Why You Want A DSi

You know, I thought I'd be hanging onto my trusty, slightly battered DS Lite for a long time. It still works just fine, and the new Nintendo DSi isn't adding that many new features, right? I can get by without upgrading, surely.

Wrong. I was a little perturbed recently after Nintendo stopped by the office with a couple of DSi units, to give us a full guided tour. Afterward I grudgingly admitted to myself that, yes, I am in fact going to buy one of these things. There's a reason I own every iteration of a Nintendo handheld since the Game Boy Color, and it isn't common sense.

It's because they keep making the darn things better! Here's a list of reasons you may also be unable to resist the DSi upgrade bug next month.

Hardware Improvements. In addition to the slightly bigger screens and integrated cameras, the DSi has a bunch of little hardware changes that improve on basic aspects of the DS' design. The DSi has louder speakers, addressing a common complaint about the DS Lite's sound output. There's a discrete charging light, separate from the power light (which is itself now blue; that ought to make gauging the battery charge a little easier on red/green colorblind individuals like Vinny).

Subtle Usability Tweaks. Were you ever annoyed that you couldn't change the brightness on the DS Lite while you were in a game? Did you ever think it was strange there was no soft reset, forcing you to physically power the unit off and back on to restart a game? Those issues have been addressed, so you can now pop back to the main DSi menu and hot-swap a new game in without powering off.

Streamlined, Wii-like Interface. Once you soft-reset your way back to the DSi's system interface, you'll find a touch-driven application reminiscent of the Wii's channel setup. You can drag the icons for each menu item around into any order you want, and you use the stylus to zoom from one end of the icons to the other. There's a new system settings interface that's basically identical to the one on the Wii, too. Design synergy!

Phun With Photos. OK, so the DSi's camera isn't exactly bleeding-edge technology. But you can do an awful lot of silly, technically impressive things with the photos you take in the picture editor. There are 10 filters you can slap on your photos, like one that lets you pull and stretch parts of the photo around with the stylus, kind of like the giant Mario head at the beginning of Super Mario 64. Another really nifty one lets you do selective color subtraction, so you could take a black and white photo with only reds or blues showing, and then you can change those hues to entirely different ones after the fact.

ExciteBike Music Visualizer! Dude! The DSi's music player is one slick piece of work. It plays songs from your SD card, and there's a bunch of visualizers that you can run on the top screen, and one of them is ExciteBike! It generates the track based on the song's waveform, and then the bikes jump the track. Do I even need to keep talking? OK, how about the sound recorder and editor, which lets you take 10-second clips in through the DSi's microphone, then use really intuitive stylus controls to change the speed and shift the pitch. There's even a pretty good tool for removing vocals from your songs.

DSiWare Looks Awesome. It shouldn't surprise you that the DSiWare store and pricing structure is being patterned after the existing Wii Shop. DSiWare will use the same points system (100 points to $1) as the Wii, though you'll have two separate points totals for the Wii and DSi; you won't be able to purchase games on both services from the same common points wallet. So if you buy a 2000-point card and enter it on your DSi, you'll only be able to buy DSiWare games with those points.

Pricing for DSiWare games will run 200, 500, and 800 points. That will allow Nintendo to sell bite-size little action games and such for next to nothing, and it'll also open up the possibility of non-game applications being made for sale on DSiWare. For instance, we got to see a flip book-style application where you can draw frames, turn them into an animation, and share them with your friends. That's right: They're bringing back Mario Paint.

Nintendo also showed us a tiny, mindbending puzzle game being tentatively called Code that seems like Tetris in math class. The game displayed a grid of numbers, requiring you to align numbers to produce sums of 10, which would clear out those numbers and make room for more. But moving a number doesn't just slide it--it flips it in the direction you're moving it. Since the numbers are displayed in a digital-clock sort of typeface, that means that moving a 2 to the right would flip it horizontally, turning it into a 5. Moving a 7 downward, however, would make it unusable, since an upside-down 7 is obviously not a valid number. DSiWare seems like it will be a great testbed for developers to try all sorts of crazy ideas like this, without incurring the bigger risks of shipping a retail game.

Good job, Nintendo; you win again. Win my money, that is. It's going to be hard to find space for my DS Lite in the drawer, with all those Game Boy Advance SPs and Micros and DS Fats crammed in there, but I'm going to have to try.

And hey, while we're on the subject of the DS: Why not head over to MTV Multiplayer to see the first images from the just-announced new DS Zelda game, Spirit Tracks?