Nintendo Dreamed Of A DSi With Two Game Slots

[wraggster]

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata is talking with the DSi development team again, this time examining some features that didn’t make the final cut. In one concept the Nintendo DSi had a single camera rotating camera, but this would have been expensive and Iwata was concerned it would make the DSi easier to break. We’re not missing anything since the DSi has two cameras anyway. These low resolution 640 x 480 cameras are actually 2.5x the resolution of the DS screen so the photos you take shouldn’t appear to be low quality, at least on your DSi.



We’re not getting a Nintendo DS with two DS game cartridge slots. Iwata notes this feature was in demand by internal Nintendo staff and customers. The original hardware plans for the DSi had two cartridge slots and Nintendo’s engineers even made a prototype with two slots for DS games. Why isn’t the DSi coming with two cartridge slots then? It made the system feel in Iwata’s words “big”. The prototype is said to have been 3 millimeters larger than the Nintendo DSi shipping in stores on Sunday.

What would you prefer? A “larger” DSi with two cartridge slots or the slim DSi with only one slot? I would go with the bigger one with two games.

http://www.siliconera.com/2008/10/30/nintendo-dreamed-of-a-dsi-with-two-game-slots/

[crookedmouth]

3 millimeters versus huge back catalog of games, hmmmmm.

[ggx2neo]

I think he meant two ds game slots, not a gba slot. Would've been cool to keep two games in your ds... but not a huge loss without it.

[DanTheManMS]

Yeah, the headline for this is REALLY misleading. Makes it sound like they wanted to keep the GBA slot when really they are just talking about two DS slots.

I suppose it could allow a developer to provide extra bonus content if a certain game was inserted in the second slot (like what they do with GBA games now) but I don't think that feature would be really all that important.

[mcdougall57]

Cannot see the point of a dual slotted DS, just buy a flash cart.

[Harshboy]

The Slim one with 1 Card slot because I would just use a flashcard anyway...

[TeenDev]

Why the hell would you need two DS cart slots? There's no need!

[davidcrew]

2 ds cartridge slots? Thank goodness that didn't get in, and btw nintendo, going around the office for design ideas is not an adequate polling of your consumer base.

And if you're going "internal" for ideas, you should probably go external and see the customers who don't already own a DS and see what appeals to them.

Also, Instead of making your current DS customers, whether you're phat or lite, feel inadequate about their DS, try not doing anything to revise the DS and focus on making some actual fun games on the wii. Face it, PSP took over the Japanese market. It's over.