That pink PS2 looks like a cake, yum!

I guess all the more important that they can make profits off the hardware?

Yeah, I figured that would still be the case… It’s really hard to compete with “free” when free software has been around for years with few objections. At least they’re buying actual Nintendo DSes instead of Nentinda D-Screens or something.

When I was a kid I drew mario, bowser, luigi, and a bunch of koopas and goombas, taped them to paperclips, cut off the top of a tissue box and colored the inside to look like a level, grabbed some magnets, and made my own Mario game! It was awesome… I think I’ll do it again.

Hah…I used to draw out Mario levels on a piece of notebook paper…level 10-1 (dun dun duuun)!

Don’t you and Jody also like to wear purses and bake cakes?

PS: get that kids friends code. Then one day you can be all “Hey, you know that famous kid who does all the art of Mario feeding Bowser? Yeah, well we hook it up on some MKDS every once in a while. Cool, huh? Yeah, I know.”

I’m going to school in Canada for Video Game Art and Design and it infuriates me that there are classmates who have pirated copies of DS games on those Micro SD cards. These people want to get into the very industry that they’re ripping off! That’s like taking money out of their own pocket!

since my mariocart ds touch screen is out of whack, i took over my wife’s grey ds AND pink ds lite. i get ribbing about the pink one but i don’t care as long as they leave me alone during breaks so i can play.

While piracy wasn’t really possible while I was still on the playground, by the time I was in high school we were passing around pirated C64 disks in class, at lunch, on the bus…. I had hundreds of them by the time I graduated. At college we’d have regular meetings of a group called “Amigoids from Hell” in various people’s dorm rooms, and bought our blanks in bulk. I assume the same kind of thing happens now, only they’re copying everything, not just PC games.

Kids are much more concerned about what they can do than what they may do.

I am totally buying one of those pink PS2s to match my pink 360 controller (I don’t even have a 360!) and my pink kitchenaid stand mixer and so much more. I love pink devices.

when i was in 4th grade, i designed an entire game called “courageous keith”. it was an exact cross between mario, zelda, and castlevania… oh yeah and “keith” used crazy r-type style guns. i had notebooks full of pictures just like this one, as well as level designs and diagrams showing what weapons worked on what enemies… aah the memories.

Yeah, in my pre-Mario elementary school days, I’d draw game ideas too…. pixel art designs for Odyssey2 games, drawn on graph paper, along with obsessively detailed descriptions of the gameplay.

The most involved was a game called “Laser Base” (or sometimes “Lazar Base”, because misspellings and Z’s made everything cool.) It was sort of a cross between Missile Command and Space Invaders, but with a two-joystick control scheme like Robotron, which hadn’t come out yet, and way more bullets flying around than could ever have been produced by the Odyssey2’s poor little video chip. (What can I say? I was a hardcore shooter freak before the NES came out.)

I did pages and pages on that one, but by the time I got my C64 I had moved on to wanting to recreate Lunar Lander or the Tron tank game. I still might write Laser Base for the DS someday, even though vertical scrollers made the millions-of-bullets thing passe like 20 years ago. Maybe Geometry Wars for the Wii will inspire me to finally do it.

My little brother, who was 7 or 8 at the time, got into the act as well, with a game called “Lunatic Loose” (or as he put it, “Luntit Lose”) with three stages: one where you have to dodge syringes of tranquilizer as you’re escaping the asylum, another that was basically a horizontal Frogger, and then a stage where you had to avoid a bunch of white-coats in order to get a gun and start shooting them. I think he could have gotten a job at any number of third-party Atari game companies. (Naturally, he’s a cop now.)

Anyway, that stuff was the work of a frustrated 11-year-old coder without a computer (since this was before the VIC-20 and Sinclair ZX81 came out, computers still cost a couple grand.) This kid’s Mario/Bowser doodle is kinda like art.

great stories all around

It is not just Korea, I have seen several of those flash cards that hold about 40 DS games here in the states too. I had someone try to stop me from buying my most recent hard copy of a DS game; they said for the same price I could own one of those flash drives.

Because most of the DS games now go online, Nintendo should generate a key code that assigns a number per DS game produced similar to PC games.

I wish I still had my pictures of mario decapitating sonic..

Korean guys carry purses, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone they don’t shy away from pink.

Anyway, I’m back in Toronto. A guy at work showed me his mini SD flash card thing last week, cycled through a list of games (including Phantom Hourglass). I have no problem with downloading stuff (even if it’s illegal [note: downloading music isn’t illegal in Canada!]) but I also almost always buy the stuff I like after downloading.

I use to pirate ps1 games back when they were popular, not for a profit though, and I didn’t realize it was wrong at the time heh. I was just a kid with a lot of free time and high-tech equipment(for the time).

We would make copies and do the little demo-disc tooth-pick swap to get the copies to play. Later when we got to a hardware store we figured out a spring made things a whole lot easier and you didn’t need to leave the lid open while playing anymore.

thanks for posting that pic, it’s something that I think we all have in common, drawing Mario as a kid! It’s so great that 20+ years later, kids still like to draw Mario.

Yeah I have a DS flashcard as well, but I’ve never pirated an American DS game. I mostly use it for homebrew (my own, and other cool stuff in the homebrew scene). I’ve pirated a few Japanese games that I don’t have access to here, but even with those, it was more of a “let’s see if I want to shell out $50 for the import of this” rather than “I’m going to steal this and play all the way through”. I’m sure in Korea it’s a different story, but I thought I’d offer some anectdotal evidence that not all flash cards are full of t3h r0mz.

Yeah, I have a flashcart, but I use it more as a ‘game wallet’ than anything. I won’t lie and say I’ve never downloaded something I didn’t own, but 99% of the stuff on there is stuff I’ve dumped from carts I own or homebrew.

Awesome drawing!

I think that drawing is very good, especially by a 10 year old. I’m probably going to Korea in early 2008 so it’ll be nice to know that I’ll have people to play DS with while I’m down there. To be honest I’m thinking of buying a flash card because it’ll be too bothering and costly to important NA games while I’m living in Korea, more of a convenience issue.

I was in Korea when mario was released and I lost my DSlite on a bus… I was deeply saddened. I like to think that a Korean youth found it and discovered the love of MARIO!!!

Nintendo would probably do well to hit Korea with a stack of Mario related merchandise, right about now. Much much harder to pirate merchandise effectively than it is to pirate games.

I wouldn’t use my DS nearly as much without the flash cart, but the only commercial game I’ve played on it was some Picross type game in Japanese that had like 25×25 puzzles or something like that…. much harder and better than normal Picross, but it turned out there was just too much of a language barrier for me to import it.

Other than that, it turns my DS into a little, weak, extremely portable computer, one that I can easily develop for as well as use other people’s programs like DSOrganize and Moonshell, and that’s what I really like about flash carts. Apart from the original Game Gear, I’ve never bought a handheld system without getting a flash cart within weeks afterward.

Not that I think that’s what Korean kids are doing, but it’s what I do. If Nintendo wants to go after Wii mod chips, more power to ‘em, those things are useless for my purposes. If they want to go after flash carts, I might just become a pirate again myself out of spite.

what the snot are you talking about. microSD cards are incredibly inconspicuous.

I have and R4 and that’s how I first played Puzzle Quest, bought it the day it dropped to $20.

one look at the back of the ds and it’s the first thing you see! first thing i see, anyway.

I’m Korean, and yes, I’ve been there. Teenage guys aren’t afraid of being really… feminine, you know, sporting female apparel.