Today, I walked out of a lecture for the very first time. Now, I didn't do this because I was bored or because I knew the content of the lecture by heart. No, I did this because I had a stomach ache from hell. I'm not quite sure what pushed it over the edge, could have been last night's Wetherspoons dinner, or this morning's uber cold ice tea I had. Whilst walking up the hill with Stu, it felt like it was doing cartwheels and this didn't stop once I'd gotten to the lecture. After 30 minutes, I was in complete agony and had to leave. Oh well...
My DS finally arrived after little over one week of waiting, and I'd been slapped for customs. In total, the graphite black unit cost me £117.21 including shipping from New York and tax.
After the painstaking initial 3 hour charge, I booted it all up only to have it appear in it's native language of Japanese. It took me a further 20 minutes of almost blind fumbling about before I arrived at the language options to switch everything to English. The PSP in this respect is far more import friendly since the first thing it asks you is which language you'd like to boot into when you switch it on for the very first time. The charger for the PSP is also multi-voltage so you just need to plug a pin adapter to get it working as opposed to the DS needing a stepdown converter or a UK charger.
The colour of the DS isn't quite as black as you'd expect it to be, more a gun-metal or dark grey. Photos of mine can be seen here and here.
Sadly, mine already has 1 dead sub-pixel. The blue one is permanently lit but much like the dead pixels on my PSP, it only becomes visible on black or very dark screens while it's on. Mike and I were discussing this and commented that dead pixels never really seemed to be a problem up until recently. It seems manufacturers have cut down on QC on the assembly line to reduce costs and simply have a better returns policy in place. It is far cheaper not to have every unit roll out perfectly and having moved production to cheaper labour sources such as China (previously, all Nintendo hardware was made in Japan), the end result is a higher ratio of units with minor imperfections. We both agreed that we'd happily pay a bit more for something if it guaranteed us a high quality product, being somewhat of an investment. Sadly, the general public and consumer electionics usually means giving them close to what they want at the lowest cost to them and the manufacturers...
Hardware wise, there isn't any difference between the DS's from different locales. They all seem to play identically and I've not noticed any difference between my Japanese one and my friend's US one I played on a few months ago. The screen is head and shoulders better than that of the SP; GBA titles all look vivid and rich in colour as opposed to their grainy and washed out presentation on the former machine. Screen quality, the PSP still trounces the DS; higher resolution for starters and much tighter packed pixels simply can't be beat. The touch screen still scares the shit out of me for fear of damaging it during more frantic games. I want to put a screen protector on it, but it's already less sharp when compared with the top screen, doing so would only cause it to become even more unfocused. The stock stylus is also terrible, far too short and my hand seriously begins to ache after a good session of Feel the Magic. I've ordered the Hori extending stylus from Play-Asia for Mike and myself, we gamers have to do what we can to prevent RSI don't we?
As portable gaming machines, I'm still heavily in favour of the PSP simply because of it's input methods. It is far easier to pull out the PSP, play it, put it away again on a busy train etc than it is with the DS, which requires that you pull it out, open it up, pull out the stylus and so on. A lot of the touch screen games also require far more accuracy and concentration which really can't be provided whilst you're on the go. Even mini-games designed specifically for this purpose fail somewhat in this light.
All said and done, I am happy with my purchase and having one in a colour other than bog-standard silver makes it a bit more special than the norm. The recently released sales figures for the Japanese market pitches the DS at 1.8 million units sold since launch, with the PSP slightly behind at 1.09 million. This will soon balance out I imagine once the PSP distribution stablises, since it is still highly sought after in Japan and many places in Akihabara are still charging inflated prices for it.
Whilst we're still on the subject of handheld gaming, I received the uber rare Japanese PSP demo disc yesterday. Featuring several properly encoded movies trailers and music videos encoded at the PSP's native resolution (480 x 270), they look nothing short of amazing. I previously thought all my self encoded videos at max quality looked stunning, now I simply feel they look a bit crap in comparison. As I said to Khang yesterday, I could take off the screen filter which would increase the sharpness but then he mentioned that it also proves how good the UMD movies look even with the filter applied. The Naruto movie trailer only makes my anticipation and impatience for it all the more unbearable...
Not really watched too much anime these last few days; a couple episodes of Yakitate Japan, the usual Naruto and Gundam SEED Destiny but that's pretty much it. Ah! My Goddess is boring me stupid but it seems Skuld will be introduced with episode 13 so it could get beter...
I don't think there's anything else of interest in my life currently to report on other than getting another first for a marketing presentation which I worked my ass off on. Also need to decide on modules for next year, consumer behaviour and psychology is the gem of the bunch from the brief look I've had, should be very enjoyable. I hope.
