Library Dive: No Steve, everyone likes the stylus.
10 DS games that demand the real hardware
Emulators are a blessing for game preservation, no-one does as much for keeping our history alive as pirates.
But there is one family of games they just can't make you experience on a PC: the ones built entirely around the beautiful weirdness of the Nintendo DS. Two screens, a stylus, a microphone (you were expected to shout into in public), and a hinge that turned the whole thing into a paperback novel. Play these on anything else that the original hardware, you can only get a glimpse of what they were, but not the full experience.
So if you have been on the hype train buying an Ayn Thor, Retroid Pocket Duo or an Anbernic DS, here is something for you. I dove into my library and pulled the DS games off my shelf that genuinely need the original hardware input.
The World Ends With You
Most RPGs ask you to control a party, one person at a time. The World Ends With You makes you control two people at the same time, on two different screens, with two completely different control schemes, while your brain files a formal complaint. You slash and swipe as Neku on the touchscreen while punching in combos for his (ever changing) partner up top with the d-pad. At first it feels like an exercise of patting head and rubbing your belly in the middle of a stylish Shibuya turf war.
And that's the whole point, because Neku starts as a headphone-wearing grump (relatable) who refuses to connect and rely on anyone. The game force-teaches you teamwork through your own two thumbs. Jupiter really managed to put Neku's character arc into your hands, which is insanely clever. The later single-screen ports are fine... They are not the original vision. And this is one of the DS's best games, bar none.
Why it's worth a revisit:
It's the rare game where learning the cumbersome terrible controls is the narrative character growth.
Trauma Center: Under the Knife
Be honest, don't you want to be a handsome surgeon doctor saving lives with a scalpel? You stitch, drain, suture and laser your way through patients while the timer counts down and your stylus hand slowly develops a pulse of its own. The stress is insane, every time you twitch under pressure, patients die.
And then, somewhere around the third operation, the story throws medical realism out the window and goes full soap opera, man-made killer diseases included. Oh, and your doctor can slow down time by concentrating really hard. Atlus, I want to thank you for Trauma Center, it is glorious. No button layout, or the later Wii ports, will ever replicate dragging a scalpel across that tiny bottom screen with sweaty fingers.
Why it's worth a revisit:
No other game has ever made me feel personally responsible for a fictional pancreas under attack from spiders.
Contact
Contact is one of the weirdest DS games I own, (and I own Little Red Riding Hoods Zombie BBQ). On the top screen, a pixel-art professor stranded on a spaceship talks directly to you, the actual human holding the DS. On the bottom screen, a kid named Terry runs around a colorful RPG world under your control. Terry needs to help the Professor fix his ship, you need to help Terry do it.
Your DS is the device linking the two worlds, and the game loves to break the fourth wall about it, sometimes charming, sometimes a little creepy. As an Action RPG it's not the systems best, yeah, whatever. But as an experiment it's fantastic, and unmistakably the work of Grasshopper Manufacture. Contact is my #1 hidden gem on the system.
Why it's worth a revisit:
It's a game where the DS itself plays a role in the story, and that only works on a real DS.
Nintendogs
Despite being one of THE system sellers, Nintendogs is a tough game to hype all these years later. There's no story, it never ends, you just have a dog and you pet the dog. And yet scratching a low-poly puppy behind the ears with a plastic stick is still weirdly heartwarming. You teach them tricks by talking into the microphone, which means an entire generation sat on public buses whispering "sit" to a Nintendo DS with complete and total seriousness.
I am still puzzled Nintendo never did something with the series after the ok 3DS outing that added occasional cats. However, I still recommend trying it out today: They might be low-poly boys, but they are the best boys 🐕
Why it's worth a revisit:
The best emotional dependence since starving your crying Tamagotchi in a drawer.
Elite Beat Agents (and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan)
A washed-up baseball star has to fight a fire-breathing golem in a theme park, a weather reporter needs the rain gone so she can go on a picnic with her son, and the Earth is about to be wiped out by aliens. There is only one solution to this: three men in black suits who solve every crisis known to humanity by dancing at it. Elite Beat Agents (and its Japanese predecessors Ouendan 1 & 2) put you in charge of tapping, sliding and spinning to the beat on the touchscreen, cheering on people to greatness.
EBA is already fun because it's silly, but iNiS genuinely invented a rhythm game that felt physical in a way other rhythm games never did, like pressing and following soundwaves as they happen. If you want it harder and stranger, import Ouendan. If you want it in English with extra pathos (and mediocre covers of Avril Lavigne and the likes), EBA is for you.
Why it's worth a revisit:
It invented a genius tactile rhythm genre that people are still playing in open source to this day, google Osu! if you don't believe me.
