You lite up my life

By Plagiarize

So, lucky me, my DS lite arrived yesterday, and as such I thought I’d share with you my early hands on impressions. First however, I’m going to do something a little uncharacteristic of me and plug an online retailer. Play Asia have won me over with their handling of the DS lite shortage and can count me a customer for life.

Where other importers were e-mailing people to ask for more money as recently as this week, Play Asia were e-mailing me to apologise for the delay, explain the situation and then when they finally started shipping units, instead of asking for more money they were throwing in a free gift for everyone that pre ordered. I feel sorry for anyone that ordered elsewhere at this time, but my unit is finally in my hands, just two and half weeks since the coloured units launched.

So, first the packaging. Nintendo seem to love to surprise with the size of their boxes. From the GameCube to the SP, both have come in very small boxes, and the DS lite is no different. A small relatively flat square shaped box that seems almost too small to contain a hand held console is the first thing that really drives home how much smaller the DS lite is. You couldn’t begin to imagine a standard DS coming in such a box. Inside, was the manual, a white wrist strip and a spare stylus.

The new stylus is a big improvement. I actually stuck with the old stylus where most people changed to longer and wider alternatives, and now I can see why they made the change. The old stylus wasn’t uncomfortable for me, but this is much more comfortable.

Bubble wrapped and eager to get out into the open air, was of course the DS lite itself. I went for an Ice Blue model because I liked the looks of all three and figured this would be the easiest to aquire from Japan and conversely the least likely to come out over here. After all exclusive coloured import handhelds keep their coolness longer than just having the unit early.

It comes ready charged; something that I always get a kick out of. You can pull it right out the box, and start playing with it right away, and of course that what I did.

The firmware in the device seems unchanged. Even with the menus set to Japanese it was easy enough to go through the initial setup (made easier by knowing from experience what it’s asking me), then into the menu to change the language to English. The DS lite, like the DS comes with six languages built into the menu, wherever you buy it, and the Japanese adapter works out of the box in the US, so importing a handheld like this is as trouble free as importing a system gets.

No worry about different video standards. No worry about region codes. It works exactly like a US bought unit would, aside from having to change the language. Easy.

Looking at the unit itself, it’s as nice as it looks in all the pictures, though smaller than I was expecting. Closed it cuts a fine figure of reflective plastic. The hinge and back of the unit is the only visible matte part of the unit when closed, but it doesn’t spoil the aesthetics. The GBA port cover is a nice touch, that goes a long way to make up for the fact that GBA carts stick out of the unit (and something like Twisted makes it look like it has an unsightly absess), and it actually covers up another detail. The GBA port is slightly off center to the right, so the GBA port cover has a tab on the left, so that with the cover in, it appears central.

The on button is now on the side of the unit and the type you have to slide sideways and release. The spring is a little tighter than the one on the PSP, and the time you have to hold it up a little shorter. It’s not going to turn on by accident, and it doesn’t need a hold mode because the DS isn’t an MP3 player. The old On button was a little too near the D-pad and some people found they’d press it occasionally during games. It happened to me a couple of times and while I felt stupid for doing it, its comforting to know that won’t happen any more.

Many people are disappointed that the volume control is still a slider, as it apparently makes fine adjustment of volume difficult, but personally speaking it’s never been an issue for me. The slider is if anything a little tighter, which I can imagine might make it harder to get the volume in a place you like, but then conversely, it’s much more likely to stay there, so whether or not that’s an improvement I don’t know. The old one didn’t bother me at all and this new one doesn’t bother me either.

Another small thing to note is that the headphone jack is now flush with the edge of the surface, so anyone with a bulkier headphone jack, or looking to connect the DS up to a hifi will be able to do that without any trouble now. Ouendan fans rejoice.

Opening it up, the interior matte finish looks almost as good as the shiny plastic of the exterior, and even better feels much nicer on the finger tips. It has a texture to it that makes the unit comfortable to hold and nice to look at. The D-pad is very different. A little spongier in response, and much deeper than the almost flat D-pad of old. The A, B, X, and Y buttons feel good, and have a nice defined click to them while still being a bit deeper and spongier. The L and R buttons are the biggest change. Sporting the same matte texture finish as the inside (the D-pad and other buttons are smooth) and if anything having reduced travel, they seem a tiny bit odd at first touch, but it’s nothing that’ll get in the way of your playing.

