I'm not importing mine because I'm going to Japan in December XD. By then I'll have my spending money prepared and the Japanese shall feel my wrath of 16 odd thousand yen!
I reckon the games will be costly because the console is so cheap. I don't think we have so many hotspots down under and that really limits the Pictochat. Will Pictochat cost to use (like SMS) or is a free service?
Assuming you have the ability to use it, it will be free. Meaning if you have either a wireless network available or someone near you with a ds you can lan with. I think the games will be cheap. Nintendo has a lot vested in this thing succeeding and has went out of their way to make sure that it doesn't go the way of the virtual boy. Have they sealed the deal yet on that one? Hmm not so sure yet, but they are close. Top notch games help. Tons of support helps. Low price helps. The last thing that will ensure it is reasonably priced games (and for that matter games that don't suck and aren't just gimmicks). Nintendo knows that is the only way to sell systems and make money. I think we will all be pleasantly surprised to see what nintendo does.
With cheaper development it gives nintendo a lot of room to do things. They can sell games that are shorter (budget titles of sorts) or more like demos or not fully realized for way cheaper than a normal full blown game would sell. There is a lot they can do with the flexibility that they have bought themselves. You see it all of the time on consoles, games that come out for $39.99 or $29.99 or whatever, for whatever reason. Most of them cause they suck. LOL. But nintendo could lower the price $10, maybe $15-$20 for games that are small on premise but long on fun. Puzzle games come to mind at first thought. But you get the point.
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No More Passwords
Last week, it was revealed to developers at a Nintendo DS developer conference that Nintendo will no longer give publishers the option. All DS cartridges, regardless of size, will feature save RAM. Essentially, every game released for the system will have some sort of memory save built-in.
The size of the save RAM in Nintendo DS games will be equivalent to what's already available on the Game Boy Advance: 4 kilobits (half a kilobyte) for starters, with sizes all the way up to 512 kilobits (64 kilobytes) and beyond made available to games that require it. Naturally, the larger the storage capacity, the more expensive the cartridge's manufacturing price.
Excerpt taken from - ds.ign.com
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I don't understand how this works if they are using flash cards of sorts, (like the ngage, or digital cameras use). How is it possible for it to have a true SRAM, I guess is what I am getting at? I understand that the game cards will be in different sizes, that makes sense just as normal flash cards at the store are, and it would make sense that they would go up in price as the size of them goes up. But I guess I am just confused on how it seperates where the game data is and where it writes the save to. Can anyone shed some light on this as I have never looked into it and find it interesting?