aik December 24, 2009 at 12:05 pm

Scribblenauts, or why I bought a Nintendo DS

I first learned about Scribblenauts by reading the NPC Comics online comic (formally it is dedicated to WoW, but players in other MMORPGs will find a little interesting there). Then the 637 issue of xkcd caught my eye . Interest has increased. And about a month and a half ago, friends came up with a request to help a child choose a portable game console for his birthday. After much discussion, they agreed on Nintendo DS Lite. Of course, I decided to put Scribblenauts there. Then he barely returned the prefix to the owner, and after that he went to the market and bought himself the same one (though Bushnaya).

Next will be a multi-book, several videos and a few pictures.

Scribblenauts

Formally, this is a quest - we wander around, solve certain problems (cross the river, press the button, remove the kitten from the tree). The main difference from other quests, there is no inventory, instead of it a magic notebook. If you write a word in a notebook, you will get this item. In theory, there are almost no restrictions.
Need a machine gun? We take a machine gun. Need an elephant? Take the elephant. Need Cthulhu? Take Cthulhu. Only he is evil. :)
Accordingly, any task has a lot of solutions. A kitten can be pulled from a tree with a rope, knocked down with a stone, set up a ladder, lured with a mouse, cut down a tree, let a beaver or a pyromaniac on a tree ...

Than to tell, it is better to watch:
Removing a kitten from the roof

Break a pyramid from bottles (without using weapons)

Collect flowers guarded by evil bees and fish

Passage of several levels

Yes, there are also disadvantages - the number of interactions of objects is small and rather sketchy. Many levels go through an identical set of things ("rocket pack + rope").

But this is entertainment that will last a long time. And the money spent, in my opinion, is worth it. For where else can you set the cthulhu against God and see who picks up whom? :)

Varieties of Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS is the original version. You can buy refurbished from the Chinese for $ 83.

Nintendo DS Lite - reduced size, added the ability to adjust the backlight level, slightly changed ergonomics. I took for 4500 along with a "flash drive", in Moscow, I think it will be cheaper. The new one costs around 7000.

Nintendo DSi - increased screen size, replacing the GBA slot with an SD card slot, the ability to play AAC files, two cameras with a resolution of 640 * 480 (one outside, the other inside), a processor with a frequency of 133 megahertz ( versus 67 in previous versions), 16 megabytes of RAM (there were 4), 256 megabytes of SSD (there wasn’t before), updated wifi (supports WPA / 2). New - around 8500, according to Yandex.market.

Nintendo DSi LL / XL - an increase in the diagonal of screens to 4.2 ", a more powerful battery. I have not seen it on sale.

Noteworthy games (except Scribblenauts :))

You can’t play Scribblenauts forever, you need to take breaks at least sometimes.
The general direction of games on NDS - puzzles, platformers, children's games. Although there are 3D actions like Call of Duty: World at War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, there are races - Need for Speed, GRID, there are TPS - Tomb Raider, Rayman, LEGO Batman, Star Wars ... Even Civilization 4 is available.

What I personally liked. There are about 30 games on the flash drive, but I would like to highlight some of them:
New Super Mario Bros - there are a lot of different Mari on NDS, I liked this particular version. The rest is somehow not very. MarioCarts, perhaps. Broken Sword Shadow of the Templars (The Director's Cut) - an extended version of the old quest. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

- platformer with RPG elements. Metal Slug 7 - I don’t even know what to write here. Metal Slug! MarioKart DS - of all the races, I liked only this one. Tetris DS - a few good tetris. This is one of them. Worms Open Warfare 2 - worms, quite convenient.

Emulators

There are even several emulators, but I did not look at them, so I will not write comparative tests.
The first and only emulator I used is called No $ GBA. Read the instructions for use (with pictures) and download here . Also there is a plugin that increases the size of the image, because the window 256 * 192 on the monitor with a resolution of 1920 * 1200 looks small. :) MyZoom plugin worked fine for me.
Playing is not always convenient, but you can evaluate toys and understand whether you need it or not.

Running games downloaded from the web on the console itself

It is clear that you need to buy native cartridges, support the manufacturer, etc. But with an average price of a game of 1000 rubles in Russia, few will engage in such nonsense. As it turned out, it’s considered foolishness not only in Russia :), because there are a lot of options for launching games from images.
They look like a cartridge into which a memory card (usually microSD) is stuck. Although there are options with built-in memory. There are several varieties of such cartridges (they are usually called "flash drives").
Here is a description of some of them: rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1646218
I have a DSTT. So far, all the games that I tried are launched except for one - GTA Chinatown Wars. What is the most annoying - it works fine on the emulator. :(
Although I'm thinking about buying myself this onecompilation .

Homebrew Applications

For NDS, there are a small number of home-made applications (a media player, a book reader, an organizer) and several toys ported by fans - ScummVM DS (a shell for launching quests from Lucas Arts, a shell and two dozen games by reference), DSDoom, DSQuake, Lemmings DS, etc. P.
There are emulators of some older consoles, including NES, SNES, Sega, ZX Spectrum. The list , however, is not very relevant. Google is newer. :)
Of course, there is DSLinux.

Where to get the games

For choosing games, I liked the site www.espalnds.com
There is no special sorting by genre, as I understand it, the games are located by region - USA, Europe, Japan, and there - by the date of addition. Not very convenient, but not fatal. For the game, you can see screenshots (the absence of which many sites sin) - you need to click on the words "Post oficial del juego" - they will send to the game page on the forum where there will be several screenshots, a video recording of the game process, there may also be information about the performance on different flash drives.
The games themselves, I prefer to download from thepiratebay.org , choosing what I like on espalnds.

The only limitation of the site is it is in Spanish, although this problem is small (for me;)). If anyone wants to see their native letters - translate.google.com to help.

Comparison with PSP

I didn’t want to write about this, but given the constant holivars on this topic and my colleague (the owner of the PSP), who had been shouting “playstation is cooler!” For a day, I decided to drop a couple of suggestions.
The main difference between all game consoles is by no means technical specifications, but a set of games. The prefix should be bought for games that a person wants to play, and not a person should play games to which the prefix allows it. Yes, multiplatforms are full, but there are also exclusives (Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid, Scribblenauts) - these are the very ones where you need to choose your own game console. And I consider disputes on the topic "ps3 cooler than this your xbox'a" and vice versa useless. Here it is the same. Yes, I do not argue that the PSP is much more powerful in hardware than NDS. But there are no Scribblenauts. :)

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