Decidedly Sound investment or Dreary Stupid idea?

Yesterday evening in Japan-o-time, Nintendo announced the DSi, the next iteration of the Nintendo DS. With the DS being the console that changed the gaming landscape, paving the way for the family-friendly Wii, and having sold in huge numbers, any change is clearly dangerous.

Nintendo runs the risk of a drop-off in sales with people waiting for the DSi, or people being underwhelmed by the hardware specification, and therefore getting tempted by something more powerful, or more open (like the Pandora).

There’s no word regarding whether the DSi will support non-stupid router security, but here are my thoughts on the announced features, in patented* ‘hurrah’ (good) and ‘hurroo’ (not good) format:

* Not patented.

Bigger screens

The screens are apparently 17 per cent bigger than the ones on the DS Lite, meaning 17 per cent less squinting, but they appear to be the same resolution, retaining compatibility. Although some muppets are reporting both screens are now touchscreens, they aren’t—only the bottom one is, but again this is good from a compatibility standpoint. Hurrah!

No GBA slot

We all knew this was coming, surely? However, this presents a double-whammy, and a triple whammy if you go ‘yarrrr’ a lot. No GBA slot means no GBA games (which means no Rhythm Tengoku), but it also means games that utilise the GBA slot for expansions are scuppered. This also means anyone making use of a 3-in-1 for playing loads of naughty GBA titles on their DS is stuffed. Hurroo.

In fact, no GBA at all

With the GBA slot gone, so is the GBA hardware, bringing to an end the original Game Boy line entirely. This makes us sad. Not as sad as if our puppy died, but about as sad as if our PVR missed off the last three minutes of QI. Hurroo.

SD slot

This sort of replaces the GBA slot. And there are all sorts of exciting things you can do with an SD card, right? (Spoiler: ‘yes’ is the right answer—see below). Hurrah!

Built-in cameras

The big black dot on the front of the DSi isn’t a skin condition (sorry, beauty spot)—it’s a magical camera hole! This would have enabled your DS to take the place of a digital camera, if only Nintendo hadn’t kicked itself in the face with the resolution. Think iPhone’s camera’s bad? Wait until you get a load of the DSi cameras, both of which are 640 by 480 resolution (0.3 megapixel). Yes, that’s not a typo—the DSi’s cameras will be on a par with those from a really rubbish mobile phone.

The photos will be editable using the stylus, presumably dumpable on to the SD card, and high-res would have been somewhat tricky to deal with, but I can’t help but feel a little short-changed here. Hurroo.

DSiWare

This one’s the biggie. The DS is currently the odd console out, lacking downloadable games content, but that’s all about to change. DSiWare will bring to the DSi a range of titles between no money and about seven quid in cost terms.

What these games will be is unclear, but I suspect Game Boy releases are on the cards. However, emulation software for the DS via the naughty internet shows that while the GBA is out of reach, the system can definitely run NES, Spectrum, 8-bit Sega and even Neo-Geo titles without stumbling, and so here’s hoping for some serious variety. Hurrah!

Opera

The browser’s now built in to the firmware (which we just bet also has some nifty way of blocking R4s and similar cards), and so it’s free. That is all! Hurrah! (Apart from the R4 speculation, obv.)

Release date

The Japanese will get their hands on the DSi, priced at about 100 quid, in under a month. November the 1st is the happy-time date. With us being a worldwide economy, that means a simultaneous worldwide release, right? Wrong. Nintendo has set their Mug-o-tron to ‘high’, and will milk the UK for one last Christmas, before unleashing the DSi in Europe next year. “We’re aiming to launch DSi in Europe in Spring 2009,” said Nintendo. Translation: “We’re aiming to get idiots to buy a DS this Christmas, and then a DSi in March. Mwahahahahaha!”

Don’t be an idiot, readers. Make Nintendo suffer for taking the piss out of you. Not so much a ‘hurroo’ as a MAJOR FAIL.

Overall, this announcement rates fairly highly on the game-o-scale. It’s not a Rhythm Tengoku of goodness, but more like a Zoo Keeper where you’re forced to play Quest Mode against your wishes every 40 minutes.

Had it been born a mobile phone, this would be the Nintendo Gamr N6099GX 1.5Z

Before I smash my Mac over your head

1. Automatically resizing my browser window

I realise you’re proud of your creation and restricting it to the absolute boundaries of my monitor is, frankly, an insult to your amazing talents. Clearly, if all was well with the world, your website would somehow be the latest man-made object to be visible from space.

