Nintendo Okie

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the Nintendo DSi going on the market.  I still don’t have one.  Why not, you ask.  Well for a myriad of reasons.  The first being I already have a DS, why do I need another one?  There was never, aside from a few games I won’t get to play a real reason to upgrade systems. 

The biggest change between the DS and the DSi was the addition of the DSi Shop Channel.  This is a service, much like Wii’s Shop Channel that allows you to purchase and download new games direct from the system.  Until recently there were never enough games on the service that I wanted to play that would justify upgrading to a new system.  Now that the DSi is a year old it’s beginning to change.  A quick look through the DSi Shop shows a bunch of titles that I would download, some without much thought, others it might take a while, but I’d eventually buy them.  Games like Dr. Mario and Mario vs. Donkey Kong are classic puzzle games that I’ve enjoyed previously, but I own those games in some other form and there’s not necessarily enough there to warrant a purchase.  The Art Style games have really been a very interesting series.  I own three of the WiiWare Art Style games and I’m interested in a few of the ones on the DS.  The last two weeks have seen a flood of Game & Watch games hit the service.  I love the Game & Watch series and would buy all of those in a heart beat because I don’t currently own any of them.  There are a few other games on the service that I’d be interested in playing; games like Bomberman, Bookworm, Chronos Twins and Dark Void Zero, but again with the exception of Dark Void Zero I own all of those games and don’t see the need to own them again.

This was taken with the DSi Camera

Another big feature of the DSi that is not available on my DS Lite is the cameras.  There are two cameras on the system that have been used in a few titles to enhance the experience somewhat.  For the most part, though, they’ve mainly been added so people could take decent, but not great, photos with their systems and upload them to Facebook.  I don’t generally carry a camera around with me, and I don’t own a cell phone, so having the camera might have come in handy a few times.  It still isn’t enough to make me want to purchase the system. 

Aside from that, now with the newly bigified DSi XL, there hasn’t been a lot of reason to upgrade if you own a DS Lite.  It seems Nintendo dropped the ball a little bit with the DSi or just didn’t know exactly what they wanted to do with the system.  The cameras add a bit of functionality to help make it a multimedia device, but many cell phones have better picture quality than the DSi.  If it had easily accessible music software that could play all of my music files and the ability to conveniently play my movies from iTunes I would have considered it.  I like the bigger screens and the touch screen functionality that I don’t have with my current iPod.  There’s a lot Nintendo could have done with the system to make it more desirable for many.  I like Nintendo and would love to be able to open up my DS and get directions or just check Wikipedia for something that popped into my head at some random time.  I don’t have, nor do I want, a cell phone so being able to access many of the functions available to cell phone users on my portable gaming system would have meant that the purchase would have been much easier to make. 

Now that the announcement of the 3DS has been made I don’t see myself purchasing a DSi at all.  I want to play a lot of the games on the system and I’d like to have a camera handy when one of my kids falls into a mud puddle and I don’t have a camera with me.  I also don’t want the device I just purchased to be obsolete in a year.  That means I’m going to wait until the 3DS comes out to make the jump to a new system.  It’s going to be backwards compatible with all DSi software so I can go back and play any of those games I’ve missed when the new system hits stores.  We don’t know a lot about the 3DS just yet, but I’m sure it’ll have enough new bells and whistles to mean the purchase will finally be worth it and I’ll jump into a slightly more technological age.