DS

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. Once the DS Lite came around, the original device became lovingly known as the brick.

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. Not only were there the two screens, the bottom one is a touchscreen!

The screens could only be set to one of two backlight brightness options: off or on. See Nintendo’s docs about it here. 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).

Favorite Games

Some of my favorite games for the DS are:

Coming soon!