Topic: Now I see why!!!

[areefer]

The early part of last year I was lookin at a mag in my doctor's office stating that Nintendo had purchased stake in the card company hoyle and I couldn't come up with much of a reason why but with the release of the ds I'm thinking that we're going to see a card game with the hoyle license on ds, and wouldn't it be cool to have poker, spades, hearts and etc. at your fingertips to play with other ds owners on the go in tourneys with prizes and ranking systems in place and looking at the number of people that frequent the card and puzzle based games on yahoo, msn, aol and etc. I'm sure it would be a huge hit.

[Koopa Troopa]

Yeah, surprisingly electronic card games have a HUGE audience.

[Shecky]

That, and these buses are starting to see a lot of money and thus interest in putting wireless onboard.  So 802.11 on the bus, plus wireless connectivity to the internet.  One of the major drives is electronic card games..... Imagine tons of people on a bus trip to a casino being able to play card games and gamble using online accounts on the bus ....  

Oh and the games wouldn't even have to be sold on a DS cart, the game could just be loaded via 802.11 into the DS memory, just like they do for the GBA single cart games now...  (Plus it's a feature listed on the DS page)

$$$$ to be made.

[Bloodworth]

Or it could just be that Nintendo started as a card company and still makes playing cards in Japan.

[Shecky]

Quote
Originally posted by: Bloodworth
Or it could just be that Nintendo started as a card company and still makes playing cards in Japan.

Yeah this is most likely the case...

However, we had a lengthy discussion at one of our last conferences with a bus driver about this very topic (and that triggered the post)... Discussion did not include the DS of course,  but users laptops, palm pilots, etc.

And it's not just on a bus.  There are numerous other areas that the same concept applies.

[Blackknight131]

Will the unit have enough of this flashable memory?
I spose so, since they did fit Mario Kart (albeit stripped down Mario kart) in that cache. WOuld be nice if Nintendo upped that memory a bit more tho.

-Blackknight131

[Bloodworth]

Quote
Would be nice if Nintendo upped that memory a bit more tho.

What?  We don't even know how much memory there is.

Nintendo isn't talking about specs, and I think it's a good thing.  Generally, the only people that really understand them are developers, not consumers or the press -- heck even some developers don't seem to know what they're talking about unless they've had working experience with a system.  

How all those numbers work together is more important than how big they are.  As we saw when GameCube and PS2 were coming out, you can publish really impressive specs that are completely unachievable and make the competitior's more realistic figures look inferior.  

On top of that, developers pretty much always push the systems beyond what anyone initially thinks they can do anyways. As long as they can make great looking titles like Metroid, Mario Kart, and the new Mario Bros, who cares?  

[Blackknight131]

Nintendo is indeed trying to distance the way people percieve them from Sony and Microsoft and their tech heavy philosophies. It makes sense, and I think I can totally see where they are coming from: rather than slug it out with those two on what perhaps will amount to an 'arms war' (continually boasting hardware and features over that of the competitor) in the market, Nintendo has opted to attempt to carve out a seperate identity, recasting themselves to be a different beast than the competition, as clearly boasting of hardware did not ultimately lead to succes with the Nintendo64 nor did nifty little hardware extras allow Gamecube to seize anymore market share from SONY in this generation. On a side note tho, and I honestly dont remember, I believe Nintendo was already heading down this road of "spec-apathetic" when they were strategizing on how to position the Gamecube.
I say to Nintendo, go do what you feel you gotta do. Dont allow yourself to become embroiled and overshadowed in the kind of battles your competition will surely be waging if that will allow you to focus on persuading a larger range of gamers to pick up your software...
However, and back to the whole DS issue, it would be really cool if adding a little more of the cache memory (that allows multi-boot games off one cartridge) would result in beefier multi-boot funtionality and/or allow certain useful applications such as pictochat to be flashable so that gamers wouldnt have to switch out cartridges too often say if they wanted to chat with soem friends after a round of Mario Kart DD DS (hopefully Double Dash will return for this edition).
I do not know how much memory the DS will be boasting however....nor how much developers would need to make such functionality possible. But it would be cool if it were possible.

-Blackknight131

[BlackNMild2k1]

I think it would be nice if Pictochat was just built in and always accessible at the the touch of a button, so that no matter what game you were palying you could always pause and chat with a friend, instead of just using the bottom screen as a map/menu/whatever.

[reverend_tod]

Pausing multiplayer games never turns out good, but I do like the idea of having picto chat built in.  It would be cool if when the DS did that little "*ding* There's another DS close by!" you wouldn't have to have the picto chat cart in there to start chatting.

[Blackknight131]

I really like that idea...being able to switch one of the screens to a chat screen, assuming that screen isnt critical to Gameplay at that point...or maybe not caring for a map, so changing it to a pictochat screen while you play multiplayer something or another.
It would seem that that would work beautifully with Animal Crossing...and very likely it WILL be part of Animal Crossing at the very least. There are maybe pics of Animal Crosiing doing just what you described...

-Blackknight131

[Uglydot]

When playing, voice chat is fun, but I don't want my friends face down there.