(Stolen from GoNintendo.)

- All character classes and character art is being completely redone
- more on revealed classes

Prince/Princess - grants party-wide buffs.
Phalanx - High-defense frontline fighter, wields polearms
Monk - Excels at fighting bare-handed, can use chi to heal allies
Shinobi - may have environmental interaction abilities, stealth
Pirate - Excels at fighting groups of enemies, not great at 1-on-1 battles

- partially takes place on the high seas
- mapping function has 23 different icons
- icons feature ocean currents, islands with various sorts of terrain (rocky, mountainous, level, etc.)
- Multiplayer mode allows one to five players to simultaneously explore a patch of ocean

Looks like we'll be mapping out land and sea overworld areas. Should be good!

As I now own my second DSi, and am strongly considering returning it for cash, I feel I am now qualified to write the most truthful review of the DSi that will exist on the internet. Now be forewarned, it's gonna sound pretty negative (anyone that knows me won't be too surprised) but I'm just very picky (and opinionated) and I'm not gonna leave anything out.

I'm gonna start out with the things I like about the DSi, because it'll be shorter:

Louder Speakers. This is definitely my favorite part about the DSi. The speakers are much louder. I love video game music, and I don't really like wearing headphones, so here's the solution.

Better start & select buttons. The start and select buttons on the DSi are wider and softer to press, making them way better than those on the DS Lite which were terrible from the get go.

My background is a picture of my dog. Any machine that displays a picture of Buddy on startup can't be all bad.

Potential for hacking. I'm not one to hack my devices, but the DSi is designed with so many restrictions, yet with an SD slot there's a huge potential for improvements that Nintendo won't provide. I'm guessing the hacking community will come up with some very awesome stuff soon.

And now things I don't like:

Overall construction quality. I returned my first DSi because the hinge was loose and would shift around when I moved it or picked it up. My second has a similar problem, but in different ways. The hinge shifts side to side, and it's not very stable when open. I've also noticed the spring when loading and unloading a cart is quite... grindy sounding, so it may not last too long. Oh and the white stylus is a slightly different tint than the white DSi. Trivial, but still a notable flaw.

Searching the internet reveals a slew of manufacturing defects including loose battery covers, loose d-pads, misaligned lower screens, etc... Now you could say this is a first generation device and it's bound to have issues, but I played with my first generation DS Lite (with a cracked hinge) after a few weeks on a DSi and it felt extremely solid! Some people say the construction quality of second generation DS Lites is even questionable so... Nintendo may be cheaping out now that they're on top again.

DSiWare. It seems everything about DSiWare was done as badly as it could be. The interface to purchase games is clunky and slow. (And doomed if it ever stocks a library comparable to Apples App Store.) Purchased DSiWare games are locked to the device, and the account being used. So if you buy a new device, you lose your games, deleting your account will also cause you to lose your games, permanently. Nintendo seems to have no problem with this at all. Strange really when Apple's App Store has a completely different policy. Purchases are tied to your account, and you can use it on as many devices as you want.

The other major gripe is that American DSi users can't access Japanese DSiWare content. There are so many games in the Japanese store that I would love to play, but I won't see any of em unless I buy a Japanese DSi. Major downer.

Region encoding. Games with DSi specific features will be region encoded. This means if the next Ouendan uses camera or SD card features, I can't import it. This makes me angry.

No quick launch. I liked being able to start my DS Lite and launch right into the game that was loaded. The DSi does not have this feature and I have to go through the system OS every time I play.

So I think that's pretty much it. Notice I haven't mentioned the DSi's higher price tag, the fact that flash carts don't work in it, and the low battery life. These aren't really big issues to me, but I spose for some people they really are. The cameras are neat, but really are nothing more than a novelty that will wear off quite quickly.

Final advice? If you don't already have a DSi you probably won't need one for quite a while. I remember being a bit dumbfounded when I sold my launch day Wii after only a couple of weeks and wondering how I could possibly dislike a Nintendo console. Now it's happened again with the DSi... It's not that it's a terrible machine, I'm just very disappointed with the quality of construction. I'll more than likely return this one and put another few years into my trusty DS Lite.

So the DSi isn't selling that great in North America eh? I sure hope Nintendo isn't TOO surprised.

