Lessons from the Nintendo DS

(This was originally going to be made for the Verge’s “Next Gen” issue, where they were getting together young writers to pitch something about a piece of tech that means something to us. I sent a pitch, but I never got a reply from them. Now, the issue has been published, and I was left with this draft. So, not wanting all this work to go to waste, I’m posting it here. You can check out Next Gen here: https://www.theverge.com/c/22587391/next-gen-technology-youth-teen-culture)

Technology changes us all as it advances, as we have all seen. Most of the time, it’s something revolutionary, but other times it could just be some piece of junk nobody cares about. In my case, I had something revolutionary that, as I grew older, nobody cared about, but I still loved it nonetheless. It was a handheld game console released in 2004 that would go on to be one of the most sold game consoles on the planet, alongside the PlayStation 2. For me, the Nintendo DS has meant a lot to me as I grow older.

How I got mine.

The first time I saw the device was at a mall in 2008. It wasn’t a big mall, just one floor and a couple of stores, prominently showing the local bookstore with many locations. At the game store there (which soon shut down), there was an ad for a device called the Nintendo DS. I think I asked my parents for one, because a few weeks later, I would get an Onyx Nintendo DS with two games: Learn Math, an edutainment title; and Drawn to Life, probably one of my favourite games on the DS. I remember how much my dad would push me to play Learn Math, maybe because of how much I struggled with it later on. Dad got one himself, a Cobalt one with Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword.

One day, Dad came to me with a cartridge that said “R4”. It had an SD card slot, and it was made to play whatever game you wanted on your DS. I did have Learn Math, as well as a couple other games on it.(One I remember was a game from Natsume, which had a particularly cute icon. It looked like a cat or something.) A lot of the games on it ended up getting switched with others, which would be the games I mainly played. As for what games I had, there was Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros., but I do remember Fossil League (kind of rare) and the many movie-based games I got.

Eventually, Dad got Mom a DS, a pink one that had an R4 cart, mainly with Hello Kitty games. With this, Mom discovered PictoChat, and she would invite me to have conversations over it. I would lose the stylus to my DS, rendering it almost useless. Mom later stopped using it, and I would be the one to own it, and I used Mom’s stylus. As for the pink DS, we lost it after we moved. The Nintendo DS was what stuck with me after we moved houses, switching from owning a house to renting one to save money.

In 4th grade, Dad changed some of the games on it to include Pokemon Diamond, since I was really getting into Pokemon at the time. And thus began a 7-year journey to beat the Elite Four. My dad even got me the original Nintendo Power strategy guide to help.

When COVID hit, I rekindled my interest in the DS, much to my parent’s confusion. It lasted until we moved again that I would power them up and beat the Elite Four. After that…. nothing, really. I lost interest again as we moved again and my interests moved elsewhere, and I’d soon get a job and switch schools.

In 2022, I was almost ready to graduate, and realizing how little hobbies or particular interests I had, got into retro games again. Discovering the SD card in the R4, I learned how to install games and skins on my old R4 cart, even learning that it was a clone called the R4 Ultra, which isn’t as compatible with games as the original R4 cart, which is why Okamiden, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, and Solatorobo: Red the Hunter never worked on the cart. Maybe I’ll get a new cart.

But at the same time, I discovered many games that would grow on me and become my favourites, including Phoenix Wright, Nanostray, Metal Slug 7, Electroplankton among others. I also downloaded some homebrews including Fireworlds, Colors! and Animanatee.

Now, it’s hinge is broken and “fixed” with a rubber band. I still play with it today.

Lesson 1: Newer Isn’t Always Better

I have had my DS for almost 14 years, and every time I picked it up, I found myself invested and enjoying myself. I’d go to a friend’s house and they’d have something newer, but it wasn’t as fun. It looked impressive, yes, but not as much as anything on the Nintendo DS. Minecraft is an example. It’s a fun game, yes, but it doesn’t connect with me as much as a game on the DS.

So, you might be thinking that I’m a total DS stan, and if it’s not on the DS, then it’s not fun, I bet you’re thinking. Not exactly, as there are some games that I like on the PC like the Touhou Project games, not to mention that I am trying to get emulators on my DS to play games from the SNES and Genesis. Now yes, they are much older consoles, but overall, I find them a lot less overwhelming, and I can attribute my interest in retro games to my 5th grade science fair project I did with my dad, who used it as a way to explain what a computer file is.

