Nintendo iDeaS and Pics Long Post Thread

Total Control Boxing
EA brutalized all comers in the sport of pugilism with Fight Night. The Total Punch Control gave you instant access to your repertoire of moves in a way that most multi-button boxer games get lost in, and better still, it made you feel more like you're actually tossing the punches and shifting your blocks than anything before it.

Is there room for improvement? We're not sure yet as far as consoles go, but with the innovative touchpad of the Nintendo DS, there is the promise of more control than ever.

EA's control system relied on the use of an analog stick, and was based mostly on motion and trajectory rather than exact accuracy of its analog controller (let's face it, even the best analog stick couldn't hit a bull's-eye if it came to it.) The touchpad of the Nintendo DS gives developers a lot more room to explore and move the controller in an analog space -- punches could be ascribed to a much more open space, where general moves like hooks, curves and quick zips would still register the type of punch, but the final landing spot and the speed at which a punch lands at that spot could be a lot more tight with the DS. Boxers could open up a fountain by targeting his opponent's eye, or could pepper their challenge with all-over shots ... and when you miss a punch or throw big air that takes you off guard because you committed too much to a blow your opponent dodged, it's your funeral.

RTS Games
Real-Time Strategy games outside of the PC realm are about as common as flying pigs (and about as welcome ... those creatures make quite a mess when they take flight.) The problem has always been the input device -- clicking about with a mouse isn't just more intuitive and faster than padding around with a joypad or analog stick, it's so much more exact that it's almost not even worth bothering in the console realm. When crisis time comes in the heat of battle, the fuddling controls will never be quick or precise enough for you to get your reinforcements where they need to be on time. No wonder that most of the big console strategy games -- Advance Wars and Front Mission -- take the RT out of RTS to fall back on traditional turnbased/board game design techniques. Full Spectrum Warrior is about as good as we're going to do in the console realm anytime soon, and that game succeeded for console players by putting you in command of a small squad instead of a full army.

DS brings a new ray of hope to console gamers who pine for a Real-Time Strategy game. The exact motions of a PC mouse are now at your fingertips on a handheld console, and techniques for overriding pathfinding or perhaps bringing action into single battles (imagine jumping down to the unit level to engage in Worms / Artillery-style minigame encounters) are finally possible away from a PC. Of course, those with a Tapwave known this well from the RTS Warfare Incorporated, but with the full field of the double-screen DS, you have a lot more screen real estate to work with. The grand battles managed in great PC RTS running on a 25", 1600x1200 monitor can still be played out on the handheld -- with a twitch of a button or a touchpad stroke, you could leap around or zoom out to micromanage individual battles or coordinate an overwhelming onslaught.

Wi-Fi Browsing / Multiboot Sharing
So far, we've mostly been on and on about the touchscreen and the double-screen layout of the Nintendo DS. But, if that was all we had to say about this bad boy, we'd only be telling half of the story...

One of the coolest features of both new handheld platforms is the ability to play wirelessly with either nearby gamers or, at a WiFi Hotspot, against gamers from anywhere on the internet. Nokia explored wireless play with its N-Gage system, and Nintendo is getting deeper into it with its own GBA wireless adapter, but the PSP and DS will break down all the barriers for multiplayer handheld gaming.

Our competitive sister site, IGN PSP, got into some of the possibilities of wireless gaming on a handheld in the first edition of its PSP 'I Wonder Ifs... feature, and the ideas in that column are even more apt to the DS since Nintendo has announced some of the specifics regarding wireless play that we can only guess are going through heads at Sony. Specifically, multiboot gaming -- where one system is used to share a copy of a game with multiple systems so that each gamer can engage in multiplayer play without owning a copy of the game -- has already been confirmed with Nintendo representatives.

