It’s not “LL” (extra large) for nothing! Another bonus comparisons include DSi and DSi LL box sizes.

本日発売! 「ニンテンドーDSi LL」。画面サイズ拡大はどのような恩恵をもたらすのか? 実際に試してみる [GAME Watch]

By the time the Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara opened, the line was approximately a hundred strong. At the Bic Camera in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro, the line was over 60 people long when the store opened for business.

As Famitsu.com notes, there was a high number of customers in their 20s and 30s. There were also business women, couples, parents and their kids and this old lady.

Hi old lady!

The DSi LL is bundled with two touch pens: one shorter and one longer touch pen (129.3mm), and comes will three DSiWare titles pre-installed: Two brain training games (one for humanities, the other for sciences) and DS Easy Dictionary. Releasing in three colours, the DSi LL is available in Dark Brown, Wine Red and Natural White.

ニンテンドーDSi LL発売日リポート！ LLサイズの行列が！? [Famitsu]

Estavillo’s suing Microsoft for an RROD on his 360, claiming that a disability means he can afford neither a new console nor a “well over $US100 fee to fix it.” He’s looking for $US75,000 on that complaint, because of the “undue stress” he’s suffered since the machine’s failure, plus the “sadness he will have in the mean time of finding one he can afford.” Allllllllright. Next.

Nintendo of America isn’t so holy in this either. Estavillo complains that a Wii firmware update disabled his homebrew channel. Basically, he’s bitching that it prevents him from unlocking a character in Super Mario Galaxy and for that he wants $US5,000 for obstructing his “pursuit of happiness.”

In his suit Estavillo says he depends on games for his emotional well being because he suffers from depression, OCD, panic disorder, Crohn’s disease and agoraphobia, the latter of which you might recall was his basis for suing Sony after it banned him for being a jackass on PSN. A judge threw out that lawsuit, a judgment which he has appealed. There’s obviously no stopping this guy.

Banned Resistance Gamer Targets Microsoft and NOA in Latest Suits [Game Politics]

So far, it’s not known how if this glitch is repeatable or what circumstances would force it, but, dang, that box is barfing infinite coins and thus infinite lives in New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii Glitch Causes Infinite Coins/Lives [Go Nintendo]

Some may know Denise as that lady who replaced Nintendo fanboy icon Perrin Kaplan in the job. Others may know her as that lady who played splish-splash with Totilo, as both tried really hard to pretend Times Square was somewhere a little more tropical.

Either way, she’s gone. Kaigler cites personal reasons for the departure (she lives in New England, Nintendo lives on the other coast), with today her final day in the job.

In a statement issued to Kotaku, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing, Cammie “Smile Machine” Dunaway, says “Denise Kaigler has been a valuable part of the Nintendo of America team for the last two years. She’s made a personal decision to spend more time with her family in New England. We wish her all the best in this next chapter of her life, and we look forward to continuing to deliver great Nintendo experiences to people of all ages as we head into this holiday season”.

Best of luck, Denise.

I sat down at Nintendo’s Redwood City office to get a good look at the single-player mode for myself (since all I had to go on were Nintendo Power previews and Stephen Totilo’s experience) before diving into the multiplayer mode. I was given a choice: I could replay the same demo Nintendo Power and Totilo had already covered, or I could be one of the first to see the second dungeon in the game – the Snow Temple.

What kind of correspondent would I be if I didn’t go for the latter? A copycat, that’s what!

What Is It?
The Snow Temple was described to me as the “second” dungeon in the game once Zelda and Link are sent to the Tower of Spirits to restore the Spirit Tracks of Hyrule. The level began outside the snow-covered structure with the train parked out front and Zelda hovering beside Link.

What We Saw
The temple had about three floors and judging from the main room that requires puzzle solving, I’d say I completed three quarters of it before having to stop to play some multiplayer.

How Far Along Is It?
The game comes out December 7. I was playing on a normal-sized cartridge that could well be a final version of the game.

What Needs Improvement?
My Snow Temple For An Item-Toggling Button: Link started this dungeon with the Whirlwind item and earned the Boomerang about halfway through. To use an item, you’ve got to select it from a menu so that it appears in an icon in the upper right-hand side of the lower screen. Tapping that icon activates the item and then you do whatever is required of you to use it (blow in the mic for the Whirlwind, draw a path on the screen for the Boomerang). There came a point in this dungeon where you had to use the boomerang to create a path of ice over water (by crossing its path through an ice torch and back across the water) – and then quickly change to the Whirlwind to activate a switch out in the middle of the water. Because the ice path melts quickly, your timing has to be spot on and it can get pretty fiddly when you’re trying to bust out the Whirlwind, aim it and THEN blow into the mic. I died at least twice, wishing in vain that a tap of the shoulder button would switch between items.

