–Dave
Hope the touch screen thing is true. That would be pretty cool, provided they get it right.
That thing would so be smashed by 8 year olds, its not even funny.
Provided they get it right. My statement didn’t exclude the possibility of pixie magic.
Pixie technology would be a major coup for Nintendo. Shit, then Dave Long could completely slam Sony and Microsoft.
That thing would so be smashed by 8 year olds, its not even funny.
I dunno. Nintendo hardware has a reputation for being fairly tough. But touch screens are a different matter than say, a Game Boy or a cartridge. I hear it can be pretty fickle technology.
I’m really not sure what advantages a touch screen would give people in a game though. In what situations would screen input rival input through controls?
Different games could have a different controllers. Controls could be situational within a game. You could drag buttons around with your finger and make them eat each other. Well fed buttons would be bigger, and therefore easier to press.
The thing I worry most about touchscreens is that they don’t have any ‘give’. Pushing down hard could hurt the tippy-tips of your fingers. And break the screen, obviously.
Are you kidding? N64 controllers wore out almost daily.
Hello, smudgy finger. Goodbye, lost stylus.
I have a hard time believing this one. You can’t use a stylus and the gamepad at the same time, so why bother? (unless Nintendo is planning on releasing Mavis Beacon Teaches Penmanship DS)
The touch screen might be the gamepad.
I would hope not. That would remove any tactile info one could hope to use. It would be hard to press the buttons if the only way we could tell where to press them would be sight.
Maybe they could make the screen out of bubble wrap. The pixels would pop right after you press them, giving you a clear impression of where you’ve already been.
The more you think about it, the more it seems sane.
I bet the boffins at Nintendo are working on it right now.
It makes at least as much sense as two screens.
Pin-art would also work. By ‘work’ I mean ‘not work’, in this context.
did this statement surprise anyone else?
Currently third parties must manufacture GBA carts at costs from six to 10 dollars a unit depending on size and save RAM.
that clears up the question of why GBA games seem so overpriced.
Does the lack of pixie dust prevent this now?
Are you kidding? N64 controllers wore out almost daily.
I didn’t say everything was durable. The sticks on N64 controllers weren’t well made, but I’ve known of Super Nintendo consoles surviving hurricanes, cartridges soaked in water overnight and still playable, and Game Boys abused like red-headed stepchilden that continued to work. When your primary audience is young kids, your hardware has to have a degree of toughness. Because childen break things. Often.
That’s what makes me a little worried about this touch screen. Any of you folks out there with kids will probably find your Nintendo DS screen smeared with some chocolate substance on more than one occasion.
I don’t think the touchscreen idea will be any good, and because I don’t think Nintendo would make a boneheaded decision, I think that they won’t have one.
If you look at all hardened touchscreens, like the ones on the credit card machines at stores that you scrawl something that looks vaguely like your signature, you see that there’s a huge gap between the screen and where you’re writing. It really sucks.
Compare that to a PDA, which has a much more exact touchscreen – does anyone want to take our their Palm or Windows CE PDA and jam their thumb down as hard as they can on the screen? Does anyone want to give that to an 8 year old and have them hit buttons on the screen?
And remember, the larger the touchscreen gets, the easier it is to break.
Yeah, Nintendo’s stuff is ridiculously durable. My Gamecube’s been through the wars, and it’s fine.
The Game Boy’s pretty tough, too. I remember reading about how a Hawaiian guy’s Game Boy got caught in a lava slide, and even though the buttons and screen were slagged, the thing still turned on and made its ping! sound. Granted, that was in Nintendo Power, so take it with a grain of salt.
Anybody know anything about the wireless adapter for GBA they mentioned? Other than 2.4GHz, do they say anything else about it?
The wireless adapter already shipped with Pokémon Fire Red and Leaf Green in Japan both of which combined sold almost one million pieces in one week. It’s now up to something like 1.3 million sold in two weeks’ time.
Basically, it takes the place of the link cable.
–Dave