But at the same time, it used to make me feel bad that I didn’t have the newest games and technology. It made me feel out of touch that I didn’t have the PlayStation, Xbox, or the Switch, or even the Wii U. (we had the Wii and the Dreamcast, but those are long gone after we moved.)

But, as I grew older, and I would get a job and start being responsible for what I buy, I still found that old DS to be the most entertaining thing I owned. I don’t play anything newer, which is why I don’t have as much of a fondness for Minecraft, Fortnite, or even Among Us, which I tried playing, but I grew bored of it.

Nevertheless, I feel that the Nintendo DS made me less inclined to be “in touch” with what is new, and it allowed me to explore what I wanted to explore. I grew to enjoy independent and foreign films more than the overwhelming epics that Hollywood distributes, as well as enjoy music I would actually find enjoyable.

Lesson 2: Help with Communication

Like I said, Mom used PictoChat to have a conversation with me, and PictoChat was cited by her to have helped me with my communication disorder.

When I was young, I was reading bilingually at 3rd grade level, but my articulation and word retrieval was very much compromised. Speaking was difficult for me, and it still is. But Mom, using PictoChat and its writing system, allowed for me to form complete sentences. Not only that, but it allowed for me to improve my verbal articulation and my ability to form sentences easily.

I do remember Mom still trying to do so a lot later, during the time when I lost my stylus, and thus I would try to find some kind of alternative that worked the same as the stylus. But, of course, Mom would let me have her DS and I finally got a stylus, which I still use to this day.

Lesson 3: The Homebrew Community

Now, this would happen a lot later on, but for me, homebrew was a big part of my childhood. Not doing it, but watching it in action. I would witness it’s use on the Wii with The Homebrew Channel and the many USB Loaders made for the Wii like GX and Configurable. But seeing what homebrew community can do, as well as seeing what it has to offer to make the Nintendo DS do so many things, allowed for me to tap into the powers that can be used with the DS’ hardware and software capabilities, as well as the capabilities of the R4 cart and make my Nintendo DS into a purposeful device that can often do more than play video games.

Two good examples are the installation of drawing programs and emulation. With drawing programs, I installed Colors!, a painting program that utilised a color wheel and some customisable brushes. It’s a pretty good drawing program for the DS, so much so it would evolve to being ported to the iPhone, 3DS, and the Switch as Colors Live. I also got Animanatee, which allowed me to brush up on my animation skills. Here are a couple I managed to export.

I did try other apps as well, such as FlickBook and a personal organiser application. I even tried seeing if they could record my voice, but they always did it in a limited sound bite and the quality wasn’t like Electroplankton(trust me, that might as well be the only way to record your voice without it sounding awful.)

As for homebrew games, the only one that I could find (for now) and that I actually managed to get running enjoyably is Fireworlds, a puzzle-platformer that utilises shapes and particle systems to make the levels.

Needless to say, I had fun with these, even with how crude and sometimes outdated they were. Animanatee and Colors! in particular allowed me to create animations and doodle wherever I was, which allowed me to spill my thoughts out without having to waste paper.

Conclusion

I have had my DS for about 14 years, and now, I am planning on getting my first smartphone on my own, since I need it for transportation like Uber, Google Maps, and other apps that can help make things a bit easier since we are becoming more reliant on our smartphones. For a while, I have been using flip phones, cheapo MP3 players, and a digital camera for everything and now, I have it all in one device. Games, music, pictures, and so much more.

But I think that using separate devices for separate tasks, as well as having to deal with how clunky and old-fashioned they can be, is somewhat of a discipline for me. Waiting for a song to download, trying to take a picture without glare, dealing with something that you cannot update or improving yourself to finally get past it so you can never deal with it again.

That last one was what the DS helped me do, improve myself so I can stop dealing with things that I didn’t want to do anymore. The progressiveness of games like Drawn to Life, Mario and Luigi, Pokemon, New Super Mario Bros. and Phoenix Wright allowed for me to move forward, just like how I live my life. I quit my job at McDonald’s to move on to another, less stressful job. I lost connections and formed new ones. You can always start a new life from a clean slate…. or just save and hit the power button off when things don’t go as you planned and then turn it on to try again.