Economy of Effort

In the course of gathering money in order to fund my Nintendo DS purchase, I found myself inside a few GameStop stores. At one such store, I brought in two boxes of old games, systems, controllers, etc, to sell back. There, at the GameStop in Sierra Vista Mall in Clovis, CA, I ran into something I had never seen before.

I met the first decent GameStop employee.

The guy behind the counter was named Brandon. He was pleasant, patient with my army of trade-ins, knowledgeable, and most surprisingly of all, not incessantly annoying! I don’t know how he ended up working at GameStop. I think he got lost on the way to the Disney Store or something. Anyway, I can say that it was my first actual pleasant shopping experience at a GameStop ever. I preordered two DS Lites with him at that store. Later, the GameStop phone demon (err, automated calling machine) called my phone and asked me to take a survey about my shopping experience. Rather than hang up immediately, as is my usual reflex, I took the few minutes to press the buttons to express my happiness with the experience.

So there you go, Mr. Brandon from the Sierra Vista Mall GameStop. Your fine work got you written about on someone’s blog. Here’s to you, Real American Hero.

Since getting my DS Lite on the 11th, I’ve acquired a good many games to go along with it. GameStop had a nice “buy 2 used games, get 1 free” deal going on, and I took full advantage.

My DS game collection is now: Advance Wars DS, Animal Crossing: Wild World, Brain Age, Castlevania, Kirby: Canvas Curse, Madden 06, Mario Kart DS, Meteos, Metroid Prime: Hunters, New Super Mario Bros, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Resident Evil DS, Tetris DS, and Trauma Center: Under the Knife.

Animal Crossing and New Super Mario Bros. are, of course, currently in Stacey’s custody.

So far, I’ve played Advance Wars the most. It’s very much like the GBA games, right down to the same graphics. It plays very nicely, though. I thought stylus control was something I would use a lot, but it’s not as easy manipulating small units on the touch screen as one might initially think.

Mario Kart DS is probably the best Mario Kart game to date. It’s silky smooth, has online play, and combines elements of other Mario Kart games into a real best-in-show. It also has a Retro Circuit, containing tracks from the SNES, N64, GBA, and Cube versions (and, thoughtfully, each track is actually labeled with which game it came from). The SNES and GBA tracks are very flat compared to the others, but are still fun to race on.
Resident Evil is the classic original RE game. I love it. Yes, RE is flawed, especially the control scheme. That’s something that I came to terms with a long time ago. The game has a kind of “remix” mode that incorporates touch screen elements. Right now, I’m just playing through the original classic mode (I only bought the game after finding out that an unaltered classic version was included). The only slight disappointment is that the prerendered backgrounds are obviously very compressed, and don’t quite match the visual quality of the original game (light spots on the walls can have a blocky look, not unlike a moderately compressed JPEG image)

Brain Age is fun. I got my “brain age” in the mid-20s on my second try. I must be a genius.

The others I’ve only played slightly or not at all. I am, however, playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the DS Lite. It’s amazing how much better the game looks than it did even on my GBA SP. Everything is so ridiculously bright, sharp, and clear. I’ve got a few GBA games (FFTA, Metroid Fusion, Fire Emblem) that I’ve been wanting to play through, and I think I’ll enjoy them a lot more now than on the GBA.