Nintendo DS: launch in Oxford Street

The media launch of the Nintendo DS in London on Wednesday was a sedate affair. The police cordons on Oxford Street were there because of a bomb scare, not to hold back any crowds gathering around the Virgin Megastore. Perhaps the sobering possibility of getting blown apart at any second discouraged any hooplah, but the four DS handhelds bolted to steel stands in the Virgin Megastore went largely untouched by the TV crews present.

The Nintendo DS has baffled many Nintendo fans. They expected a more predictable evolution from the Gameboy Advance, an odd two-screened device which Edge magazine once dubbed “a chimera, a mythical beast made up of a peculiar oddment of parts.”

So what’s the new Nintendo like to play with? Our first impression was that its plastic clamshell case was so hard it probably would survive a nearby explosion. It may be tough, but it not's pretty, and you’re not going to feel proud playing Super Mario on the train. There’s a Speak-And-Spell utilitarianism to the styling and you can’t quite jam it into your jeans pocket - but then the original Gameboy was not exactly slim, and that did just fine.

The gaming experience itself is unique. The Nintendo’s dual LCDs with touchscreen capability really does provide a novel way to play. We tried out Wario Ware Touched!, a series of quirky mini-games designed to showcase the new touchscreen interface. Someone had yanked the tiny DS styluses off most of the demo stands, but -- as you can with some PDAs -- we used our fingernail as a makeshift pen.

Wario Ware Touched! is as daft and surreal as the name suggests. We popped a bunch of balloons, sketched a little bridge for a stick man to walk across, bludgeoned rabbits as they poked their heads out of warrens, and attacked a man in a bunny suit. A series of weird, psychedelic mini-games with no clear meaning, each bewildered us briefly but was replaced so quickly that we had no time to wonder why we had just given a pixy a haircut with our finger. Few would survive individual scrutiny but when delivered in an unrelenting frenzy they have an undeniable, if slightly demented, appeal.

The game does a good job of showing of the units bright, clear screens and very accurate touchscreen control system. The external design doesn't impress, but the platform has real potential for interesting game play . We’ll be reviewing the Nintendo DS in more depth soon. -CS