Today the Nintendo DSi is on sale at most outlets. I picked mine up at a midnight launch last night. Nothing fancy for my area but I had my DSi by five after midnight, which was perfectly satisfactory.
I'll be honest: I mostly bought the DSi out of professional obligation. How can I write about all things Nintendo if I don't have their latest hardware, even if I'm perfectly happy with the Nintendo DS I have already? I'm just glad I got to launch this blog after the ridiculous Game Boy Micro was already gone and forgotten.
That said, the DSi actually managed to impress me. Once it's in your hands, there's a lot of little things about it that would make it a little hard to go back to the DS Lite and pretty much impossible to go back to the DS Phat. I'm pretty glad I bought it and I think you might be, too. Unboxing pics and hands-on impressions await behind the cut.
The local GameStop is on friendly terms with me since I buy ridiculous tons of stuff and basically tend to know what I'm talking about, so they gave me a leftover Giratina Origin Forme statue to go with my DS. Now I feel kind of morally obligated to go buy Platinum. Incidentally, what's up with it being a "Forme" and not just, you know, a form? Is Giratina so awesome an extra e is required to express it?
(Also, check out that sexy grandma quilt! I'm house-sitting for my parents this week, if you're wondering what's up with that. Had I taken these pictures at my own luxurious journalism palace, the DS would've been resting on cloths spun from gold and money draped over exotic mahogany tables, of course.)
Let's get into the box! First, check out all the instructions this thing comes with. The full instruction manual is 108 pages and repeats in French and Spanish. I've put the "Quick Start-Up guide" next to it which is only a few desperate pages long in hopes you will actually read through it. I, of course, did not. It's not like reading things is part of my job or anything.
Now the system itself! As you can see, I decided to pick up my DSi in the distinctly weird shade of blue Nintendo's providing that I like to call "Bathroom Tile Floor." I'm trying to decide if the DSi's stylus is longer than the DS Lite's or if it just feels longer because the DSi is so slim. I didn't think to bring one for comparison but if you figure it out any way, let us know! My money is actually on it being longer, the more I think about it.
The DSi is one of the very few systems that's had a charge on the battery right out of the box, so no waiting for it to charge overnight before playing with it. Still, it's only about a half-battery charge, so I had to put it down to charge for a bit after the initial unboxing. This is a size comparison shot of the DSi and its own power supply, to give an idea of how small it is. Note that the DSi power supply isn't the same as the DS Lite power supply. The part that plugs into the system is shaped differently and the supply itself is a little bit bigger. Also, the DSi seems to chew through its battery faster than the DS Lite, especially when you're using the web browser.
Note the DSi's 256MB internal memory is fine for downloading games and such at first, but if you want to do much with photos or music over the long haul you'll want an SD card for your system. You don't need to pick up an SD card to use your DSi and don't be upsold SD cards by people who tell you that you do.
The DSi reads up to 8GB SD cards and they're dirt cheap these days, so I stopped by a twenty-four hour department store while I was out and picked one up. You insert it into a slot in the side and then can just kind of forget it's there until you need the extra storage. Don't pick up a SD card while you're at a GameStop, their prices are total ripoffs. I paid only slightly more for my 8GB card than GameStop would've charged for a 2GB card.
The first thing you'll notice when you power up a DSi is just how much bigger and brighter the screens are than the DS Lite's screen. This feature hasn't been played up in a lot of preview coverage and pre-release unboxings, but I spend enough time playing DS that I found it extremely noticeable. I've got the sneaking suspicion that for games that rely on touchscreen controls, between the bigger DSi screen and apparently-bigger stylus, DSi is going to offer slightly better controls. I actually meant to test this out but the game case I grabbed on the way out of the house ended up not actually having a game in it. That'll teach me not to keep my DS collection organized.
Setting up a DSi is a bit more complicated than setting up a DS. You do the usual with entering name/date/time and you can also give it a little personal message to say to you. The interface for configuring wireless access is basically identical to the Wii's and so by default superior to the older DS methods. You can also automatically tether your DSi to your Club Nintendo account as part of set-up, which makes registering a snap. Perhaps not incidentally, the Club Nintendo website is finally working right for me and spawning surveys when it should. I'll get my hanafuda soon! The DSi registration was worth 160 coins by itself.
The DSi has a totally different menu interface than the old DSes, very similar to the Wii's interface. (It also makes tinkly chimy music that's in the same basic neighborhood as the Wii's menu sounds.) It also has true system firmware, but don't worry: your DSi will still play your DS imports with no problems. However, you will have to update your system firmware right out of the box before you can access the DSiWare Store, which is pretty ridiculous but painless.
I got my 1000 free points when I was done, so I snagged Art Style: Aquia along with the DSi browser. Didn't really care much for anything else being offered. When you download from the DSi store, there's a little "stuff downloading" animation that appears to be based on Super Mario Brothers 2 (US) and is absolutely adorable. The picture above is the best I could get of it, but it puts the SMB1 download animations from Wii to shame. Clearly Wii 2 will upgrade to a SMB3 animation involving the almighty Raccoon Tail.
As for the browser, I was pleasantly surprised and disappointed all at once. While the DSi browser loads pages really fast (much faster than the old DS browser), both of the two browser display modes leave something to be desired. There's Overview and Column, both with their drawbacks. Above is this very site viewed in Column mode, which eliminates a lot of graphics and shrinks the size of others. It's perfectly readable, sort of, but getting through an entire post is even more awkward than reading the site on, say, a mobile web browser from a none-too-smart phone. Also some sites don't display in readable form in Column mode for some reason, notably Wikipedia.
Overview is really good for reading image-intensive sies or, actually, reading webcomics! The site loads at its original resolution in one screen and you can view a magnified version of it in the other. You can swap which screen hosts the full version and the magnified info. The main downside to Overview mode is that reading a lot of text in it is a huge pain in the butt, while image-intensive sites can overload the DSi's memory and force you to manually flush the browser's history (no, really). Ultimately, the DSi browser seems good for amusing yourself if you're bored and out of the house and don't have any games you want to play. It's probably not so good for... well, anything else. I mean, it doesn't run Flash so you couldn't even browse most video game official sites on it.
Here's a pic of Art Style: Aquia running on my DSi so you get an idea of what the screens look like when they're hosting gameplay. As you can see, it's all big and very colorful. Aquia itself is a fun and really quite hard little puzzle game. You're doing the match-three-colored blocks schtick, but you have to match tons of them while the screen slowly grows dark and keeps you from seeing what you're doing. The swimmer moves down the screens as you match stuff, and you want to get him (her?) down to the bottom before the screen goes black.
If you do, you have to solve a timed puzzle that involved matching blocks to make a particular shape before the time runs out. Succeed, and you go to the next level. Fail, and you just wasted the five minutes it took you to clear the level! I would like Aquia much better if not for this second puzzle that seems to exist just to make the game waste your time more aggressively, but for 500 points I can't complain too much.
In all, I'm quite pleased with the DSi, mostly because of the enhanced screen size and the promise of what DSiWare will offer in the future (what it offers at launch is sort of anemic). I think touchscreen games like Puzzle Quest: Galactrix will probably play better and I'm betting 3D games like Phantom Hourglass end up looking a lot better thanks to the bigger touchscreen. Of course, the real DSi stress test will be how well it plays FFCC: Echoes of Time, but it'll be awhile before I'm reporting on that. In the meantime, the OMG Nintendo verdict is that the DSi is worth it if you want DSiWare and the bigger screens and not really worth it for the browser.