But here’s the thing: when you resize my browser window, which, I hasten to add, I’ve sized exactly how I want it, it makes me want to claw your eyes out with a rusty spoon. It’s probably something you haven’t considered, but I’m actually quite capable of dragging a window-resize widget.

2. Background music

Look, I know that you’re ‘down with da kidz’, and keep abreast of every trend, niche and passing fad in the music industry, and I fully understand that your tastes are impeccable. But when I visit your website and you force me to listen to an infinitely repeating five-second loop of compressed, painfully in-vogue dance music, it makes me want to come round to your house at three in the morning and play Captain Beefheart through your letterbox. And when you don’t provide any option for turning said music off, you instantly confirm yourself as the person who’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

3. Making Flash equivalents to HTML

It might have escaped your notice, but HTML actually works rather well. You might think that making something in Flash when it could just as easily have been made in HTML ensures you retain your ‘web designer of the future’ crown, but it really doesn’t. It just makes you look like an idiot, and compels users to want to kill you when instead of getting their usual and extremely useful context menu upon right-clicking, they get Flash Player’s one instead.

4. Rebuilding pages on every load

Yes, your animation skills are unparalleled and make the combined forces of Pixar, Aardman and DreamWorks green with envy. And I know that you’re extremely proud of your logo spanging around the screen and your navigation items arriving one by one, like the cool kids showing up half an hour late at a party. The thing is, while I don’t mind seeing this once (well, actually I do mind, but it doesn’t make me want to hurt you), seeing it every single time I access a new page on your website makes me want to take a cheese grater to your gums.

5. Long loading times

This will be perhaps the biggest eye-opener of them all to you, but the reason I’m paying out for broadband, and the reason I consider broadband to be such an exciting technology, is because it makes things faster. When I used to have a Commodore 64, I hated it when things took ages to load. When I had a dial-up modem, I hated it when things took ages to download. Newsflash: I still hate it when things take ages to download.

When you think the web is ‘a bit like television’, or that I think your work is so great I’m willing to wait five minutes just to get a glimpse of it, or assume I have a web connection so fast that it would make government agencies weep and average routers melt under the sheer strain, it’s pretty clear reality has left your little world, and that you should just give up and spend the rest of your life in a dark corner working yourself into a sexual frenzy about just how big you can make multimedia files for web interfaces these days. But just leave me the hell alone while you’re doing it.

You get the feeling someone’s spoiling for a fight in the browser race. Compared to the late-1990s pissing match between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, we’re now in a period of relative stability, and once Microsoft finally wheels IE 8 coughing and spluttering into the daylight, designers and developers will be able to code pretty much without hacks across all current browsers.

Bar Microsoft, what remains of the browser race is all about innovation, but as the Redmond giant has shown, ‘innovation’ can also mean waiting to see what others do and copying them. With Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft got all excited about ‘innovative’ features like tabs, which had been irrevocably welded to practically every other browser for years. And with Google essentially being the new Microsoft, should it have come as any surprise to see its upcoming browser project, the badly-named Chrome, pushing the innovation angle hard, and yet pilfering as much as possible from other browsers before anyone really notices?

At the time of writing, Google Chrome has yet to be revealed, bar the press release and a rather odd comic book. (Expect to see that adapted into a Hollywood movie starring Shia LaBeouf by November.) However, we can glean the following:

• It’s based on WebKit (like Safari)
• The so-called ’special tabs’ are above the window (like Opera’s)
• It offers thumbnails of recently visited websites (kinda like Opera’s Speed Dial)
• It has a privacy mode (like Safari)
• It has intelligent address bar auto-complete (like Opera and, to some extent, Firefox)
• It has malware protection (like Firefox)

… And so on. In fact, bar its ability to launch web apps in standalone browser windows without browser junk, I failed to see a single piece of major innovation. (And even that idea isn’t really new—Prism and Fluid are single-site browsers. Chrome’s only addition is in making it easier to launch SSBs from the main browser itself, and then protecting them by ensuring all instances are separate processes.)

I should be livid about Chrome, shouting from rooftops and damning it to places where things are damned. Google is doing the thing I hate most: it’s a massive company, nicking other people’s ideas and smushing them together into a big ol’ sticky ball of best-of goo.

The thing is, having recently reviewed every major Mac browser for a Mac magazine and most PC ones for a Windows publication, it appears Chrome is exactly what I’ve been asking for. It’s picking the best bits, potentially killing that nagging feeling that you get when using one browser’s great feature and just wishing it had that other feature from that other browser. Whether that’ll be enough for me to get over that feeling of utter wrongness at seeing everyone else’s ideas compiled into the browser equivalent of a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation, only time will tell.