game systems?

I think so. Check out mmorpg's (massively multiplayer online role-playing game ) . The more sophisticated and the more popular the game, the more critical that it's available.

Again, I'm going to begin by going back to ancient times to review how far we've come in this particular genre of online gaming. Anyone remember the Commodore PET? I have one, and it still works with the tape player! Well, can't have a computer without games (lesson from the inventors of Unix, read my post on that subject later) even if the machine had huge green pixels for text based Basic programming. I'm telling you, the creativity that went into this one particular game, I forget what it was called, but it was 3d like before 3d graphics were available. The only way to describe it was a shoot em up space flight simulator with tie fighters(from the original Star Wars for you younger people). I mean, at the time I couldn't believe you could write such an advanced graphical game with such limited memory, cpu power and gawdy ascii text characters. But it was very cool. An excellent example of maximizing absolutely whatever was available, that is hardware and software resource to produce, of all things, a 3d space game out of green text. As far as the code goes, this was definitely Nasa lunar module stuff. But I digress. This particular game was not multiplayer.

What was available at the time and was sort of "multiplayer" was a game called Galaxy by Avalon Hill. Each player up to 20 players would take a turn to select their home planet and send ships out to conquer other players' worlds. Some strategy was involved since each player did not know how many if any ships would be sent out and what outcomes would occur when each players ships would arrive at different points at different times to duke it out with the local defenders. I said sort of mulitplayer because basically it runs on only one computer. Everyone gathers around to see the battles to figure out whether their decision to attack or defened was successful. And each player takes a turn at that keyboard to enter his directives without anyone seeing of course. Planets which produced ships quicker were highly valued and became a quick target for all players. Multiplayer yes, multimachine over network, not yet available. I managed high school computer science making games like that (or well playing them).

Jump ahead almost 10 years later, I'm now a Novell engineer thanks to a 6 week course and a couple of exams and castle wolfenstein was becoming a blur as far as 3d games were concerned. This would be regarded as ancient times for some graduates of college right now, castle what?!. But the company that created that game was obviously visionary. That same company; Id software, would all of sudden bring out a game called Doom. And I believe that is when the flood gates were opened. I remember very clearly, my team had completed networking all the PC's (running OS/2, DOS and windows 3.1) including a small group of Apple Macs (Mac II's, Mac se30) using Novell Netware. It's around Christmas time and we were quite proud of ourselves for the accomplishment, at least I was. So, I came up with the idea of celebrating by us playing Doom over a private Lan. And sure enough my guys were shooting at me or I was shooting at them and this was all a new experience. I could see them run by and they could see me shoot them, and of course the monsters would kill us at the same time. This was sophisticated stuff on many levels (no pun intended). You can download source code and other tools from Id software to build your own games under the GNU Public License. But no database or dedicated central server was involved. This was more a peer to peer communications network. You simply started over from the beginning if you ran out of lives. Maybe you could save your position for later continuance. But system availability didn't factor in yet.

With the advent of the Internet, services of all types provided by small, medium and large corporations all demanded availability from their servers. Otherwise they might miss an online order or two, perhaps more than one or two I think, we could ask Amazon. Mmorpg's are no exception. Central to every aspect of the online experience must be made redundant; player sign-in, game access, tracking player progress, coordinating other players, managing the playing environment. Any of these components could fail and the online vendor will face a customer service issue. Not unlike the auction players in the bidding war on eBay's system. Funny, it is a bit like a game isn't it...sometimes an expensive one.

Most notable mmorpg is eve-online, screen shot from eve:



I can only image what is operating behind the scenes to enable the entire system to function with so much that may be going on between players, their desktop clients or browsers and between the backend servers. Are their database servers configured for replication and failover? As the requests and responses flow back and forth are network switches managing that traffic with a cluster of web servers using secure protocols? Are the hardware components to meet each service, i.e. web server, application processing, and database storage structured in tiers to manage load and improve hacker security? Questions likely to be answered only by actually building such an infrastructure to see it apply in the world of online gaming. But if we were to dissect eBay's infrastructure and conclude that auction bidding is in fact an elaborate game with capitalistic consequences then we could also conclude what was good enough for practical ecommerce is good enough for creative conquest of remote star systems.

Games and Online Entertainment

Where else could the combination of technology and creativity be more prominent than in the game and entertainment industries. Atari video games have evolved to network (wireless network in the case of the new sleek Nintendo DS lite) interaction and collaborative play. Movies and for that matter all digital content; video, audio will soon be delivered either through fiber optic Internet or wireless Internet. Apple computer seems to be the leader in this area, rapidly getting the public used to the concept of digital music delivered like it was never delivered before and now just as rapidly into the age of network based media management. All of these things are enriching our lives beyond what we imagined. I hate to keep this particular discussion so confined to one particular vendor. However, having used what little media software Windows XP has introduced as native tools, i.e. media player, movie maker etc. The comparisons to iLife is, well... not really important. It is important though to recognize that some companies are incredibly focused on where the future lies. It's developing the software technologies on a journey towards ultimate enlightenment. For instance how would I function tomorrow without Google? I also wonder how many lines of code went into the games we played in the 80's compared to the 3D games of today for the Xbox 360.

I began programming by writing my first "game" on my Commodore Vic-20. I put that in quotes because the intention was to create a game, although the only interactivity was to press 2 keys to control a starship, up and down as the flying part was automatic. Of course each version would add increments of improvements in display and play. Having worked in IT for over 15 years, I will honestly admit it was difficult to program in Cobol and Fortran in those early years. And now with the advent of Java, I still struggle a bit. But until recently, I had lost sight of that motivator; the desire to be creative. The creative drive absolutely was the driving force that got that starship looking as cool as possible although very pixelated by today's standards. Business process requirements for a new order entry system took some of that creativity out of the picture as I stared for days at green text against a black screen. How much more productive could I have been or how better an application could that Cobol program have been if there was an element of, shall we say "game" aspect to that Cobol program? If I started out with a difficult challenge of writing an Eliza program in Cobol, elements of that successful code could have enhanced the Order Entry application. Maybe people could interact with the OE system that was a bit like a game, with certain qualities of good design, thorough planning, object oriented thinking, some AI thrown in...who knows how that program would have turned out.

But of course those progrmming languages have evolved to adopt those things I mentioned as we learned to think in more complex and "creative" ways. Btw, I will appologize now for the overuse of the word; "creative". I'm fascinated by the concept of code development. Does anyone know how much code was written to land the Lunar module on the moon? The code that runs the aging Space Shuttle? I wrote assembler code for both commercial computers and custom embedded controllers, so there is a great appreciation on my part of the "Art" of assembler programming. With all the C++ libraries and Java libraries, operating systems, it all boils down to the machine code. And going further, Ascii or ebcdic bits and bytes. Ones and zeros account for our daily emails, ipod music, video podcasts, etc. But layers of knowledge have helped us generate great complexity from those simple ones and zeros. But knowledge of the creative kind I would like to believe, although it's all mathematical in nature... very few of us view mathematics as being a creative form... more on that subject later.

I'll close this post which is intended to lead to more posts to delve into these topics by summarizing that interesting things can be observed and derived from analyzing where we started with this whole Computer stuff and how our lives and environment is unfolding with the Computer. Quoting a book title from the great Frank Herbert; "You're nothing without me".

So it begins...

As with all discoveries, exciting challenges await. I will focus on 3 basic things in this blog; technology, creativity and how those two things will help us evolve. No philosophical yammerings about the negative or positive effects, but present and discuss real world technologies past and present. Talk about how those technologies worked in connection with either enhancing creativity as tools and how creativity in turn pushed along new technologies.