New hype on Nintendo DS : Professor Layton

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a game for the Nintendo DS handheld gameconsole:

I heard about it while I was in San Francisco for GDC. I was told that the game is a new hype on the DS. According to VGCharz it sold close to 1 million times. That accounts for the 45the place on the top sales list. Not yet very impressive but that may change rapidly.
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There happens to be a marketing campaing unleashed probably targetting, GDC and Wondercon attendees on top of, the San Francisco citizens. At the Chinese newyear parade around Union Square, Professor Layton's lookalikes drove around on Segways handing out cards advertising the game.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes

On sidewalks around the Moscone center, several stickers advertised the game:



(See also: Gallery: Professor Layton Takes Over San Francisco)

The game is basically an animated story with a lot of casual puzzles. It's the mix of story telling and causal games that makes me interested in this genre. I guess it must not be that hard to extend such an approach to a transmedia experience with a television series as driver?

Nintendo DS evolves into smartphone for kids

As already mentioned in a previous post about the "Wiivolution" the Nintendo DS Lite gets Voice over IP. I means that if you are in a free hotspot with wireless internet, you can call somebody else for free. It's not yet official by Nintendo as Endgadget reports: Nintendo DS Lite gets VOIP.

Testing the Opera browser on Nintendo DS Lite

As I already mention in a previous post, the Nintendo DS Light (NDS Lite) will be able to do voice over ip (VOIP) as revealed in the article: Latest Pokemon titles morph DS into kid-friendly VoIP phone at Engadget. During my visit to the i-city event, I had some time to test out the Opera Browser for the Nintendo DS Lite. The Opera browser is a 45 euro package that consists out of the usual flash card that has to be inserted into the top slot where normal games are inserted and an extra card that has to be inserted into the front slot that contains extra memory:

Remark that the front slot is a different in a NDS and a NDS Lite. Check carefully for the right version when you would buy the browser.

My experiences using the Opera browser on the NDS Lite:
first of all, the DS lite Wifi connection only support WEP encryption. Since at home I'm using WPA, I could not test it at home. Setting up a Wifi connection is not childplay. In some cases indepth knowledge of the wifi router settings were necessary. This is not something to blaim Nintendo for, as setting up Wifi links is in general a difficult task. Probably only Apple will be able to solve this by using a RFID chip in every Wifi terminal (see their recent patent).
Second observation while browsing is that it's going slow. Something to be expected when you know that the DS Lite runs on a 67MHz ARM9 processor but I hoped more horsepower was made available in the extra front cartridge.
Third reading gmail on the DS Lite is possible although not very elegantly as Google does not support Opera's browser very well. Typing short emails is working fine and definitely an option.
Fourth, on the public hotspot of the local provider Telenet, authentication via username and password must be reentered after each session. Thus closing the DS lite and opening it again ment that the full username and password had to be entered again. I guess this has to do with Telenet infrastructure because I got a popup about a root certificate that could not be stored. I did not test Wifi in a open hotspot without authentication.
Fifth, during browsing it is not possible to play games. The top cartridge must be removed and browsing is then disabled. So no easy switching between reading mail and brain training...
To conclude, even in bright sunshine the screen stays readable. Kudos to Nintendo for this.

To conclude, the Opera browser for NDS Lite does not transform the game console into a functional handheld computer. To me, it looks more like a gimmick.