Things My DS Needs

I've had such things wandering through my mind lately, and I thought I'd share them with you. Also, I wanted to get them written down before I went to sleep.

While the Nintendo DS is a pretty awesome piece of equipment with an equally stellar lineup of soft-ware, I do have a few gripes with it. Mainly, that the home screen needs to be worked on a little. On my PSP, all I have to do is hit "Home" and I'm back to the home screen, no problem. For the DS, I have to restart the whole system. This just feels harder and more difficult than it should be. Using only the buttons available to me, and not adding in any new hardware, I thought that maybe Nintendo could change the functionality of the power button so that a hold means power down, while a tap means go to home screen. Or, to ensure that you don't accidentaly throw yourself out of a game, you could have it be some weird control scheme, like "Start, Select, L, R, Power" all at once. Of course, this is ALL optional, and you can turn it to the way it is now or not using a selection in the options menu.

A battery indicator would be nice. While you obviously can't have one in the middle of a game screen, you could thrown one .... I'm retarded... there IS one on the home screen. Sorta. Anyway, okay, kudos to that. Moving on.

The Game Boy Advance emulation needs an upgrade. In addition to the current "GBA on top screen" and "GBA on bottom screen," you could add a new one: "GBA on top, options on bottom." The options menu would be a way to use the touch screen for accessing a few of the DS's features in the game. Adjusting the screen light would be one thing. Returning to the home screen could be another. Another could be used to give you a semi-analog control, like the one used for Super Mario 64 DS, a circular sort of control like the old Genesis game pad. The other thing that needs fixing about the GBA emulation is multiplayer. How hard, honestly, would it be to use the DS's wireless technology to play against other GBA-playing DS's, or even the GBA's own wireless transmitter. Or perhaps even creating some sort of online GBA multiplayer feature. The possibilities are endless.

Anyway, there's my suggestions. Truth be told I'll bet my minds just prolly fried from all the work I've been doing in iTunes. I rebuilt my main playlist, with almost twice as many songs as I had. I'm at 216, which reads as a full gig according to iTunes. w00t. Now I've gotta pick the songs to put me to sleep, and then... go to sleep. ^_^