dsblog: a Nintendo DS weblog: Ouendan in English, Opera web browser, Tetris videos, and Super Princess Peach

Here's some recent news. For fans of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, big news: Ouendan will be localized to English--for the European market. It'd be interesting to see how playing it in English affects the emotional impact of the game, but I don't intend to buy a copy just to see. I imagine all the people who already know the game and love it will feel the same. (I wonder who I can get to buy it; not Nick, as he borrowed my Japanese copy.)

The big news for everyone else is the DS is finally getting a web browser: a version of Opera, the best desktop web browser you can get on mobile devices, will hit Japan this summer. (No telling when it'll come out over here, so Nintendo has plenty of time to fix their web site.) The DS version shows the full width of the page stuck in the touch screen, with a draggable zoom box to select what's visible at an actual readable scale on the top screen, which is a nice use of the technology. See Opera's announcement here.

Here's a funny Phoenix Wright ad from Japan, subtitled in English, on YouTube.

Tetris DS news is heating up. Yesterday I saw the videos on nintendo.com that make it clear that the retro NES backdrops are specific play modes, not just pretty pixels. The video of the Catch (Metroid) play mode is pretty cool! You're flying your own katamari of Tetris pieces around, trying to fill in the nucleus before it clears (or something). British Gaming Blog has something like the ultimate Tetris DS screenshot collection, showing the same.

Lastly, Super Princess Peach is coming out this week. If you're interested, you might check out the official site which has like some little videos and stuff. That you perform actions with "vibes," the big heart icons on the touch screen, seems interesting. It seems a little sexist, too, that the heroine's greatest weapon is her wildly swaying emotions, but at least Peach isn't getting leered at in the shower by AI supercomputers.