Pushing the Nintendo DS to its Absolute Limit!

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Having covered the PSP, of course I can't ignore the DS. As I said in the PSP article, the PSP versus DS console war was unusually vicious. Sony fans wanted a successful handheld of their own, but were going up against a company which had crushed every prior competitor's handheld without hardly trying to.

Game Gear? Crushed. Lynx? Crushed. Turbo Xpress? Crushed. Wonder Swan? Crushed. Neo Geo Pocket Color? Crushed. Game.Com? Well, it sort of crushed itself. Point being that everybody and their dog took a swing at Nintendo, making the exact same mistake every time.

They thought making a more powerful alternative to the Gameboy at a higher price would guarantee success. In their mind, consumers would see the Gameboy next to their own full color, backlit screen alternative and buy the one that looked more technologically advanced.

Nintendo knew what it was doing though. People buy consoles for the exclusives. Gameboy may have been low powered and black and white, but that meant it lasted a long time on 4 AA batteries (compared to 6 for most competing machines) and didn't cost as much.

That was the winning formula Nintendo stuck to, which granted them victory time and time again against a long series of competitors who all believed their own handheld would uniquely succeed where all other "Gameboy killers" before it had failed, despite doing pretty much exactly the same thing they did.

Nintendo fans who were old enough to have witnessed this series of victories for Nintendo at the expense of competitors who all tried the same doomed approach knew full well what would happen to the PSP. But younger Sony fans who weren't around to see that happen made the same error in reasoning all those slain competitors did: Believing it's about the technology, not the exclusives.

Well, the dust from that battle settled long ago with a predictable outcome: The Nintendo DS, of course, defeated the PSP. The 3DS also defeated the Vita, and the Switch looks to be the logical culmination of Nintendo's desire to extend their dominance in the handheld space into the home console space by unifying the two.

Does that mean the DS is left behind and forgotten? Not by the devoted programmers who still love it. The DS has received a great deal of impressive scene demos running on hardware which, despite lacking texture filtering, is in most other ways a bit more powerful than the N64. Demos like Defcon Zero, by Scarab:

Pardon the fact that it's taken with a camcorder. The next demo, 'C0d3r C0l0rZ' by Throb and T-Rex was captured from hardware via a capture card and looks a good deal better for it. Though there's no hiding the low resolution of the DS:

'The Strongest Demo' by St. Vincent and the Grenadines is even less serious, as you'll know from past installments that demo coders have a particular sense of humor they like to infuse their art with. The music is catchy as well:

'Heinrich-Siegfried Viktor' by SVatG is another cute, charming demo with some dazzling colors and catchy music that does some amusing things with the bottom screen. DS demos in general were a fun diversion from the usual since demo coders had two screens to work with:

'It's 1975 and this man is about to show you the future' has perhaps my favorite name for a demo so far. It's another one by SVatG and has a fun, campy 1970s tech industry aesthetic to it which reminds me of Jazzpunk:

But what about the games? The DS surely had some stunners back in the day. Managing 3D on the system is less impressive as doing it on GBA, since the DS was designed for 3D to begin with, but actually making it look halfway decent without texture filtering was a trick indeed.

Metroid Prime Hunters tops the list, bringing the eye watering geometric detail of the Gamecube Prime games to DS with shockingly few compromises. The controls are wonky since the DS had no analogue nubs, so you aimed with a stylus. It also had an unorthodox mission structure and is not well loved by most. Those graphics, though...!

COP: The Recruit is essentially a GTA3 clone on the DS. It was actually going to be a Driver game early on. Rumor has it that they lost the rights to the IP, but in fact, their publisher requested that a new IP be created rather than making another sequel in the Driver series. The scale of the city and complexity of gameplay remain a sight to behold on the humble DS hardware:

Moon, no relation to the film, is another scifi first person shooter for the DS. It controls just like Metroid Prime and would be average gameplay wise if not for a couple of neat gimmicks a ways into the game like being able to remote control a rover to access maintenance vents. The graphics and environmental complexity are exemplary:

Aside from the ambition inherent in bringing survival horror to a handheld, Dementium: The Ward shines because it's graphically resplendent and a genuinely fun game to play. The gameplay works well, the game is scary, and the lighting effects in particular look like something out of a PSP title:

Have you ever wanted a JRPG based on the Wizard of OZ? Me either, it took everybody totally by surprise when it came out late in the DS lifespan. Not just because of the strange concept but because it pushed some frankly incredible graphics, especially in the outdoor nature areas which look impossibly lush for such rudimentary 3D hardware:

That's all for this time. Did you have a DS? Which game was your favorite, and which one impressed you the most visually speaking? Do you have any fond memories of that era of gaming, or was the focus of your life elsewhere at the time? Sound off in the comments.

As always, stay tuned for the next installment in this series!

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^{...and Stay Cozy!}