The DS is ten years old.

[BobbyBesar]

I own an embarrassing number of DS games, due to a combination of a fantastic library, lower default price point, and disposable income. Probably not over 100, but it's probably close.

 

10 years is probably enough time to put together a DS "canon", but agreed on many of the above. TWEWY is great, EBA / Ouendan are great. Meteos was pretty good (although Lumines was probably better). Canvas Curse was a great new spin on the platformer that showed off what the touchscreen could do. 

 

Devil Survivor was pretty good. It also popularized picross in the US with Picross DS, which is great.

 

I spent a ton of time with the various Advance Wars and Castlevanias on the DS. Despite being partially sold on 3D graphics, it was possibly the last great bastion of 2d gaming.

 

It's sad the Lost in Blue franchise didn't really survive that era (other than a mediocre Wii release).

 

Infinite Space was pretty good, although I lost steam with it long before it ended.

[Sno]

I have that first Lost in Blue game, i completely forgot about that.

You know, I'm just going to run through a bunch of other games i've played and still remember fondly, but haven't seen mentioned elsewhere in the thread*:

 

*(TWEWY, 999, Ghost Trick, Meteos, Tetris DS, Planet Puzzle League, Advance Wars games, Cing games, Ace Attorney games, Kirby games, Castlevania games, Infinite Space, MPH, Sonic Rush, etc.)
 

The DS had Okami-Den, which i never quite made up my mind about, i'm still not sure if it's actually a good game or not. It was charming though, it was trying very hard.

 

Orcs & Elves, one of Id Software's weird first-person RPG's for mobile phones, it got ported to the DS and was actually really great to play there.

Scurge: The Hive is an isometric metroidvania that i have a ton of love for. It plays great, it sounds great, it looks great.

Lost Magic, an early DS strategy RPG with online play, real-time battles, and a crazily flexible rune-drawing magic system. That's still a pretty great game, though the online is obviously now non-functional.

 

Aliens Infestation was a super cool late-cycle Metroidvania from Way Forward with permadeath and a lot of inventive control mechanics geared towards simulating a slower, survival-horror experience on a 2d plane. This is one of the best games to come out of that franchise.

 

Metroid Prime Pinball... Every once in a while Nintendo releases some weird themed pinball game, but they've always been pretty good and this was no exception. It also shipped with the DS's awful and inexplicably broadly supported rumble pack.

 

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a game that set out to emulate what people fondly remembered about the original top-down GTA games and in most respects actually ended up surpassing those games.

Custom Robo: Arena. I will not justify this one. This one is for me. (It did have some pretty solidly implemented online play though.)

 

Bangai-O Spirits is one of those random DS games that i find myself going back to more frequently than others. It's almost offensively janky, the DS cannot do what the game is asking it to do, but it's still such a fun toolbox of game mechanics to mess around with.

 

Nanostray 2 is the best shoot em up on the DS. It looks great, it sounds great, it plays great. It even has a bunch of suprisingly fleshed out mini-games.

 

Glory Days 2 - This was a game i picked up on a whim and ended up just adoring, it's a really fantastic linear action RTS. Build tanks that gradually push forward your front line, carry infantry to forward bases to capture them, bomb enemy units, and directly fight with the other player from your helicopter or jet fighter.

 

Megaman ZX - I have mixed feelings about its overly bloated follow-up, but the first ZX is a pretty great latter-day Megaman game.

 

Puzzle Quest was an awesome and fresh thing before they drove it into the ground with rapid-fire sequels. It's kind of remarkable how fast that came and went.

 

Lunar Knights ditched the Boktai sunlight sensor gimmick, but is nevertheless a really great and fleshed-out action RPG, despite probably being the last entry in the beleagured Kojima series.

 

Contact is a bizarre and almost indescribable Grasshopper-developed action RPG, but it's incredibly memorable and full of odd things to discover.

 

Space Invaders Extreme is an amazing thing that people should play, it's an incredibly energentic and fun reimagining of Space Invaders.

 

Electroplankton was Nintendo's weird art game/music toy, and it's... Really not a thing to recommend exactly, it's something you own mostly just to have in your collection. It's perhaps less weird today, but it was an incredibly bizarre thing to see NIntendo release in 2006.

 

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is largely an inoffensive and harmless Zelda-like adventure game, it definitely skews young and... WHAT ARE THESE TANK BATTLES? THIS IS AMAZING.

 

I might end up adding more later, now that i'm thinking about the DS again.

[mikemariano]

Scurge

Contact

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime

 

All these games are worth taking a look at; thanks for mentioning them.