Dude, Where’s My Zelda? As soon as I set foot in the Snow Temple, Zelda shrank and faded away with a sigh. It turns out she can’t go with you or help you within the Temples and you can’t talk to her for advice the way you could with other companion characters in other Zelda games. This turned Spirit Tracks into an experience that was an awful lot like Phantom Hourglass. Phantom Hourglass was good, so that’s not an automatic minus – but I think people were expecting the all-new Zelda gameplay to be a consistent feature instead of an area-specific thing.

What Should Stay The Same?
Shallow Learning Curve: Truthfully, I never beat The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and it’s been ages since I’ve touched it. But it really didn’t take long to master the stylus-only controls and the menus weren’t at all difficult to navigate and interpret. People who missed out on Phantom Hourglass are going to be just fine adjusting to Spirit Tracks.

Sure Rings My Bell: The entire temple was based on moving three bells into a main room together so that Link could trigger them in a sequence to open a door. This objective was communicated entirely through visuals (little panels with bells on different note lines, panels on the floor, etc) and all of the puzzles were familiar slide-the-block, clear-the-room-of-monsters affairs that I know and love in Zelda games. I got so caught up in the familiar, simple gameplay, I didn’t mind dying twice and getting stuck three different times.

Final Thoughts
Despite not having beaten Phantom Hourglass and not really liking The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (yeah, I said it – you wanna fight?!), playing Spirit Tracks felt like coming home. That’s probably the best feeling I could ask for from a game, especially so close to the holidays when I long for that feeling and have all this extra time to play games.

But anyway, Spirit Tracks has multiplayer. Boy does it ever have multiplayer, and boy did we ever play it. Here’s what we liked:

What Is It?
The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks’ multiplayer mode is akin to The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for the GameCube — four people each control one colour-coded Link and move around the same map as the other Links. The difference in Spirit Tracks is that instead of trying to help each other, you’re racing each other to collect Power Gems and trying to royally screw each other up on the way.

Note: It’s local-only.

What We Saw
I played two matches against a developer and two publicists at Nintendo’s Redwood City office after finally getting my hands on the single-player mode.

How Far Along Is It?
Spirit Tracks is out December 7. I was playing on a normal-sized cartridge that may have been a final version.

What Needs Improvement?
Little Bit Laggy: When dashing around the dungeon map, things start off steady and the Power Gem drops are few and far between. As the match picks up pace, however, and players start falling into traps or getting sliced up the Phantoms, huge amounts of Gems will suddenly spill out onto the map. That plus all four players frantically running to that point to scavenge Gems caused a couple of super-laggy moments in an otherwise smooth experience.

Trap Door Confusion: There are trap doors in every map that are either random or triggered by switches. I honestly couldn’t tell you which, though, because sometimes I’d press a switch and a trap door would open and sometimes the door seemed to open and shut in a kind of rhythm. It was confusing — and that much more frustrating when I fell into one because I didn’t know if I should blame somebody for it.

What Should Stay The Same?
Spreading The Phantom: Numerous Phantoms — those big guys in helmets from the last Zelda DS game, Phantom Hourglass — wander the maps, prowling for Links. When one spots you, a little icon pops up above your head, indicating that it’s got a bead on you. If you fail to run for your life, the Phantom will speed toward you and cut you – costing you precious Power Gems and precious seconds as you scramble to get up and recover them before the other players get there. The fun part about this mechanic is the bit where you can pass the Phantom’s bead onto other players you run by — like spreading Chlamydia. It’s amusing.

The Invisible Zone: One map we tried out had a patch of water in the centre that rendered players invisible when they ran in. You could still see ripples where their feet landed in the water — and if you look closely, the ripples are colour-coded like the Links — but with all four players running around in there and Phantoms bearing down on one or more of them, it was blind panic. And freaking awesome.

Mario Kart-style Pick-ups: Occasionally, an orb with a question mark on it will fall from the sky. Players that snag this pick-up are treated to several things like a random Gem drop, invisibility or a lightning strike that you can inflict on other players. It keeps things interesting and can be the salve to the wound of a player who just went from 51 Gems to two after a string of Phantom infections.

Single Cartridge Play: I am so happy that it doesn’t require four people to actually buy the game to enjoy this mode.

Final Thoughts
The multiplayer mode in Spirit Tracks certainly isn’t the main attractions of the game — but it’s a solid addition that deserves to be played if you can tear yourself away from trains and princesses for a little while.

