I wasn't planning on it, but the combination of demo units at Target and G4TechTV's bizarro DS day event forced my hand. Last week the DS kiosks began to pop up... our East End Target hid theirs in the video game accessories aisle, where it could hold court over third party memory cards and an infinite assortment of pretty GBA purses. I buzzed through the Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt offering without truly grasping the two-handed control setup. It wasn't until we left that I realized I hadn't tried out the stylus-based control scheme.

So we visited the West End Target (Yes, we have two. We're blessed.) Their DS demo was more happily located by the Locked Software Atriums... but this one did not have Metroid in it. It had nothing. But while the stylus-testing mission was scrapped, firing up a cartridge-less DS does get you into the system settings and PictoChat, so I played with that instead. I typed IMs to an empty chat room.

Today, during the Fourhman Brunch module of our day's agenda, Rhonda found G4TechTV running DS demo movies... with a larger-than-life DS graphic around them. And when that ended, they continued with regular programming... still inside the DS frame! Hah! For the first time in years, I enjoyed watching X-Play, simply because it was taking up less of my screen.

And a million channel flippers were duly confused.

Did Nintendo pay for that? Or is this G4TechTV's latest bid to pretend they're actually relevant to the gaming audience they're trying to reach? Aside from my continued brand confusion since they merged G4 and TechTV, I remain horribly annoyed when they show repeats of game review shows featuring games released two years ago.

So after staring at DS movies for an hour, we went back to East End Target so I could play with stylus Metroid. I thought it worked really well. You use the stylus for mouse-look, D-pad for movement, and the remaining buttons for usual functions. It does not take long to get the swing of it. Even more impressive is the miniaturization of GameCube's Metroid Prime. Same music, same look. Just smaller. The intro movie is obviously Nintendo's first big chance to show off the dual screens, as Samus jumps from top to bottom and then stands upright across both of them.

Target had a hundred DSs available. No shortage here. However, I'm promised to Toys R Us for all major purchases, so we hustled out there... where they had a similar huge supply. But my good ol' TRU still managed to screw it up: they had no fancy DS display or kiosk (which is probably why they also had plenty DSs to sell) and only about half of the launch titles (which were all displayed solely with the old fashioned purchase tickets; no box art, no signs, nothing.) We noted that Target had the launch games on sale, so after receiving a DS we went to West End Target for the games.

Picked up Super Mario 64DS (duh) and Feel the Magic XY XX. Feel the Magic is a total Quirky Launch Title, the type that comes out specifically to showcase the new hardware, is never seen again, and ends up bargain-binned for $15. Fantavision. PilotWings. Luigi's Mansion. But it plays like WarioWare with a dating sim plot, so it looked like a nice grab.

Super Mario got a ton of play tonight, primarily in the mini-game section. The mini-games are all designed around the touch screen / dual screen features. I actually lost control of the DS for most of an hour as Rhonda tapped her way through one of the card matching mini-games.

Watching Luigi (on the top screen) deal out cards to the bottom screen, and then watching Rhonda use the stylus to click and clear matching pairs, I couldn't help but wonder if this is as far as it will go. Will the mini-games of Super Mario 64DS and Feel the Magic represent the peak of the DS? It still reeks of gimmick, and Nintendo is going to need much more to make the DS concept feel fully realized.

Tell you what though, when you hand somebody a stylus and say "click the matching cards," that's just about the easiest video game instruction I've ever had. There's definitely something to be said for simplicity.