 

I hated the enemy AI in Scurge so much—every enemy just runs directly at you as soon as you enter a room.  It really ruined the game for me and it's a shame because the rest was really interesting.

 

I also didn't really enjoy Moon very much, but it was a first person shooter with vehicles and a brief view of the Earth from the Moon, so that was nice.

[Sno]

Moon wanted to be equal parts Metroid Prime and Halo, condensed down into a technical showpiece for the DS. It feels like the sort of thing that should be pretty remarkable, but the result was just such a plodding and dull thing.

 

A lot of the perceived issues with Scurge could be laid at the fact that it doesn't have any mechanisms for dodging or strafing, but if you can get a handle on repositioning yourself between taking shots at your enemies and can just keep that going rhythmically in lieu of any systems to do it for you, it's completely manageable. I think that game actually plays incredibly well, but it is a pretty decent challenge.

Speaking of Contact, it occurs to me that game had some kind of online functions as well, didn't it? I can't remember what it was for, it was something weird, and it obviously wouldn't work anymore. I don't think it did much, whatever it was.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Meteos was great! I loved the weird take on having a simple puzzle game with physics influencing it and it got super hard in late game.

 

Also I don't know if anyone else will hear it but

[Twig]

Meteos is my second favorite action puzzle game (after Puzzle League of course).

 

Oh I guess Planet Puzzle League is the best action puzzle game, and it's on DS. DS wins!

 

Someone else mentioned Tetris DS earlier, which was the best Tetris ever - Push Mode anyone? Fuck yeah.

 

...DS has the best action puzzle games of all time. REAL TALK.

[dartmonkey]

I got a DS Lite with Metroid Prime Hunters in 2006. I never really got on with MPH. Then I picked up Animal Crossing Wild World and lost 18 months. Ah, Dibly...

 

I'm still mopping up the DS catalogue. Never played a Phoenix Wright (I think they're coming to 3DS soon, right?), still on the lookout for TWEWY and the Chrono Trigger port. I don't think Rhythm Heaven's been mentioned here. Whaddagaim.

[Sno]

The Ace Attorney games are apparently being ported to the 3DS, yeah. I don't know if Ace Attorney Investigations will be brought over, however. I think it's just the main ones being ported. (There's also already two Ace Attorney games native to the 3DS.)

 

Also, that Chrono Trigger port for the DS was pretty great.

 

Meteos is my second favorite action puzzle game (after Puzzle League of course).

 

Oh I guess Planet Puzzle League is the best action puzzle game, and it's on DS. DS wins!

 

Someone else mentioned Tetris DS earlier, which was the best Tetris ever - Push Mode anyone? Fuck yeah.

 

...DS has the best action puzzle games of all time. REAL TALK.

I remember having a bunch of really heated push battles online, that was a really great competitive interpretation of Tetris.

There are seriously just tons of great puzzle games on the DS though, yeah. Magnetica is another really good one. (It's like Zuma, but from the guys PopCap ripped off!)

[Merus]

My favourite thing about the DS was how much it felt like a desperate attempt from Nintendo to stay relevant in the face of Sony coming in and colonising the handheld market. And then it turned out that Sony were bringing games that didn't work on a handheld, and Nintendo brought touch controls and instant sleep and wake.

[Sno]

Twenty hours of battery life didn't hurt it much either. Oh man, the 3DS' battery gets some shit, but it can still squeak out like 7 hours in optimal conditions. The PSP never really did much more than four or five. The person who thought it was a good idea to stick an optical, mechanical disc drive in a portable game console should seriously be kicked in the balls. Nevermind the impact it had on the battery life, those load times were horrible.

 

You mention that the DS pioneered for Nintendo that dependable, intuitive sleep mode. The PSP's sleep mode in comparison only inconsistently worked, often causing games to glitch out or outright crash. There's also just how damn fragile that thing is, the PSP feels like it'd crack in two if you gripped it a little too hard, and i've seen them basically explode when dropped.

You know, In retrospect, the PSP really didn't stand a chance, despite seeming like such a modern and powerful machine at the time. It speaks to the wisdom of that "lateral thinking with withered technology" philosophy that has guided so much of what Nintendo has done over the years. While the PSP was busy trying to be a measurably worse version of what you had at home, the DS was off its own little corner with cool things you couldn't get anywhere else, doing those things as well as it possibly could.

Sony learned literally nothing of course, repeating the same mistakes with the Vita.

 

(All this said, I do own a PSP and really love the thing, but it succeeded in spite of itself. Japanese developers were so damn insistent on supporting the thing that it ended up with a massive library full of great games despite its obvious failings as a platform.)

That DS tho...

