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I want a Nintendo DS MMORPG

I just picked up Geometry Wars: Galaxies for the DS. It’s a fairly solid, brightly coloured shooter that took me a couple days of constant infatuation to get tired of. Unlike every other game I own for the system, I don’t have to:

  1. Remember the plot in semi-excruciating detail so I can have a meaningful objective to accomplish the next time I open the game, instead of wandering aimlessly for a bit until things start coming back to me
  2. Repeatedly play through the temple of the Ocean King (aka no meaningless, repetitive, grinding, boring gameplay).
  3. Carefully calculate my next step across game matches that can last hours
  4. Lose all of my progress if I don’t play for more than 30 mins at a time
  5. Have super-precise stylus movements, or god forbid, have to talk to the thing.

The above list is mostly a consequence of my use case. I spend 70% of my DS time on my commute to and from university. This means I generally only play for short 20-30 minute bursts ~8 hours apart, on a loud subway. Because this is assignment-exam season, the remaining 30% have been taken up by short, guilt-infested procrastination sessions that occur during breaks between tasks.

The majority of games I encounter tell me that this is probably not what most people do. Zelda was a fantastic game which avoided #1 by allowing you to scribble notes to yourself. How novel! However, #2 and #4 hit like a ton of bricks. I’m currently stuck in some lower basement of that stupid, boring temple, since the game only allows you to save between puzzle-separated checkpoints, and I don’t always have 25 uninterrupted minutes to invest in it. This results in a fairly sharp disincentive to play the game, and the result is that I don’t play it at all anymore.

I could go on and tell you lots about why most other games suck, because of how I play them, but I’d rather tell you what Geometry Wars does right:

  1. Story: Brightly coloured polygons are out to kill you. Kill them first. The End. It couldn’t be more mindless.
  2. The game automatically saves your progress (which levels you have unlocked, your hi-score), every time you stop playing a level*.
  3. I never have attention to spare. If I’m not dodging and killing polygons, I can only be adjusting game options or selecting a game stage.

In short, it’s ideal for short bursts of gameplay when I want to blot out idle thought.

My only complaints so far:

  1. Guys, I have the game already. I don’t think anyone cares who writes it or distributes it, really. Make it possible to bypass the stream of company logos by hitting start, or A, or breathing. These intros are unusually long, and I might boot the game three times in a day. Being forced to stare at them actually makes me dislike you, intensely. If this were an open platform, I’d break out the debugger (Yes, I want those ten seconds back).
  2. There is no online multiplayer.
  3. Several games feature whole 3D worlds. Drop the particle count, reduce animations, whatever. Do not drop the framerate. It’s not terrible, and it doesn’t significantly alter gameplay, but it’s irking nonetheless.

Which brings us around to the actual point of this post. I think Nintendo totally dropped the ball when it comes to their online components. I realise the lag involved would probably ruin such a twitch intensive game, but it’s indicative of the sad state of affairs across all Nintendo DS games.

Ideally, we would just have an Xbox Live clone option when we boot up our DS’ and that’s that. I’m yearning for some way to read my RSS feeds in the morning, but for now I’ll live with Google Reader and reading a book during the commute. However, aiming for this generation of handhelds, and short of a Nintendo DS Community game cartridge, the following would own:

  1. Take Zelda’s superb game engine and mash it with any successful pre-established mostly-online 3rd person game, like Diablo 2. Abstractly, they’re pretty similar: you’re this dude, with items, who goes from level to level fighting and solving puzzles. There are many MMORPGs with this formula, and lots of them are successful.
  2. You can buy mod cards for about $40 that can read mini-SD cards that can hold some 4 gigabytes. Surely, a DS cart with 512mb of free space is not impossible.
  3. Solve the problem of effectively communicating using a stylus. Might involve common words, or the ability to build dictionaries. Admittedly, non trivial: no one has done this part right yet.
  4. Figure out how some way to manage having more than 4 players on the same level/stage. May be hard, given the DS’ limitations, lag, etc.
  5. Given the above, roll your game. There is plenty to be leveraged by people with existing “properties”, though. Multiplayer Animal Crossing, with larger/more domains. Diablo DS might sell pretty decently. This is also known as the ??? stage.
  6. Charge $5-$10/month. Congratulations, you have just created a legal form of crack cocaine.

I say this because Animal Crossing had me checking back every day until I ran out of new content and the characters started to be repetitive. Increasing the interactivity and the quantity of content by just a little bit would probably make it irresistible. Get home, plonk down on the couch, open up the DS. It’d make the genre immediately more accessible to loads more people if they needn’t use an actual computer, like, all the time.

As a computer scientist, not using an internet capable device to its full ability is clearly a shame.

*. Okay, I have to complain about this. I don’t know how many cycles writing to the game cartridge takes (I suspect it’s an incredibly slow medium), but my god a kilobyte here and there shouldn’t take a concerted effort on my part. I always thought Mr. Resetti was in poor taste; there are many genuine reasons for not being able to stare at a blank screen for 20-30 seconds while the thing stores the world state info.