out of the loop!

[A Black Falcon]

The GB and GB Pocket were a full six or seven years apart, though. It's only with the GBA that Nintendo really started with this "new upgrade every few years" system. Also, the 3DS already is similar in size to the DS Lite. Do you really think that they'll be able to make it smaller soon? I'm not so sure.

Hmm... Yeah so here's an issue. The screens have a higher resolution, but it isn't perfectly divisible by DS game resolution, so it has to be "smoothed" artificially to get around the "native resolution" issue of LCD screens. Some have complained that this makes it look bad. I can see that. You can also hold down select and start to simply force the games to display in their actual resolution, but it seems like it's incredibly small when you do that, much more so than GBA games displayed on a DS screen. Further, for some odd reason, when you turn on DS games there's a rather lengthy load time. The load times during the game are identical, but that first load is oddly long.

Thing is, these two issues probably aren't ever getting fixed, considering Nintendo's track record for shoddy firmware updates. About the biggest updates ever on the Wii are the addition of a visible clock on the main menu and being able to actually run applications stored on the memory card. Woo....

Hmm, interesting, I hadn't thought of it but that is absolutely true, isn't it. LCD native resolutions are such a pain, one reason why CRTs are better... I've noticed that with GBA games on the DS, but it's only a slight shrink so it's not so bad, but with the 3DS it really is either "upscaled and filtered" or "really small", isn't it. But on the other hand my DS screen (lower one only anyway) is all scratched, and the L button only rarely works (and sometimes R doesn't either), and one of the hinges is half broken off (happened when I dropped it), and the stylus's tip is gone, so in comparison I doubt the 3DS scaling thing is so bad... yeah, the shape my DS is in is getting kind of sad. :) Even so though, I doubt I'll get a 3DS right away, $250 is a lot.