Is it possible to have too much store credit?
I had no intention of buying a DS. I thought the launch line-up was lackluster, and at the time, my Nintendo fandom was starting to wear a bit thin, as the GameCube lineup was getting even thinner. One day, however, I took a quarter of my video game collection (a few old consoles, a plethora of older games, and a few newer games) into a local trade-in shop, expecting to get around $60 or $70 in trade. When they told me that my collection amounted to over $200 in trade, I was suddenly stunned with how to spend the money.
I looked around for some new GameCube or Xbox games, but nothing really jumped out at me. Finally, I remembered that a new Nintendo handheld had been released a month or two prior, but as a guy who had never really played Game Boy as a kid, and hadn't touched his GBA much at all lately, I wasn't frothing at the mouth to get it.
I started looking at the launch lineup. Mario 64 wasn't in stock, and the only games they had that looked tempting were Madden 2005, The Urbz: Sims in the City, and Feel the Magic. I ended up picking up Madden along with the DS and a new GameCube game.
After I got the DS home, I tried out Madden and really hated it; the controls were awkward, and the graphics were ugly. The Metroid Prime Hunters demo, however, impressed me. The game wasn't that much fun, but it was clear when I played that demo that the DS was going to be capable of some fairly new types of games – for a handheld at least.
Madden went back to the store a few days later, and my DS collected dust for months until a friend of mine mentioned casually how much fun he was having with his system. I looked at him in shock, and asked him what, exactly, it was that he was playing. He said he had picked up the newest Kirby game, and a puzzle game called Meteos.
Those two games were brilliant, especially compared to what had come before on the handheld, and I played them endlessly. I still don't know that any action game has lived up to the potential of touch control as Kirby did, and the wireless play of Meteos was a hit at our weekly poker night, after the cards were dropped.
Looking back now, it's amazing to think about all of the fantastic games that have come on the system after such a meager first 6 months. The DS has come of age, and as we move on into the 3D era of Nintendo handhelds, it's very easy to look back at the DS and think that this may have been one of the finest game libraries ever produced.
