My Wife & Gaming, Part 2

It's the end of a very short lived era.

Back in October of last year, my wife wanted a Nintendo DS for Christmas. Overjoyed that she looked to at least expand into more modern gaming, even if it was in the handheld realm, I readily agreed and ordered her the desired Coral Pink DS and the games she initially wanted with it: Brain Age 2, Flash Focus, Mind Quiz, Nintendogs and Tetris DS.

At first, it was a big smash. She played it all the time. She took it to work to play during her lunch hour. She volunteered to go with me to the game stores in the area so she could peruse the used DS and GBA titles. In that month, she picked up Polarium, but little else. Later, I picked up Geometry Wars: Galaxies for myself for when the DS was home and I could play it.

By late December, the appeal apparently wore off. She stopped playing everything and stopped wanting to look at new and used DS titles. In early January, the DS magically disappeared. Since I only rarely played GeomWars:Galaxies on it, I never really paid much thought to the DS' disappearance.

Last week, while having one of my frequent cleaning and reorganizing fits, I found the DS packed away in a box and shoved under the bed. When my wife got home, I showed her the DS and proudly announced I finally found the thing. Her response? "Oh, that? You can have it. I don't want it anymore."

Sigh!

So now I'm the owner of a Coral Pink DS. It matches my pink X360 controller nicely. (Aside: Unlike all of my friends - and apparently my stepson - I'm not afraid of the color pink. I don't know why they get the feeling that owning something pink makes them look gay. I've had people give me grief because I have a pink x360 controller, to which I merely pull a line from Red vs. Blue: "It's not pink, it's lightish red.")

While I'm on the subject of the DS, anyone else been following the litigation between Nintendo and the makers of the R4 Slot-1 device? I find the whole situation funny because there's a lot of people out there, myself included, who didn't know things like the R4, M3 or CycloDS Evo existed, yet because of Nintendo making it into gaming news a lot of people are discovering them. While I wouldn't get one now, if this had been several years ago, I likely would have. It reminds me of when Sony was cracking down on the Action Replay Pro for the orginal PSX , a device that plugged into the back of the PSX and bypassed the bios, allowing pirated games and imports to be played. Until that news, neither I nor my friends knew there was a device that could bypass bios that didn't involve a mod chip. Within a week of it making mainstream gaming news, all of us ordered them.

It makes me wonder how many more people are ordering these Slot-1 devices to play pirated games who, until recently, didn't even know they could have done so. (Aside 2: I have to admit that the CycloDS Evo is tempting, but I made the resolve many moons ago to be fully legit in both gaming and computing simply because I wouldn't want people stealing my work and distributing it for free.)