I went to a wedding this past week in Portland (then I drove to Seattle, because Seattle is awesome). During the long drive from Montana, I got to spend some quality time (or, at least, all the time that I wasn’t reading Harry Potter) with my Nintendo DS. It was nice to sit down and dig into some of the games I’ve bought but have only played topically thusfar.

The game I found myself playing most during the trip was Super Mario 64 DS. I loved the original game (if you’ve read the blog at all, you’ve probably been able to guess that), and spent way too much time playing it when I bought my Nintendo 64 way back when. Well, all of this talk lately about Super Mario Galaxy has gotten me pretty pumped for Mario games in general, and this one seemed like a good diversion for a long car ride. It definitely is.

The game itself is absolutely great on DS. It has all of the original graphics and levels (including some additional ones), and most of the textures have been updated to make a castle which is absolutely stunning on the small screen of the DS. The major change from the N64 version is that players start the game as Yoshi, and must get 8 stars in the castle in order to unlock Mario (who’s been tricked and kidnapped by Bowser). After unlocking Mario, players can switch between the two characters, and eventually unlock Luigi and Wario as well. Each has their own “specialty” moves, but the entire game could probably be beaten by Mario, as in the original.

The thing that really gets me about this game, though, is the fact that you’re playing a game specifically designed for the Nintendo 64’s 3-D control stick on the DS, which only has a four-directional control pad. Sure, you can whip out your DS wand and wiggle it around on the touch screen for sub-part, completely inaccurate (i’m not bitter) movement, but then you spend most of your time looking at the touchscreen instead of watching the gameplay. Even though the control pad is infuriating, it’s, in my opinion, the best control scheme available.

For the most part, the control pad is accurate, but for those who remember the way the camera works (or doesn’t), you can begin to see why the control scheme is infuriating. The camera will swivel to match the terrain of the level, switching the control subtly as it does, leaving the player a difficult task when negotiating turns with thin landings. Another downfall of this control scheme is that there’s barely any precision-adjustment; you press the up and right keys, and mario won’t nudge one direction, he’ll turn almost 90 degrees.

All in all, Super Mario 64 DS is still a great game, and it’s definitely possible to have fun with on the DS once you become acclimated to the controls. The fun that is taken away by controlling a 3-D entity with 2-D controls is not nearly enough to make this game “bad” by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a constant reminder that just because you can put a great game on a new, smaller console doesn’t mean you should.

Many of my favorite memories from my Nintendo 64-playing days come from that land of Hyrule made so masterfully into 3-D in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I remember stepping into Hyrule field for the first time, thinking how amazingly vast the plain before me was. It was the first time that Hyrule had been cast into the third dimension, and the result was stunning. I still remember how “realistic” I thought everything was back then (and, really, compared to all that had come before, it was realistic). Many gamers can probably relate to all of the possible nostalgic sensations I could describe when I talk about this game, but that’s not the point of this discussion. The fact that Ocarina of Time was such a break-away hit and left such a good taste in so many gamer’s mouths was what I had in mind when I recently sat down and bought all of the Zelda games for sale in my Wii’s virtual console. Reality, however, had other plans.

I ended up buying The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: Adventure of Link, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. When I first sat down with Zelda and Zelda II, I had forgotten how hideous the games on NES really were. The Wiimote bears a striking resemblance to the old NES squared-off controller once you turn it sideways, which was a nice treat for the eyes, but actually playing the games was a different story. I was quickly reminded why all of the old Nintendo consoles had “select” as a button on their controllers: you had to use it, and often. I’ll admit my attention span only lasted for about 30 minutes on each of the two NES games, but that was all I needed to remind myself that sometimes it’s better to let the past be past, and realize that the reason people play games on consoles like the Wii and the PS2 is because they’ve made so many improvements along the way. People don’t like pressing select, they’d rather use the arrow keys: thus, newer games use the arrow keys. OK, fine, $10 is an acceptable loss in this case. At least the logo channels will look good on my Wii’s dashboard.

Before I began playing Ocarina, I wondered if I would have a similar experience: maybe after having played Twilight Princess and Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time wouldn’t be very fun. With this in mind, I clicked the OoT channel with the Wiimote and began to play. Of course, with all Nintendo 64 games on the Virtual Console, you’ve got to use the “Classic” controller as they’ve labeled it; some kind of bastard child cross-breed of a nintendo 64 controller and a gamecube controller. It fits in the hand well, yes, but the controls are different enough from the original game to merit 10 to 20 minutes just to retrain your brain. It was amazingly hard to adjust to the new buttons, but the real test came with the movement of the character using the Classic Controller’s left thumbstick. The right thumbstick replaces the yellow ‘c’ buttons on the Nintendo 64 controller, and the change is nice. It makes it very easy to slide between any two of the yellow buttons, which is useful in some situations for the game.

The left thumbstick, the one which controls the movement of Link, is way too fast compared to the Nintendo 64 version. I don’t know what they did, or what they were thinking, but there is a subtle change here (I plugged in my Nintendo 64 and popped OoT into the cartridge slot just to be sure) and the stick is far more sensitive than the N64’s ever was. I suppose, if I had to, I would attribute the new sensitivity to the fact that the technology in the controller mechanism itself has greatly improve, and the controller I used to play OoT 10 years ago was probably a little worn out itself (not to mention that I’d spent so many hours playing on that thing that it seemed like second nature).

The game itself is exactly the same (so are the original NES versions), but this time we have a wireless controller (the classic controller plugs into the bottom of the Wiimote, and the Wiimote is wireless), some extra buttons on the classic controller itself, and the benefit of a “Home” button that we can use to get back to the Wii dashboard (N64 didn’t have a dashboard, so turning the console off after saving was the next best thing).

To be sure, I’m still making my way through the vast expanses of Hyrule to defeat Ganondorf (if only so I can then play Majora’s when it comes out on the console, and then wind waker, and then twilight princess with some continuity), but it’s going a touch slower than it went when I played the first time through. The magic is still there, but it’s harder to get into the game when the graphics aren’t so cutting-edge. For $10 (1000 Wii points), the game is a worthwhile investment, since it’s held to be one of the best games ever made by many authorities.

So, while Nintendo has done an excellent job recapturing the Ocarina in this case (the smoothness of play on the Wii is notable) with their new controller, they’ve missed something in terms of capturing the time that the game first came out. That exact magic felt when first entering the game may be elusive, but playing the game through once more on your Wii will feel a hell of a lot better than simply dwelling on it.

According to this article at Bloomberg, Nintendo’s market share rose to 6.57 Trillion Yen today, topping Sony’s struggling , pathetic market value of 6.48 Trillion Yen.

From the article:

Sony, which overtook Nintendo as the world’s biggest console maker after PlayStation 2’s introduction in 2000, suffered production delays and slow sales at its latest player. Wii’s lower price and a wand-like controller that players swing like a sword or tennis racquet helped Nintendo widen its sales lead over the PlayStation 3 in Japan last month.

Reasons cited as the cause of the fluctuation? The increasing popularity domestically (and internationally) of Nintendo’s DS Lite, which is taking PSP by the balls.

Its two-year-old handheld DS player, Nintendo’s best-selling game machine ever, uses a stylus instead of button controls, making it easier for users to play Frisbee with their virtual pets, practice calligraphy and draw pictures. Nintendo is also looking to capture an older audience with a “brain-training” game and tutorials for cooking and languages.

While this doesn’t really actually mean anything, maybe it’s a testament to the fact that sometimes more fun is better than more pixels. Then again, nothing really matters unless it’s in dollars anyway, so we’re right back to square one.

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