The Video Game Revue

GBA vs. DS

Whew, I played a good three hours of Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance this afternoon, and needless to say, it's awesome. The only GBA Castlevania game that I'd played before was Circle of the Moon, which I'd gotten reasonably far in before giving up out of boredom. That was a long time ago, so I can't say for certain exactly why I stopped playing it. I remember feeling that Circle of the Moon was good, but certainly not great--which is also how I felt about Golden Sun at around the same time. Sometime I'd like to revisit those games. I would definitely have felt different about the GameBoy Advance back then if they'd had stuff like the GBA SP, WarioWare Inc., and Zelda: Minish Cap. Anyway, seeing as how Circle of the Moon was the only Castlevania for GBA that I had, when the Castlevania "Double Pack" for GBA came out, I was first in line to snag a copy. Between that and Final Fantasy VI Advance, my GBA is seeing a lot of action these days. And I still haven't even cracked open my copy of Riviera.

The funny thing about it, though, is that although the GBA is certainly a solid hand-held platform, the Nintendo DS surely kicks the crap out of it. I am entirely serious when I say that this is not something which I had suspected at all. Back when I first caught news of the Nintendo DS, I was immediately put off by the idea of the dual-screens and the touch screen, and I stand by my words when I say that these doubts were well founded. It didn't seem like anybody could convincingly explain what would actually make the dual screens a good idea, nor could anybody offer up a really sound explanation of how a touch screen was going to be a useful gaming interface. I had written the whole production off as a novelty act, and died a little inside to realise that Nintendo was high off of the success of the GBA and were out to make asses of themselves. The GBA was such a simple idea: a SNES in your pocket (although minus two controller buttons, for reasons that I still can't fathom.) You can't go wrong with an idea like that. The Nintendo DS seemed nothing but wrong.

As it turns out, the Nintendo DS has three killer features that I didn't expect:
- It's capable of playing Nintendo 64 generation games, so in the same sense that a GBA is a SNES in your pocket, a DS is a N64 in your pocket.
- It's much more affordable than a PSP.
- It seems to have stolen development attention away from the GameCube.

Now when the DS first came out with its snazzy remake of Mario 64, I had doubts about the playability of Mario 64 without a better analog input than the touch screen. I still feel that these doubts are quite reasonable--that the touch screen is not a proper replacement for an analog joystick--but I'd sort of missed the larger picture that even though Mario 64 might not be as great on the DS as it was on the N64, other games that don't rely so much on analog input (Mario Kart, Resident Evil) could be ported very successfully to the DS, and original titles (Nintendogs, Electroplankton, Metroid Pinball) would still have hot N64 quality graphics in a handheld. Sure, it's not a perfect replica of a N64, but it's close enough.

I'm getting distracted here with hardware-centric talk, which is just plain wrong when one is talking about the success of a console platform. The simple fact is that the hardware has very little to do with it--it's that games like Mario Kart DS, Nintendogs, and Metroid Pinball are available at all that astounds me. Sure, the DS has much better graphics than the GBA, and worse graphics than the PSP, but all that really matters is that Nintendo DS has some totally killer games. The GBA has many more original titles available for it than the SNES ever had. I'm not as certain on how the numbers on the Nintendo DS stack up against the Nintendo 64, but I can already say this: there nearly as many Nintendo DS games that I badly want to play than there ever were N64 games of as much appeal, and the number is closing fast. The N64 had Mario 64, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, Goldeneye, and Zelda 64. The Nintendo DS has Mario Kart DS, Metroid Pinball, Advance Wars DS, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, and new potential hits arriving every month. The DS also has backwards compatibility with GBA games; if only the N64 had been able to accept SNES carts.

I was really pissed off when Lunar: Dragon Song and Advance Wars: Dual Strike were announced, because I felt that these were games that belonged on the GBA. And I dare say that I was right; I didn't find that either game did much on the DS that couldn't have been done effectively on the GBA other than soak up the extra screen real estate, which I have to admit isn't a bad thing at all. What is bad, of course, is that Lunar: Dragon Song ended up sucking so badly for no good reason, but at least the Advance Wars legacy was carried forward respectably. As a fan of the Lunar series and Advance Wars series, I felt like I was being bullied into buying into the DS platform just to keep up on games that had no business being there. And I will say that if the story had ended there, I would have hated the DS more than ever.

Thankfully, the DS isn't about exclusive games that are on the DS for the sole sake of suckering gamers into buying one. The DS actually has original games that are very DS-like in nature, which is to say that they just wouldn't be the same on any other system: Nintendogs, Kirby Canvas Curse, Metroid Pinball, and Electroplankton are ideal examples of this. And Mario Kart DS--oh Mario Kart DS, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways... The point is, and always has been, that Nintendo DS has awesome games. So awesome. I could not have predicted that. And I haven't even got my grubby little mitts on Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow yet. Actually, the point is that the Nintendo DS has a lot of character, and only the best of consoles ever develop a lot of character.

Say, did I say something about the Nintendo DS stealing developer attention away from the GameCube? I did! Wait a sec while I grab the link for the press release from Nintendo... ha ha, I'm just yanking your chain: there's no such press release, so far as I know. But that doesn't mean that what I'm saying isn't happening. I hadn't noticed it outright until recently, but the GameCube has been conspicuously quiet lately. What new GameCube games have been out lately? Fire Emblem? Super Mario Strikers? I took a pass on both of those. For some reason, the lineup of exciting new releases for GameCube seems to have ground to a shrieking halt. I haven't "needed" a GameCube game since the likes of Pikmin 2 and Resident Evil 4, and the next huge thing on the horizon is, of course, Zelda: Twilight Princess. I realised this at the same time as it dawned on me that all of the gaming budget that I used to spend on GameCube games has been going towards DS games instead. In fact, not only am I spending the money on DS games instead of GameCube games, but I'm spending my play time there as well. So while it's not an official thing--to the best of my knowledge--that Nintendo has ditched the GameCube to focus on the DS, it certainly seems that way to me.

The overall effect that the success of the DS has had on me is profound. For one thing, I've never done as much hand-held gaming as I do now. In fact, I've never before had such a deep feeling of hand-held gaming being as worthwhile as console or PC gaming. Secondly, my love and respect for Nintendo is definitely the highest that it has been since the N64 flopped almost a decade ago. I don't know if I will ever again love Nintendo as much as I did back in the NES and SNES days when they were pushing the envelope of the console gaming industry light-years ahead (and, I might add, in a way that the PlayStation, XBox, and Nintendo fans of today simply cannot understand), but at least I have some confidence now that Nintendo does have enough creative juice to do something worthwhile with the Revolution. The glory days of the 8-bit and 16-bit generations may be long gone, but this is still a good time to be a Nintendo fan, and I'm finally getting that.

As for the GBA, as much as Nintendo insisted that the DS was not meant as a replacement for it, we all knew that was just a pipe dream if not an outright lie. The way I see it, either the DS was going to flop, or the GBA was going to be rendered obsolete (or, I was afraid, something inbetween would happen and both platforms would be crippled.) The Nintendo DS is a huge hit, and although I'm still interested in GBA games, I don't get half as hyped up about an awesome GBA game as I do about a good DS game: I'm still looking forward to Final Fantasy V and VI Advance, but I'm way more excited about Resident Evil DS and Final Fantasy III DS.

Looking back, I can scarcely believe that things turned out this way.

posted by Parappa @ 6:42 PM