Saturday 16 February 2008

Nintendo DS Lite

The Nintendo DS Lite, like the original Nintendo DS, is a portable gaming system with two vertically tiered screens. On the bottom is a touch screen that allows you to use a stylus or a finger for anything from selecting options to moving characters. There's also a normal face-button layout that allows a more standard method of control. The system plays its own proprietary cartridges (which are somewhere between SD and CompactFlash cards in size), in addition to its near-full backward compatibility with Game Boy Advance (GBA) titles--the system will not play multiplayer modes of GBA games, unfortunately. While DS cartridges are much smaller in capacity than the PSP's UMDs, they play without the often unbearable load times of Sony's proprietary format.

As its name suggests, the Nintendo DS Lite is a much more compactly designed system; at 0.83 by 2.83 by 5.25 inches when closed and weighing in at 7.66 ounces, it's 39 percent smaller and 21 percent lighter than its predecessor. The rounded corners are more finely tapered, and the top and bottom sides are symmetrical, avoiding the underbite-like look of the original's oversize bottom half. It's a much more pocket-friendly system than the original DS. Despite the smaller overall size, though, the trademark twin screens have the same dimensions.

Nintendo DS Lite Video Review