R4DS Increases the uses of Nintendo DS

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The Nintendo DS is one of few current portable electronic devices that can only do one thing. They can only play games. Mobile phones and PDAs can do just about anything a PC can although to a lesser degree. Digital Camera’s can track your global position. Even the DS’s main rival, the PSP had one of its original selling points as the ability to play movies on UMD disc.

That’s about to change. The R4DS (or R4 Revolution to some) is a very small device that lets you connect a Nintendo DS to an SD card. An SD card is a type of flash memory storage card which is often used to store files on digital cameras and mobile phones. Being able to get your DS to read from a writable disc opens up a world of possibilities. Many of those possibilities are good and some of them are bad.

Using the R4DS, you need never again worry about losing or damaging cartridges. In fact, once you’ve set the R4DS up with your Nintendo DS, you never need to change your cartridge again. That’s because you can backup your entire games collection onto a single SD card, and just leave it in your DS all the time. This is a great time saver, not to mention that you’ll never lose any of your games down the back of the sofa again.

With the R4DS, you can start using downloadable content. This includes applications such as mp3 players, video players, photo album suites and homebrew games. Other, applications aimed more at a smaller niche of users includes the likes of DSBible and Pocket Physics Online Repository. These are quite a change from Nintendogs! With all these applications at your disposal, the Nintendo DS is now a portable media centre.

The homebrew games are fairly impressive. They are of a similar quality to Flash based games found on websites; however they can incorporate the touch sensitive screen of the DS.  Examples of games include Video Game Hero, which is very similar to Guitar Hero, Chess and something called Tickle Girl.

However, the R4DS does bring some trouble with it. Along with backups of games owned by users and homebrew games, people are able to download games which they are not legally entitled to. Playing these games is of course piracy.

Nintendo is fighting hard to stop the sale of the R4DS because of this. The device itself and its intended purpose are legal; they can be bought at Amazon. Using the device for piracy is obviously not legal.

The effect of widespread piracy is less revenue for games developers to invest into new games. This means a lower quality and quantity of games being produced.

Another concern is in fact piracy of the R4DS itself. There are a number of imitations of the R4DS on sale throughout the Internet. Many have reported on Internet forums that these have caused their system short circuit. Consumers are advised to seek advice before purchasing an R4DS for themselves.

Significant improvements for Nintendo DS user have been created by the R4DS. However it also causes a significant threat to the video gaming industry. Nintendo are trying to stop the sale of the R4DS. A fairer solution would be to stop the websites allowing the illegal downloads. As the music industry knows though, this is not a simple task.