The expectation is that players would be able to link up with their friends and play multiplayer games after a quick download, just like with the GBA ... but we've got even bolder ideas. What if, instead of downloading a multiplayer level from just your local friends, you could hook into a WiFi network browser and go multiplayer with any gamer on the planet, in any game that supports the function -- even the ones you don't own? The connection would just require a lobby for finding gamers and the games they have loaded up on their system -- gamers would browse the titles or run through their buddy lists to find what they want to play, download a single multiplayer stage over the WiFi network, and it's game time! Publishers wouldn't even have to foot the bill on bandwidth fees -- these sections of games would be distributed peer-to-peer, so it'd pretty much be a system of free demos for any multiboot-capable multiplayer game. There would have to be limits -- both in stage design (since only so much can be downloaded into the RAM) and in available stages (since no developer would want to give so much away for free that gamers wouldn't feel the need to buy the game anymore) -- but even within those limits, there's so much potential in this kind of system that we're staggered by the possibilities.

wait a friggin minute... that's warcraft 3 for a GBA

yeah

looks slick

...and there is a juggernaut in this warcraft

I can't wait for this to come out. I've had every Game Boy to date, and this looks like the best.

Dang..... I neeed this... i mean i never got SP...but i need this

BartNowciu wrote: wait a friggin minute... that's warcraft 3 for a GBA

not GBA, but for the nintendo DS

man and its WI-Fi.....Congrats nintendo has made a smart desicion. But now all they need is to get internet play on the consoles. But they dont want to.

Nintendo DS is going to be a lot better than PSP because it's all about the games. Wowzers, I can't wait to buy this baby! I mean, I've bought every Nintendo console, but the last Game Boy I bought was the Game Boy Pocket (brother got the Advance). And the added sweetness is that it's backwards compatible with every game boy game to date. That's over a 1000 game library at launch. This is going to be the Game Boy to end all Game Boys ^^

whoa man calm down. I got tired of game boy becuase lack of good games, and i went to console gaming.

PSP is all about features. Loading a device up mainly just for novelty features = bad.

People use these things to PLAY GAMES, not watch your favorite porn. There's other devices for that.

Like...your girlfriend. lol

I don't know what you're talking about, ire. Game Boy has a hell of a lot of good games. Maybe you're just not looking into it too much, or you're too obsessed with eye candy to think about gameplay, like what a lot of people have turned to.

Gameboy, heh i've never really got interested in consoles, but even so when pokemon was hot, i got a crappy GB Colour an the pokemon blue, then i dropped that in the sea so i got Yellow, then that got boring so i got silver and i hant touched it for about 5 years, i wonder where it is. . .

alot of you guys are biased against the psp and think DS has more games, when psp really has alot more interesting games than ds.

Can you prove that? Have you played them?

From what i've observed, the PSP has the same old "punch punch punch" and "gungungun" that you can get anywhere else. The DS makes use of two screens and has a much longer battery life, and it's made solely for playing games, not replacing your laptop.

- Edited By CheapAlert On Fri 16th, Jul 2004 @ 3:04:39am

Exactly. Nintendo is all about changing the way you play games. Sony is trying to bank off its success with PDAs and Walkmans by pumping its PSP full of it.

By the way, there's only been about 5 or 6 games announced for Sony PSP's launch. Game Boy has a big library full of really cool games. Tetris, Advance Wars, Metroid: Zero Mission, Golden Sun, Mega Man Battle Network, Shining Force, and so much more. There are enough games so that you at least find a dozen that you really enjoy.

By the way, operativex, this is a conversation about the DS. If you want to talk about that, go to another thread o.o

I still think PSP is going to be better i just dont know if i like the folded top of the Gameboy.

you dont like it because it folds up? reeeeeeal good reason :/

CheapAlert wrote: PSP is all about features. Loading a device up mainly just for novelty features = bad.

People use these things to PLAY GAMES, not watch your favorite porn. There's other devices for that.

But can those devices also play GranTurismo. Well i guss if its a PS2......

And folding screen is a major plus NO SCRATCHES!!!!!!!!

- Edited By Pengus On Fri 16th, Jul 2004 @ 6:15:21pm

Cory_the_Gargoyle wrote: you dont like it because it folds up? reeeeeeal good reason :/

Good enough for me... i hate the stupid folded tops cause my luck id step on it and bust it... long live me a clumbsy moron

What does a folding top have to do with breaking it. The same would happen to the none flip screen PSP.

Plus, you're going to have to buy the DVDs for $15. You can't rent them for $3 like for a regular dvd player.

You never know, PSP might not deliver all that it's going for. Game Boy has already delivered x10, and Nintendo is very familiar with the market. Sony is just starting out, so we'll just have to wait and see.

the dvds wont cost $15, the special UMD's that it uses will cost more

yea they will probably cost around $30