The Start and Select buttons seem to my fingers a bit too hard to press. Perhaps it’s their size, perhaps its how stiff they are, but you’ll have to push them harder than you’d expect. This is either good or bad depending on whether or not a game needs you to press them regularly. Generally I think it’s a negative… but hopefully they’ll loosen up over time.

The screens now have a matching colour border around them, and one unusual thing is, I can actually see the touch screen in the lower screen when the unit is switched off. There’s an obvious grid of dots about 1 mm apart, and I was a little concerned they’d be apparent with the unit turned on. No such problem. With the screen on you can’t see them at all.

So, throwing in a game and firing it up what do we find? The unit is set to its second highest (of four settings) brightness out of the box, (the pictures were taken at the second lowest) and I’d say that you’ll probably be playing at this one the most. Under other lighting conditions (or depending on game) you may want to go lower or higher, but for the most part I’d say games look best at the default setting.

On my unit, the white balance of both screens seems very slightly different. The upper screen looking a little colder than the bottom screen. I don’t know if this is a problem the DS had, because it’s less apparent at lower brightnesses and I’d imagine it’s something to do with the touch screen on the bottom screen but aside from in the menus which are predominantly white, I can’t say I’ve noticed it in game. It could just be the viewing angle.

Even so, games look so much better. The brightness is only one aspect of it. The unit has much less reflection issues, and much brighter and truer colours. I played Jam With the Band (aka Daigasso! Band Bros) as it was the nearest game to hand, and it uses primary colours for many of the notes you have to play. Those colours came through much truer, and putting it back into my old DS suddenly it became apparent how washed out the colours on the old unit were. Bright coloured games look many times better as a result, and even something that uses a darker palette than most Nintendo games, like Metroid Prime Hunters, suddenly looked like a whole new game.

This wasn’t universal though. Games that were meant to be darker, that had been designed for the old screen, now look far too bright, and so to play Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, I had to turn the brightness down so that the difference between the blacks and the off blacks wasn’t massive and horribly noticeable.

Stylus driven games feel brand new thanks to the improved stylus, which is less of an issue if you had a wider stylus anyway, but now at least you can use a larger stylus that fits neatly into the side of the unit. It’s a good touch too that the stylus is a matching plastic.

Button driven games I’m currently less convinced by. It seems harder to press diagonals on the D-pad (which means that you’re less likely to press them by accident) and for games the require diagonals a lot, like Resident Evil: DS this has been bothering me. Hopefully it’s just me still readjusting to the new D-pad, and for some games it’s going to be a plus, but unless I get used to it, some games are harder to control on the new D-pad even though it feels much nicer all in all. To put things into perspective though, I still prefer this D-pad to the one on the PSP, X-Box 360 and GameCube pads, it’s not bad it just feels like an uncharacteristic slight step backwards.

The unit is certainly more comfortable to hold, a combination of size, weight and nudging the button D-pad and buttons further up the unit so that the weight is more evenly distributed when you’re playing, and I’m glad that the surface is much flatter than before, compared to the strange rises and falls on the old unit.

For GBA games, or indeed if you want to use the DS rumble pack, you’re going to have to live with the overhand. This isn’t really a big deal as it doesn’t come near to getting in the way, no matter how you hold the unit, and for the slight loss in aesthetics you get in the unit itself (and an off center sticky outie cart) the increase in visual quality is a fair trade.

I haven’t yet spent time playing either Warioware Twisted, or a game with the rumble pak to see if those suffer at all for the port being off center, but I doubt they will as it’s only off center slightly.

So all in all, a definite improvement. Games look better. The unit looks better. Battery life is meant to be better (haven’t had it long enough to know if the claims are realistic, but Nintendo are normally on the money about such estimates). Stylus games control better.

That said, there are a few negatives… the GBA port thing, which is a very very tiny issue, and the new D-pad taking some time to adjust to if you’re used to the old one. I know for most games diagonals are less important than the main directions, which could explain the tweak, but games that use them heavily really make it apparent that you have to roll your finger a lot more than you used to in order to get them. I’m still underdoing it.

Nintendo didn’t knock this one out of the stadium then, but they certainly knocked it into the stands. A solid device that takes care of all the old problems of the device major and minor while only introducing a couple of new minor niggles. The combination of looks, practicality and function combined with the available software leaves the DS lite standing tall as the best handheld gaming system I’ve had the pleasure of owning. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s closer to perfect than its peers.