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.

Hop to it!

As if bomb squads don’t have a hard enough time, Jumpman is tasked in this platform game with defusing bombs in Jupiter Headquarters, a place that clearly needs a serious heath and safety check. Precarious platforms and all manner of hazards await our athletic chum in this dated, playable and frequently frustrating platform game.

With Jumpman originally arriving on 8-bit computers in the early 1980s, it’s not much to look at, and the sound is guff, but designer Randy Glover had a wicked sense of humour and a real sense for level design. Therefore, each of the 30 levels brings its own set of dangers, such as ledges that vanish once you defuse a bomb, UFOs that dart around the screen, and manic robots hell-bent on killing you in the face. Also, when you inevitably come a cropper and tumble down the platforms to your untimely demise (and a jolly, slightly sarcastic rendition of the death march), you still defuse bombs that you bump into and can therefore sometimes complete a level during your dying moments, which is a nice touch.

Aside from poor aesthetics, niggles with Jumpman largely relate to some screens being absurdly difficult and controls being twitchy on the faster levels. However, if you can put yourself in the mind of a 1980s gamer—it was a time when gamers were real men: hardcore, but with mullets—you’ll find Jumpman a compelling, challenging, and occasionally maddening game.

Jumpman is available now for 500 Wii points (about £3.50). It’s tough, so wimpy gamers need not apply. Mullets, however, are optional.

It rocks. It’s diamond. Etc.

In the early 1980s, Peter Liepa was tasked by First Star Software to rescue a project that was, at the time, a canned and barely playable clone of obscure arcade game The Pit. Rather than fudge a solution on his Atari, he instead deconstructed the 1981 Centuri title, playing with its component parts of digging through earth, avoiding monsters and collecting jewels. What evolved was a game that in every way bettered its arcade-based inspiration and provided the cash cow that First Star subsequently milked to exhaustion over the next 24 years.

The core of Boulder Dash is simple: guide Rockford (who, depending on various artistic interpretations, is either a prospector or a cave mite with a penchant for munching diamonds) around various underground caves, tunnelling through dirt, avoiding deadly monsters, grabbing diamonds and seeking out the exit once a set number of gems has been pilfered. Tight time limits, varying speeds, excellent level design and occasional new foes ensure that Boulder Dash never lets up, and once you’ve conquered its 16 caves and four intermission screens, you’re plonked back on a harder Cave A, with a different layout and an increase in enemy numbers.

An almost perfect combination of frenetic arcade gaming and thoughtful (but quickfire) puzzling and strategy, Boulder Dash is one of the very few games from the early 1980s that is a true classic. And although the C64 version on Wii Virtual Console doesn’t quite match the Atari 800 original, it comes close. Sadly, the majority of subsequent Boulder Dash games (including the recent—and dire—DS Boulder Dash Rocks) never managed to capture the magic inherent in Liepa’s original, and so here’s hoping this rerelease enables a whole new generation of gamers to fully embrace and enjoy the game, and long-time gamers to fall in love with it all over again.

Few games truly stand the test of time, but Boulder Dash is a rare example of one that will still be worth playing in 2028, let alone today. Essential.

Boulder Dash is available now for 500 Wii points (about £3.50). If you like videogames and don’t buy this, you’re an idiot. Oh, and no the NES version wasn’t better, Nintendo fans.

• New from me on Cult of Mac: Opinion: Apple keyboards need better key labelling – http://tinyurl.com/3vm5wc #

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.