Hey, Atlus games. Nobody's really mentioned many Atlus games. Atlus went wild with the DS, it often felt like they they were releasing handfuls of obscure JRPG's every other week. It was something i was always curious about, but realistically just couldn't keep up with.

I've been told Radiant Historia and Strange Journey are particularly incredible.

[tegan]

The person who thought it was a good idea to stick an optical, mechanical disc drive in a portable game console should seriously be kicked in the balls. Nevermind the impact it had on the battery life, those load times were horrible.

 

This is why I have a PSP Go instead.

 

People said I was crazy for preferring the all-digital platform. How times have changed.

[syntheticgerbil]

Twenty hours of battery life didn't hurt it much either. Oh man, the 3DS' battery gets some shit, but it can still squeak out like 7 hours in optimal conditions.

I just wish it wouldn't blink red. My god that is obnoxious. I need to collect streetpasses until it dies, I don't need a fucking red light going off in my pants.

[Merus]

I just wish it wouldn't blink red. My god that is obnoxious. I need to collect streetpasses until it dies, I don't need a party in my pants.

 

whatever you say dude

[Sno]

Oh man, but i really love that the 3DS goes through multiple stages of low battery warning. Both the DS and the PSP gave you virtually no advance warning, it sometimes was really hard to abort out of a game and get shit saved, especially on the PSP with those load times.

[SiN]

My favourite thing about the PSP was how the "low battery" LED was placed in *exactly* underneath your right thumb. I had many "Surprise! your battery died when you weren't looking" moments.

[BobbyBesar]

Even before the PSP Go, custom firmware that let you rip any UMD to memory stick was the true form of the PSP. The shock of running games off a memory stick and realizing the battery life was now more than doubled was really a revelation.

[tegan]

I like how this is now a PSP thread.

 

The PSP is also ten years old, you know!

[Sno]

The PSP still has a few months to go before it's ten, heh.

I mean, but the PSP is relevant to the conversation, it provides the context around the DS.

The PSP had an incredible launch line-up of games, they're still some of the best games on that system. The DS's launch was comparatively dire, it had a horrible first year. There was definitely a perception that Nintendo was kind of doomed going into the DS launch, it was a system crammed full of unproven gimmicks and the games were seriously lacking for a good long while. Then the PSP showed up a few months later with a huge screen, better visuals, and a strong launch library. It didn't take people long to proclaim that Sony had usurped Nintendo's position in the portable market.

[tegan]

The PSP still has a few months to go before it's ten, heh.

 

Two and a half weeks.

[Sno]

Only by the japanese date though, it was another few months before the wordwide releases of the PSP happened.

[Arathain]

The DS titles I spent by far the most time on were Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes and Zookeeper.

 

M&M:CoH stands next to the first Puzzle Quest as the monarchs of the puzzle-RPG genre. They're the reason I keep trawling the genre, and keep being disappointed. Clash's battle system is unique and brilliant, and has you combining coloured units to launch attacks and build walls. The way the varied units interplay is inspired. It's available to PC as well now, so no excuse to not try it.

 

Zookeeper is a match-3. Not even a very complicated one, compared even to Bejewelled. But it has this neat feature that a lot of them don't have- you can continue to make matches even as other matches are animating, so if you're fast, you can keep these big chains of matches going. Add the tactility of the DS and you have man hours of my life vanishing. I found myself in a unique situation, actually- the game has a 6 minute time trial mode that you can unlock. That is the entire game for me. Once I got a score of 5.9 million. I didn't even think it was that great a run. I thought I could do better. I never ever could. I still pick it up now and again and chase 6 million for a while.

[Vorlonesque]

I always wish I was around for special edition sort of styles for consoles or handhelds, but I've never been lucky enough for the timing to be right.

 

I will forever wish I had this:

So awesome.

I almost bought one of those soooo many times going into a Gamestop after work and seeing them there...I had the money to buy it, but for some reason I couldn't justify it when I already had a perfectly good dark greyish silver model (that I still have and use for GBC games).

 

I did stupidly rebuy a 3DS XL to get the Zelda version (and to give my mom my old red 3DS XL...my brother has my original small 3DS)...but I love gold Zelda themed shit:

 

http://i.imgur.com/ufiWgpe.jpg

 

But nothing really holds a candle to the gold NES Zelda carts...those things rocked with that shiny gold finish!

 

http://i.imgur.com/CMYS0Ps.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/vIqEOCw.jpg

 

Edit: speaking of old zelda games...those carts hold their memory for way longer than they were supposed to...last time I checked both my LttP and Link's Awakening carts had their saves still on them!  I think I haven't touched that Link's Awakening cart since 1994 or so when I beat it and it still had my saves from my adolescence!