Upon entering the videogame section of my local Wal*Mart, my eyes were greeted with a shiny new Nintendo DS stand. I ran over to it and and gave it a hug.
Well, first things first. The screens are very nice, albeit small. Same size as the GBA, but all the casing around it makes is feel cramped. Fortunatley, even though the DS was attached to a stand, it was still comfortable; much more than the SP/stand combo. The directional pad is slightly larger than the SP's and it feels very nice, but the face buttons are rather small. They're not so small that it should pose as any sort of a problem, but it just feels kinda strange.
The power button is just above the d-pad, and it takes only one tap to turn the system on. But, contrary to what some sources may have told you, you have to hold the button down for about half a second to turn the system off, preventing any accidental shutdowns.
Upon booting there is a seizure warning screen, but it only lasts for about one second before your allowed to tap the screen to proceed. The system page has a clock and calender on the top screen with your choices on what to do on the touch. You can either play the Metroid Hunters demo, open pictochat, download data from another DS, or play the cartridge game (which there was none of). I first chose picto-chat.
Although I wasn't talking to anyone but myself, I got the gist of what Pictochat will be like. It's not as great as Jonny, or someone at PGC, made it out to be. There are alot of characters to choose from, including some what looked like Kanji or Katana or something. But the main problem is that the buttons to choose what letter to type are VERY small and hard to hit. I had some problems with the touch screen sensitivity here, too, but not too much. I found it easier to draw what I had to say in the box, (which is also small). Not really a fun thing in and of itself, but considering it's not really meant to be a game is gets the job done.
Metroid Hunters: First Hunt. First of all, what Jonny said was true, it's nothing like a Metroid game. The biggest thing missing is the scanning. There are emblems that look like the activation switches that you scanned in MP, so it looks like you CAN scan, but you really can't. Which sucks.
Anyway, the control scheme is this: fowards/backwards = up/down on the d-pad, and left/right allows you to strafe. You look around using the touch screen, and shoot with L. Double-tap the screen to jump. Surprisingly, I found that this worked very well and it only took about 30 seconds of playing before I was used to it. Jumping is kind of a pain, but it's still easier than in other FPS's. I couldn't figure out how to get in the morph ball, though....
The touch screen worked beautifully for this game, too. The screen itself seemed very durable, and worked well with the stylus (which was thicker than what will coe with the DS, it seemed to be just a "demo" stylus, which may have contributed to the lack of sensitivity in Pictochat), but not so well with my finger. So don't lose the stylus, because it's definitley the best way to control the touch screen.
The modes of play available in First Hunt are: the main demo thing, where you walk about multiple rooms shooting green metroids; survivor, where you walk about one room shooting green metroids; morph ball, which lets you roll about some rooms bombing things; and multiplayer, which I couldn't play seeing as there was only one DS there. So all-in-all, it's a neat little demo that controls great, but's missing the metroid feel.
So basically there were some shortcomings, but it's still a blast and multiplayer is going to be RADICAKES. Just don't expect to get too much fun out-of-the-box. Pictochat and the demo don't satisfy.
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Just took that from my journal. Not even sure of what I wrote.
Topic: Your Impressions of the Nintendo DS Demo (Read 5905 times)
