It's even more beautiful than I had dared to hope for. The shiny, partly transparent surface finish doesn't come out properly in pictures, it pretty much has to be seen in person. This is particulary true for the white unit I might add.
Speaking of white, it really does look awesome. I was almost sure I would choose black, but seeing the two with my own eyes it was clear white was the way to go. No pun intended by the way. Smudges, and undoubtedly in the future, scratches, simply don't stand out the way they do on the black version.
The ergonomics are pretty good. It feels heavier than I expected, which is both good and bad. Good, because it makes it feel solid and high-quality. Bad, because it might be tiring in the long run, but since all DS games can be paused by simply closing the unit it's easy to take a break at any time even during a hectic boss battle to rest worn-out wrists and fingers.
The face buttons are pretty small, considerably smaller than I expected. I don't have all that big hands so I have no problems operating the controls, but maybe they could have been a tad larger without breaking the stylish look of the unit. Just to satisfy those who DO have big mitts. The D-pad feels great even though that too is fairly small, it has that precise Nintendo feel of old when digital controls ruled supreme. In fact, the small D-pad of the Lite feels much like the NES digital cross, something I heard Nintendo spent thousands of manhours designing. All that research certainly paid off more than 20 years later!
People always mention the new screens when they talk about the DS Lite, and yes, they are bright. Very bright, and nice and everything. It's important though to keep the unit pointed pretty much straight at the user tho, because aimed too high, the image starts to wash out, and too low it fades into darkness. Side-to-side, it works fairly OK. The image fades there too, but at least it doesn't start to polarize like can happen with many other LCD screens. These are clearly of good quality. My unit had no dead/stuck subpixels either I might add.
Unfortunately I picked not very exciting games. They were all out on Metroids, so I quickly realized Brain Age sucks, and Phoenix Whatsisname is kind of tedious, but maybe the pace picks up in later missions. I only played the edit: FIRST one, and didn't really get the hang of it until fairly late. Maybe it would have helped reading the manual first, but hey... Manuals are for wussies!
I'd wanted to get Electroplankton and New SMB instead of these dud-ish titles, but unfortunately neither are released (yet) in euroland! Neither is Nanostray I might add. Oh well. I intend to keep this thing for a long good while, so I'm sure I'll build up a decent set of titles for it eventually. There's always homebrew also of course.
So in closing, this friggin thing rocks! Outstanding build quality and design, only thing really that's missing is a springloaded hatch over the DS cartslot, other than that the DS Lite is pretty feature-complete. Only weird thing is the on-board firmware shows an image of the phat DS in the config menus, but that doesn't really have any impact on the unit.
Guden-Rating: 18! (0-20)
Speaking of white, it really does look awesome. I was almost sure I would choose black, but seeing the two with my own eyes it was clear white was the way to go. No pun intended by the way. Smudges, and undoubtedly in the future, scratches, simply don't stand out the way they do on the black version.
The ergonomics are pretty good. It feels heavier than I expected, which is both good and bad. Good, because it makes it feel solid and high-quality. Bad, because it might be tiring in the long run, but since all DS games can be paused by simply closing the unit it's easy to take a break at any time even during a hectic boss battle to rest worn-out wrists and fingers.
The face buttons are pretty small, considerably smaller than I expected. I don't have all that big hands so I have no problems operating the controls, but maybe they could have been a tad larger without breaking the stylish look of the unit. Just to satisfy those who DO have big mitts. The D-pad feels great even though that too is fairly small, it has that precise Nintendo feel of old when digital controls ruled supreme. In fact, the small D-pad of the Lite feels much like the NES digital cross, something I heard Nintendo spent thousands of manhours designing. All that research certainly paid off more than 20 years later!
People always mention the new screens when they talk about the DS Lite, and yes, they are bright. Very bright, and nice and everything. It's important though to keep the unit pointed pretty much straight at the user tho, because aimed too high, the image starts to wash out, and too low it fades into darkness. Side-to-side, it works fairly OK. The image fades there too, but at least it doesn't start to polarize like can happen with many other LCD screens. These are clearly of good quality. My unit had no dead/stuck subpixels either I might add.
Unfortunately I picked not very exciting games. They were all out on Metroids, so I quickly realized Brain Age sucks, and Phoenix Whatsisname is kind of tedious, but maybe the pace picks up in later missions. I only played the edit: FIRST one, and didn't really get the hang of it until fairly late. Maybe it would have helped reading the manual first, but hey... Manuals are for wussies!
I'd wanted to get Electroplankton and New SMB instead of these dud-ish titles, but unfortunately neither are released (yet) in euroland! Neither is Nanostray I might add. Oh well. I intend to keep this thing for a long good while, so I'm sure I'll build up a decent set of titles for it eventually. There's always homebrew also of course.
So in closing, this friggin thing rocks! Outstanding build quality and design, only thing really that's missing is a springloaded hatch over the DS cartslot, other than that the DS Lite is pretty feature-complete. Only weird thing is the on-board firmware shows an image of the phat DS in the config menus, but that doesn't really have any impact on the unit.
Guden-Rating: 18! (0-20)
