Last year's DS Christmas was pretty lame - essentially the launch titles plus lots of hope and promise - and I recall telling people "Nah, I wouldn't bother getting one just yet. Wait until Animal Crossing comes out."
As I look over my latest purchases and the future games on track for November and December, it's obvious that the time has come. This is the DS's First Big Holiday Season. If you've been fence-sitting, feel free to jump in... may I suggest the Mario Kart DS Bundle, a flame red DS plus Mario Kart DS (online play!) for $150. (And if you still don't have a GameCube, Nintendo's 2005 holiday bundle is absurdly good. GameCube plus Mario Party 7 w/mic plus two controllers... all for $100. $100! You can tell this is the last GameCube Christmas!)
We had a long DS Dry Spell for the first 2/3rds of '05. Wario was great, Pac-Pix was cool, Yoshi was fine, Kirby was merely okay... I'm sure I would have enjoyed Advance Wars Dual Strike and Nintendogs had I picked them up. But that's less than one worth-it game a month. And many of those are pretty low-end games. Sure, Pac-Pix was fun, but how much work do you think really went into it? And Yoshi Touch-n-Go should have been an unlockable bonus in Mario 64DS.
My DS buying season began with Lost in Blue a couple weeks ago. I like it, but it can get terribly cumbersome. The button controls are all over the map; the X and A button usage gets very confusing... for example, X is used to access the in-game command menu for inventory / rest / build / scrapbook. Select, say, build with the A button, the A again to select the items you want to build, then X to actually build the item. It's stupidly non-intuitive. Meanwhile, the shoulder buttons both sit almost useless. BOTH OF THEM cycle through the three upper map status screens, which is a complete waste. The left shoulder button could have handled the herculean task all by its lonesome, and the right shoulder could have easily pulled up the command menu. Very strange function-mapping decisions.
Also, and this is probably meant to duplicate the difficulty of surviving on a deserted island, the game never helps you out when you need it. You'll be told simple stuff - like how to fish using the A button - but finding out how to add more shelves to your cave hideaway is a mystery. You'll be told that you have to gather spices to give to Skye (your castaway partner) but not be told that you don't actually have to give them to her; she'll just invisibly take them as she needs them. Never mind that Skye comes with a Give command that I have yet to use correctly. She refuses everything I offer her.
Then there's the gibberish number screens that pop up when you store firewood, bamboo or rope vines in the cave. It took me days to decipher what those unexplained numbers meant. (Top line: X number of items stored out of a possible Y. Bottom line: X number of items in your inventory out of a possible Y empty slots. Use D-up and D-down to transfer items between the two lines. Was that too hard for the game to explain? And why do these storage areas use mere numbers when every other similar storage area uses the normal inventory visuals?)
Interface issues aside, it's a fun little game. Spear-fishing! It comes off as a freeform sandbox type of game - a survival-based Animal Crossing - but there actually is a goal in sight, a la Harvest Moon. I wonder how much neater it would have been had they made the game play out in real-time (or, as my sister suggested, include 2-player co-op play). The unfortunate truth is that they erred on the side of making it too challenging simply by obfuscating the goals and controls.
Much more direct is Trauma Center, which is very much like an arcade version of Photoshop. (In fact, I'm going to throw that out as the next bizarro DS game: Action Designer. Given a scaled-down suite of Photoshop tools, you have to meet the design demands of various clients before deadline! Mr. X wants an edgy logo! Ms. Y needs a newsletter layout! Organization Z has to present a slideshow for the board of directors in ten minutes!) Each level presents a body on the operating table, and you have to switch between the tools at your disposal to perform major invasive surgeries. You have to learn various techniques as you go - how to remove a tumor, heart massage, etc - and the fun comes from pulling off your learned skills under the time limit of the patient's vital signs.
The game takes place in the future, so it gets into a wonky sci-fi killer micro-organism vibe... and I do detect a whiff of anti-euthanasia politics... but the game itself is a fast-action blast. I'm enjoying it more than Lost in Blue simply because it's better suited for a portable system: you can pick up and play a level without worrying too much about what you did before or what you have to do next. The storyline is pure melodrama but still fun, even if some conversations go on forever. I'm at the bit where you have to save the little girl from dying, and her brother is forced to re-examine his pro-euthanasia viewpoint.
There's a trilogy of sleeper DS games out now, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is the hat trick. I don't have it yet, but I expect it soon (probably as soon as I get off that damn island.) All of these games have squeaked out from major publishers (Konami, Atlus, Capcom) as proof-positive of the DS's strengths. Over the next few weeks, the rush of first-party titles hit the racks (Metroid Prime Pinball, Mario & Luigi, Animal Crossing, Mario Kart) and then the DS will have really hit the big time.
In contrast, the PSP doesn't have much going for it right now. Sure, Liberty City Stories is huge - the first game that makes an argument for the system, in my opinion. Infected is a good PSP concept title, since it makes interesting use of the wi-fi play. But what else? The release date lists don't present a very strong lineup for the holiday. To be fair, this is the PSP's first Christmas... but to be equally fair, it has been out since March. And no price drop for the holiday! In fact, Sony plans to relase a PSP bundle that's even more expensive than the $250 stock unit. Pretty ballsy moves from a company expecting to sell three million more PSPs by the end of the year. Note: Sony has only sold 2.3 million PSPs in North America in the past five months. So good luck on that.
