Well, my R4 Revolution from Gadget Gear arrived yesterday. That’s some mega-fast service right there; I ordered it, what, Monday night? Something like that.

Anyway, it’s heaps awesome. $79.95 all up which is cheaper than a new-release DS game. The box was a little squished (I blame Australia Post for that one) but everything was in working order. Essentially what you get is a DS card with a slot for a microSD memory card, a software CD and a USB dongle that also takes a microSD card. Essentially, you stick the microSD card in your dongle-thing, stick that in a PC along with the little CD (woe on those of you who don’t have a platter CD-ROM drive, hey) and then copy some files from the CD to the dongle (the documentation is dodgy as hell but easy enough to follow).

That’s. It.

Well, barring ROMs of course. A DS ROM is about 62 or 128 MB; I’ve got five or so on my R4 card with room left over for the boot shell and save files. The bigger your microSD card, obviously, the more games you can store (I’m thinking of swapping out the 2 GB one from my camera; when am I ever going to need the memory for 900 photos?). The best part is that it’s all just drag-and-drop; the ROM files you download from the internet are exactly what you drag onto the root folder of your SD card.

So I grabbed me a bunch of Square Enix stuff, though in the spirit of things I’ve only actually started playing The World Ends With You. The game is… oh god it’s so damn trendy it hurts. I can’t decide whether I like this or not; apparently I’m not as grown out of my otaku fanbrat stage as I’d thought. The battle system looks like it’s going to drive me nuts, though; you battle on both the DS screens, using the arrow keys for the upper character and the stylus for the lower one. Of course, if you leave your upper-screen partner alone they just go and do their own thing (while you on the bottom screen do not), so I’m a little baffled as to why you’d intervene at all. Unless you had some, like, crazy-über micro or something.

Anyway, the game managed to piss me off on Day 1 (literally) by not letting me save until Day 2. La-ame!

So… who wants to recommend me some DS games?

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of wanky Square Enix stuff… last night I also shelled out a whopping $7-something for SONG SUMMONER. It’s an iPod game, similar to FF: Tactics, I guess, whose main selling point is that you “make” your units out of your mp3 collection. Apparently I listen to a lot of Monks, Soldiers and Knights, with Archers and Mages coming distant second. I’ve got no idea really how tightly-coupled the game’s unit creation really is to your song’s characteristics, but… meh, it’s still kinda cool.

OK Go’s “Invincible” made an S-Class Monk, which I thought was pretty cool.

I haven’t actually, like, played it yet — I spent all my time last night picking songs to make Troopers out of — so no opinions on that front, only that the controls are kinda awkward but, well, what do you expect from the clickwheel? (I still don’t like that stupid thing…) I mean, the UI tries hard to compensate but I keep rolling past the thing I want to select all the time and, bleh. Damn iPod.

Still, it’s a pretty fucking cool idea.

And, of course, it’s only $7! ($5 US.) I think one of the reasons I don’t like buying games for handhelds is that they’re not actually cheaper than PC games but they feel like they should be. Because, I dunno, they’re… smaller, or something? Yanno.

If I fork out $90 for a PC game I know I’m going to get 30″ of MEGA GAMEPLAY!!! out of it. The 2″ DS screen just doesn’t have the same sense of value, you know?

… maybe it’s just me.

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