## Thoughts This was a really exciting handheld console to get when it was released, which was in 2004-2005! I had the original **Gray** colored one. Something about having *two screens* was just awesome. Since displays on portable devices back then were usually quite small, having another one seemed like a logical idea, and it led to some pretty creative gameplay mechanics in games. While it had two screens, they could only be set to one of two backlight brightness options: off or on. See [Nintendo's docs about it here](https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7464/~/how-to-adjust-the-screen-brightness-on-nintendo-ds-lite). The successors would enhance features like this quite a bit. Some of the other features that were seriously cool at the time were *Pictochat* and *DS Download Play*. Games from this era have a lot of charm, and that's part of the reason I've recently retaken an interest in playing them (as of writing, it's [[2026 - January 7 - Wednesday]]). Once the [[DS Lite]] came around, the original device became lovingly known as the *brick*.