Cooking Mama
Many have dismissed Cooking Mama, and I did too. Cracking virtual eggs with a stylus while a beaming cartoon girl watches your every move is not exactly cutting-edge game design, it sounds like prime shovelware. But let's be a bit more serious here: for a lot of kids, Cooking Mama was the first time anyone asked them to perform cooking steps.
You chop, peel, stir, fry and plate, and Mama (is it Mama in the game? Or are you cooking for an off screen Mama? Why would Mama tell me “Great, just like Mama” after cooking?) rewards you with praise or, if you burn the food, with eyes that literally burst into flames. Terrifying, quite effective. Better take cooking seriously and learn it, kid! I genuinely believe it nudged a whole generation toward a real stove.
Why it's worth a revisit:
It's not a great game, but there is something to be said about the entertainment value of an underpaid voice actress saying "Great just like Mama!" in DS sound chip quality.
Inazuma Eleven
Ok, here is the deal: I am not a fan of football. It genuinely baffles me why its so popular. Its long, hard to see and every time I suggest adding some more spicy rules football fans look like I am out of my mind. But I really like Inazuma Eleven. It's a shonen soccer RPG where you scout and train a team, and then win matches by drawing lines on the touchscreen for where each player should run.
Doing that, you feel like a tactical genius, at least until your striker pulls off a Dragon-Ball-esque special move that looks like it comes straight out of Shaolin Soccer. Its glorious. Also: One of the few series that has lots of english European entries, that never made it to the US, worth hunting down.
Why it's worth a revisit:
A genuinely underappreciated effort that did something fun with the game of football. Play it!
Electroplankton
Is Electroplankton a game? I dont really feel like dusting off my copy of "Rules of Play" here, so I'll just say no, probably not. There's nothing to win and no way to lose. Instead it's a collection of musical toys by media artist Toshio Iwai: you poke, steer and hum at tiny glowing sea creatures until they make music.
With the stylus it feels like tinkering with a weird little aquarium that is also an instrument 🎶 Plenty of people called it pointless back then, which kind of misses the point. I'm quite sure only Nintendo would have greenlit something like this in 2005. Let's hope they dare to do experiments like this again.
Why it's worth a revisit:
It's a pure toy, and a lovely reminder that games are allowed to be whimsical. Also it was the DS game with the serial number 0001, which is kind of awesome.
Hotel Dusk: Room 215
In Hotel Dusk you hold your DS sideways like a book, which turns your handheld into a moody crime novel set in 1979. You play Kyle Hyde, an ex-NYPD detective turned traveling salesman, checking into a run-down Nevada hotel where every single guest is hiding something, and most of them are hiding it badly.
I absolutely loved diving into the world of the sketchy, hand-drawn character animations, and the puzzles actually make use of the hardware instead of just pretending to. Cing were really good at this kind of tactile storytelling, RIP. Hotel Dusk is a rather slow affair, but I'd still take it over any serious novel, any day.
Why it's worth a revisit:
You might be LARPing as a book reader, but it sure feels classy to solve this mystery in a lounge chair.
Drawn to Life
Drawn to Life lets you draw your own hero on the DS and then drops that hero into a real, playable platformer. Suddenly your wobbly stick figure, with a head far too big and arms far too short, is the chosen savior of an entire village of Raposa. It doesn't stop there, you also draw weapons, platforms, vehicles and whatever else the villagers desperately need that day.
The platforming itself is nothing to write home about, but watching your own scribble jump through a level felt like magic as a kid. 5th Cell, which genuinly is one of my favourite devs on the system, would go on to make Scribblenauts, and I'm convinced Drawn to Life told a lot of kids that they could make games too. I'd bet some of them do it for a living today.
Why it's worth a revisit:
It's the moment a whole generation of players realized they could be game creators and that's neat.
Some Honorable Mentions:
This year I just want to shout out a few titles that dropped off the list last second:
Picross DS: I really like this game, but the fact that Picross is way better with a stylus is not really worth explaining in a paragraph.
Ace Attorney: Love it, but technically it was already great on the GBA before. And I dare you to use the mic to actually shout "Objection" for the whole game.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village: the Layton games really get a lot bang for your buck with the stylus controls. Highly recommended.
Art Academy: There are some genuinely great art lessons here, but the DS small pixel size really gets to its limit here sadly. Better on 3DS or WiiU
Wario Ware Touched: Yes, you touch. Other than that, Wario Ware D.I.Y is actually the superior and more exciting game.
Touch the Dead: Makes a perfect point that the touch screen isn't a good light-gun replacement, kind of quirky for that.
Go Dig Out That DS!
So here is my call to action: Dust off your DS! To me, the DS has a genuine claim to be the best console of all time. Its over 4500 games strong library hides a selection of truly generational gems. It is also surprisingly cheap to get these games (or easy to flashcart them) and if you aren't looking for a 3DS, a DS Lite is practically thrown at you everywhere. So go get a DS. Its a never ending treasure trove of quirky experiences, still worth to be explored today.
