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Just in time for the Christmas break, Retro Gamer pays tribute to the greatest-selling handheld of all time. Veteran coders, Paul Machacek and Paul Hughs explain what it was like coding for the dual-screened system, while ex-gaming journalists Matthew Castle and Simon Miller explain what it was like experiencing the likes of Nintendogs and Brain Training for the first time.
“I’m not sure I fully appreciated the DS at first glance,” recalls Matthew. “Back then you often thought about new hardware in terms of graphical grunt, and I was a bit too eager to focus on how good Mario 64 looked on a handheld, rather than the potential of its strange form factor. A handheld N64 is an attractive pitch, but it’s definitely not how I think of the DS now. It was the weirdness of what followed, enabled by its dual screens and colorful inputs, that really resonated.”
In terms of designing games, Paul Machacek mentions how it could be challenging to get the best out of the system. “We looked at the different hardware characteristics of the DS and tried to find features that could use them,” he says. “The idea of blowing into the microphone to get a turbo boost was a quick off-the-cuff idea. Recording your own sounds with the microphone and applying them to in-game events was unique and allowed people to customize the game with the extra comedy of other players experiencing such sounds in multiplayer.”
Outside of our excellent DS coverage, we finish off 2024 with plenty of great retro-gaming stories. There’s an in-depth look at the creation of Wizardry, the iconic RPG that influenced hits like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, Andreas Tadic looks back at the early Amiga games of Team17, while Paul Davies explains what it was like making CVG during the Nineties.