After a several weeks of inactivity, the Art Style series has returned to North America’s DSiWare shop with Digidrive an abstract puzzle game about directing traffic that can sit alongside Art Style: Boxlife, a wonderful game about folding boxes in a factory, as a suggestion that Art Style games are downloadable because, were they sold in stores, the descriptions on the back of their boxes would scare people away.

This game is a remake of Bit Generations: Digidrive, a 2006 Japan-only Game Boy Advance game from Q Games, the studio known best these days for making the Pixel Junk series on the PS3 and less-well-known for programming the PS3’s background ribbon thing. And, yes, their take on directing traffic, virtually, is fantastic.

Loved
Terrific Traffic Trope: The gameplay in Digidrive is as solid and simple as it gets. Thank goodness, you know, that game designers consider waiting tables and taxi-driving and other often un-delightful real life activities as subjects for games. Here, being a one-man traffic light is a joy. What you’ve got is a gradually sped up relentless flow of colour-coded cars approaching the centre of a four-way intersection from four sides. With either the d-pad or the stylus players can direct the cars to one of the three lanes that branch from the road on which they are entering the playing field. Your directive is to park like-coloured cars behind each other, which banks fuel. Doing this well and then cashing in that fuel by letting a siren-blaring emergency vehicle drive into that section of parked cars, provides force to a puck on the bottom of the screen. That’s important, because you are hoping to push that puck away from a plunger that is creeping up on it.

Yes, that’s weird. And no, that’s not how directing traffic works in real life. But it’s fun, because of a few smart twists: Going into a high-speed Overdrive mode if you have at least five cars successfully parked in all four lanes helps you bank a lot of cars. Also, a clever but risky technique lets you double your reserves if you sacrifice one of the rows of parked cars. Timid players will never park many cars and keep cashing in to bump that puck forward nudge by nudge. Bold players will bank more and more cars, doubling and re-doubling their reserves, waiting until the last possible minute and than cashing in to ignite a major push of the puck. Hey, trust me, OK?

Abstract Art: The techno soundtrack is good. Better is the iconography of the graphics. A less interesting development team would have used numbers to represent the number of cars successfully being parked at the end of a lane. Q Games uses shapes. Park five cars and you get a triangle. Park a bunch more and that triangle fills up and becomes a square. Repeat until the square becomes a pentagon, then a hexagon (if you haven’t messed up by this point and had the puck hit by the plunger), and then the hexagon becomes a circle. I like ammo counters and flashing words too, but I’ll take a game that signals success with shapes.

Hated
Touch Options: Hated is a strong word, but I found no great advantage from playing the DS version’s new touch mode. It allows players not just to direct the game’s cars with a tap of the screen but to tap the shapes of banked cars to cash them in, rather than waiting for — or sending out into the roadway — an emergency vehicle. This seemed to make the game simpler without making it better. I preferred the d-pad controls which allow me to play this game even when I’m standing on the subway, holding onto a railing for support with my other hand. Many portable games require you to play while sitting, leaning or standing still. Praise Digidrive for allowing us portable gaming on unsteady platforms, but if you do, don’t try those touch controls.

It’s hard to express the quality of a puzzle game when just putting it in your hands would prove that the balance and flow here is good. Don’t be deterred by the traffic-directing subject matter. In fact, I hope that kind of oddity emboldens you to try this game. It was fantastic on the GBA and makes the transition to DSiWare well.

Art Style Digidrive was developed by Q Games and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DSiWare downloadable store on November 16. Retails for 500 Nintendo Points ($US5) Played three difficulty levels in single player, tried touch mode, tried two-player Vs mode against the computer and had trouble looking at the traffic in the intersections of Manhattan without wanting to get involved.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Because if anyone from Nintendo of America had bothered to watch the latest episode of Modern Family, they may have seen this kid. “Oh great!”, they probably thought at first. “Free advertising!”

But the more observant of staffers would have noticed the odd colour of the cartridge stuck in the back of the DS. And then the cartridge’s funny shape, smooth on one side, a hole on the other.

Yup, the hole where a microSD card goes. Meaning it’s very likely the kid (don’t watch the show, don’t know his name) was using either an R4 cart, or a similar device. We don’t know for sure — I am also not involved in the show’s production — but take a look for yourself.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a pirate! After all, the R4 isn’t just for pirating games; it’s also for enabling homebrew, a noble endeavour if ever there was one.

Not that Nintendo would care to make the distinction.

[thanks Greg!]

These are “FuruFuru” figures, which basically means “bobblehead”, only more subtle, with everyone’s proportions in order. There are two available — the good Professor and Luke — and you can import them for just under $US30 each.

Steep, yeah, but on the bright side they’re not asking you to solve any stupid match-stick puzzles in the checkout process.

Professor Layton FuruFuru Figure [NCSX, via Go Nintendo]