Pedro found a DS easily, and it became a beloved travel companion.
Unfortunately, my story lacks any real drama, launch day excitement, or even limbs and dignity being lost in the name of a new handheld. I literally just walked into a Wal-Mart, grabbed a unit and went home to play it. It's as simple as that.
However, even if the lineup of games was weak, remaining that way for nearly a year, I still enjoyed the hell out of my first DS. I had worked hard as a Data Entry guy at a Super Market to save up and buy a system, which made it a far more valuable and important purchase.
Using the touch screen to control Samus in the Metroid Prime Hunters demo felt very natural and weird at the same time. Even if the game itself was very old by the time it was ported to the DS, Super Mario 64 DS was still a fun game, especially the mini-games that used the DS's features in unique ways. I actually spent far more time in those mini-games than in the main game itself. While I missed being able to distort Mario's face in three dimensions, the ability to manipulate drawings in real time on the main menu screen was just as impressive.
A week later I got Feel the Magic, which was a rather surreal game, and loved it. It’s unfortunate that the series only received one sequel and Sega didn’t do much with it after that. It was a surprisingly captivating love story with fantastic music and some solid gameplay.
The multiplayer component of the DS also yielded a lot of fantastic memories. One time my friends and I went to Montreal for summer vacation and nearly all of us brought our DS systems, so whenever we had a downtime in the trip, we would just sit around and play whatever game we had at the moment. At the hotel room, we had epic, eight-player matches of Bomberman DS, and we would insert random jokes and references to shows like Red vs. Blue or Doctor Who while playing. When we attended the Fantasia Film Festival during the trip, we would play Puyo Pop Fever while waiting in line. Finally, we went to this bar that was so loud that we couldn’t talk to each other, so we used PictoChat in order to engage in conversation as well as be immature with rude imagery.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any Wi-Fi, so I couldn’t play online DS games for a long while. I missed out on online Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing, despite those being highly anticipated games on my end.
I didn't get many games during the first year of the DS, but I still had a lot of fun with it, and it showed a promise that would materialize years later. I expect the 3DS to have an impact in the same way that the DS did that one fateful day in 2004.