Here's my take on the whole thing:

1. Not available in white in North America. White was likely the most popular colour of DS Lite. Why did we only get the DSi in black and pastel blue? The white DSi exists in Europe and Japan so why not here? A lot of adults may want a white DSi, including myself, but they can't get one unless they import. Maybe NOA didn't want confusion between the white DS Lite and the white DSi? Whatever the reason this was a lame decision.

2. NOA continued to promote the DS Lite. There were actually several very prominent bundles advertised AFTER the DSi launch that included a DS Lite. A smart company would have metered down stock of the DS Lite and then completely replaced it with the DSi at launch to prevent buyer confusion and quickly build a user-base so developers will have reason to support the new features. The only reason those bundles didn't include a DSi is because Nintendo knew they'd have a hard time moving the DS Lite after DSi launch.

3. DSi is TOO EXPENSIVE. This one is a given, seventy bucks extra for a machine that has very few significant updates? Maybe only if you wanna maintain the same price point on the DS Lite. The DS Lite should have been almost gone by the time DSi launched, and the DSi should have been priced high enough to indicate that it is SUPERIOR, without being so expensive as to make a buyer consider a new or used DS Lite instead.

4. Advertise to your user-base. Instead of marketing to the difficult people that don't already own a DS, show the millions of DS Lite owners what they'll get if they update. Get those great DSi GAMES from Japan over here QUICKER and give it up with the educational/application style software until you realize who is buying these things.

As anyone knows, I'm a huge DS fan. I was slow to adopt at first but now I have a pile of purchased games (much more than 30 at last count) but I still don't have a DSi. If Nintendo can't sell one to ME what hope do they have with anyone else? *

(* Disclaimer: I do really want one, it's just the DSi is a little expensive, isn't available in white, and I'm worried we won't get some of the cool DSWare games Japan is going to see... So I wait, but this is only partly because I choose to.)

E3 is back baby. The rumor mill's been churnin hard and there's already been a few drops. I'm certainly excited about E3 again, and that hasn't happened in about three years.

So here's the topic for E3 links, video, discussion, whatever.

Gametrailers E3 section. Gamespot E3 live stream.

Just a few hours ago at the Game Developper Conference in San Francisco Nintendo revealed two games which sit at either end of the game idea spectrum.

On the completely stunned end of the spectrum is Rock n' Roll Climber, which looks to be a College game design project that somehow mistakenly ended up on Nintendo's release list. You use the Wii controller and balance board to climb a cliff, and then play a guitar once you reach the top... The unanimously negative comments on Kotaku do a fine job of summing up public opinion on this announcement.

And on the "it's about time Nintendo" end of the spectrum is a new Zelda game on DS titled "The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks". The visuals look very similar to Phantom Hourglass, and the boat has been replaced with a train... so the game may be lacking a bit in the creativity department, but at this point I'll take just about anything that somewhat resembles a real game from Nintendo.

[ Screenshots at IGN ]

Wow that was the longest downtime in Fourside history! By the way January 15th was the 9th anniversary of this site so it was a pretty lousy time for things to go wrong!

So anyway, here's the story for anyone interested in what happened. After several months of instability, the Fourside server finally kicked the bucket. At first glance it looked like the problem was leaky/bulging capacitors on the motherboard.

Unfortunately it wasn't that simple.

Plugging the Fourside hard-drive into another computer to retrieve data produced sparks and smoke, things you definitely don't ever wanna see come out of a hard-drive. Any further attempts to power the drive simply resulted in more sparks, and more smoke. At this point I was pretty sure I was never gonna see my files again. I had a few tiny backups from a few weeks ago on a flash drive, but much of my personal stuff would have been lost forever. I didn't give up though! After a couple weeks of research and much help from Dalton we solved the hardware issue by removing a cracked diode from the bottom of the drive. The drive would now boot, but the data was in pretty sore shape.

At this point I was ready to start running data retrieval and hard-drive repair software and wasn't really expecting to get anything at all off of the disk. Almost by magic however, when I tried the drive back home in the computer Andrew lent me I was able to view the files! Copying data was tedious as the drive was super slow and would occasionally return an error or simply freeze the computer, but I managed to get all of my important stuff back, including this up to date copy of Fourside!

First thing I'm gonna do now is start looking for a nice high-tech new computer!