The killer app for the Nintendo DS?

Stormwatch · Post by **Stormwatch** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 4:15 pm

I was wondering... what would be the "killer app" for the Nintendo DS? What can it do that is impossible in any other game system? It has the touch screen, of course! And then, I realized what this machine really needs. Ladies and gentlemen, behold...

UnscathedFlyingObject · Sat Mar 05, 2005 4:17 pm

That would rock if they had even tried putting some processing power into the system. Maybe it could run MS Paint

.

jp · Post by jp » Sat Mar 05, 2005 4:19 pm

That would be cool... but I'm fairly content with just playing games...

Ganelon · Post by **Ganelon** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:30 pm

Too bad the resolution would make it useless anyway...

the2bears · Post by **the2bears** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:33 pm

What would make it a "killer app" would be somehow involving a game with the creative aspect of drawing/painting. For just photoshop I would ask: Why? If you say to be creative (as you certainly wouldn't use it for production!) then you sort of agree. A game allowing creative outlet (see electroplankton) that makes use of an exclusive quality the machine has.

Bill

dave4shmups · Post by **dave4shmups** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:37 pm

"What would make it a "killer app" would be somehow involving a game with the creative aspect of drawing/painting."

One of the new Pac-Man games for the DS involves drawing in Pac-Man, and lines to guide him to eat the ghosts. Very cool idea.

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:44 pm

i definitely want some sort of paint program on DS. something they could do to expand the drawing area is have the top screen as a full view of the "canvas" and use the touch for drawing as well as scrolling the view-window (or just assign scrolling to the face buttons).

Strychnine · Post by **Strychnine** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 9:06 pm

I think it would be nice, but in no way a killer app - they have things like that for the Palm already...and they're okay for sketching quick ideas...but anything serious is fairly irritating to attempt. The screen is much too small to be very useful, and the resolution is also too low.

Vexorg · Post by **Vexorg** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:23 am

I don't think you'll ever have that kind of capability in a handheld, but I do use a fairly basic drawing app on my PocketPC with decent results (The one I use is called PhatPad and it's more geared toward note-taking than drawing, but it is vector based, and has animation capability, which is nice.) In order for a pen-based system to really be useful for drawing, you need to have pressure sensitivity, for which you need either a pen tablet or a Tablet PC for now. One really cool app that takes advantage of this is called ArtRage which has some really cool paint effects to it, all for the price of a 2 megabyte download. I use it with a Wacom Graphire tablet, and have done some cool stuff with it.

the2bears · Post by **the2bears** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 3:21 am

dave4shmups wrote:One of the new Pac-Man games for the DS involves drawing in Pac-Man, and lines to guide him to eat the ghosts. Very cool idea.

That is cool... the DS keeps going up in my esteem. The PSP looks great, but it so far hasn't had any of these "new idea type games" that compel me.

Bill

Brian · Post by **Brian** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:49 pm

The Vectrex allowed you to write on the screen with Art Master and nobody cared about that. Why the sudden interest?

Strychnine · Post by **Strychnine** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 6:32 pm

Vexorg wrote: One really cool app that takes advantage of this is called ArtRage which has some really cool paint effects to it, all for the price of a 2 megabyte download. I use it with a Wacom Graphire tablet, and have done some cool stuff with it.

I mostly use Corel Painter - that program is very featured - but sadly I dumb the program down to photoshop levels in so far as I mostly eliminate all the brush/paint/texture simulations. Being trained in traditional media its kind of hard for me to adjust to the "virtual" oil paint not behaving exactly how I believe it should - do you have this problem at all? I'll definitely check out ArtRage though - I believe I've heard of it before, but I never really gave it a chance.

LoneSage · Post by **LoneSage** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 8:07 pm

The DS is actually going to have something released for it that will give it PDA-related abilities.

jp · Post by jp » Sun Mar 06, 2005 8:16 pm

LoneSage wrote:The DS is actually going to have something released for it that will give it PDA-related abilities.

V-Pocket I believe its called. The DS already has that Play-Yan thing that lets it use SD carts for MPEG4 movies and MP3s.

Personally I just bought mine cause I like videogames... but whatever.