Nintendo appears to have taken a leaf out of Apple’s book and announced a slimmed down ‘Lite’ version of their best selling Nintendo DS. A fully featured DS2 has been announced by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata today with a March 2nd release though there has been no confirmed date for the US and European territories.
"Also featuring brighter screens, Nintendo DS Lite will launch in Japan in March. Nintendo DS Lite will be less than two-thirds the size of the original Nintendo DS and more than 20 percent lighter."
2006 is gonna be a lot of fun. With the scheduled release of Sony’s PS3 and Nintendo’s Revolution towards the back end of next year they are gonna join an already crowded market vying for the space in you living room. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 launched in November and is undoubtedly the hot Christmas present this year thanks to a combination of a technically impressive games console, lack of direct competition and massive shortage of units. This machine has undoubted gaming potential but Microsoft’s attempt at offering a device that keeps everyone happy was never gonna happen. Short of ideas as an innovative media centre or even as a central hub for all your AV devices there still leaves a big gap in a potentially very lucrative market.
Podcasting, a format to publish rich media like audio and ultimately video by use of RSS, has come of age in 2005 with an estimated world wide audience of 4.8m people compared with just 800k in 2004. As main stream media giants begin to see the benefits of this emerging technology and bandwidth becomes more readily available (broadband internet access has overtaken dial up in the UK for the first time this year), using RSS perhaps combined with bit torrent will become the formats to publish video. For now I am enjoying this, not so amateur, radio that is easily downloaded directly to my PC and walkman.
It appears all our juvenile hopes have come true, well nearly all! Mario Kart DS is a winner and it now looks as though I am gonna have to buy a DS now as well.
“IGN 95
It’s hard to imagine how Nintendo’s going to improve on what they’ve done for this stunning portable rendition. There’s so much gameplay and depth in this design, moreso than the series has ever had in the past.
Even if it’s about three weeks after the US launch and a good week after the UK, I’ve just started playing GTA:LCS and first impressions are really good.
Every bit of tech, format or device needs a ‘killer app’ and the PSP as advanced as it is, is no different. This aint no shrunk down baby GTA, this is (appears) to be the real deal. The graphics appear to be real slick and the gameplay is really refined. This could have been just another PS2 port with soul destroying load times (Midnight Club 3 anyone?) but Rockstar appears to have gone to town and done the business on this one. (You can tell its the festive build up, GTA for the PSP and Mario Kart for the DS)
