By Plagiarize , 14th February 3:32 am
First of all, let’s get something straight, worthy or not, the DS Lite is no SP. The original GBA had one major flaw: Its screen. Short of cracking open the device and manually installing a front light (no easy process) you were pretty much stuck waving your GBA next to a light to see what the hell was going on. That or buying a clip on light that needed batteries of its own, and made the device less portable and more cumbersome.
While many complained about the removal of a standard headphone jack, overall the SP was welcomed with open arms because not only did it fix the crushing flaw with the system, by adding in a front lit LCD screen (not as good as backlit for colours, but plenty good for seeing what’s going on), it had three other major improvements. It was smaller, it had a clamshell design that protected the screen much better than on the original, and it had a rechargeable battery, with better battery life than you got on the old unit with standard AAs.
The only other real complaints heard about the SP was that it had been work in progress before the GBA even launched. Nintendo as always were just tweaking and waiting until they could launch the unit profitably at a price people would pay.
The DS Lite is no such band aid. It addresses no flaw that the original system had, arguably because the original system had no glaring flaw. It makes the device smaller and lighter, at a small cost to practicality as GBA games will now stick out a bit. It makes the stylus bigger, certainly a welcome and wanted change. It improves the battery life and offers 4 different brightnesses to the screens. The same highly rated backlighting technology that the GBA Micro and more recently, the SP have been given. It’s not as big a deal for the DS though, which was already backlit… and while the battery life at equal brightness has been upped by a few hours, at its highest brightness, the battery life is slightly less. So, if there’s no design flaw that needs addressing, why go to the trouble of relaunching the system with a new design given that the old one was doing so well?
» Read all of “Why For Art Though Lite?“…
By Plagiarize , 28th January 7:06 am
How hard is it to take a good screenshot?
I’m a reviewer, not that you’d know it around these parts, and when I review demos or games, what I try to do, is to record video of gameplay, and then I can go through that video to pick out the showpiece screenshots. I know something cool looking happened a couple of minutes in, and I can pick the frame where it looks coolest. It’s not always about things looking cool either, if you’re trying to show a specific glitch, or what have you, it’s much the same.
» Read all of “Screenshot Hall of Shame“…
By Plagiarize , 27th January 4:28 am
A lot of focus is put on how America reacts to anti game crusading (or pro family crusading as I’m sure they’d prefer me to call it). My bizarre debate with Jack Thompson got linked left right and center, but what is angering me today is pretty simple.
Britain has exactly what Jack Thompson et al claim they’re trying to achieve over here. This is something I’ve brought up before I know, but for anyone not familiar with this, I’m going to detail it again.
An independent group of censors rate videogames that are seen to have violent or sexual content in. Those ratings are legally enforced. It is illegal to sell a video game that has been rated for a given age to anyone younger than that age.
Pretty simple. I have no problems with the suggestions of a similar system here in the US (though that suggestion of adding 50% tax to violent video games as at least one state is proposing is abhorrent in so many ways not least because it punishes the people the mature adults that no study has been able to suggest have any adverse reactions to the games) for the reasons that should be plain to see.
» Read all of “What is wrong with Britain?“…
By Plagiarize , 1st January 1:52 am
So it’s finally here. It’s on my desk and it’s quietly humming away to itself as I type. The X-Box 360. The console that Microsoft built, finally free of the identity crisis the last one had.
Of what do I speak? Well, the X-Box just wanted to be a console with a hardrive. A powerful one for the time, but just a console none the less. Oh I’m not going to start spitting out hyperbole don’t worry. Let’s just say I found the console to be worth every penny, though not perfect.
I honestly think that the 360 is an important milestone in console design… for the interface.
» Read all of “Interfacing“…
By Plagiarize , 18th December 6:57 am
F**k yeah.
Blog Feed