Following up on my declaration that I needed to spent more time on the gimmicky
Ampown MagicX Zero 40, a compact DS-focused emulation device.
Super Princess Peach (DS, Played on Ampown MagicX) – One of the earliest DS games I got that I haven’t really replayed, this was a great thing to play on the MagicX, because the smaller size didn’t really impact the gameplay. Well, in general: During normal gameplay the only thing you need the stylus for is tapping to activate vibes, which works better as a finger-tap anyway; but the special stages before each boss are an issue, particularly tapping the ghosts in stage 3. (I tried a couple of cheap styluses and they worked okay, but at the end of the day my finger was actually most effective.) I had forgotten that you need to collect 100% of the Toads in order to fight the final boss; I did every stage but ended up declaring it complete with a couple missing from the last area. This is a solid take on the 2D Mario formula, though; the action sequences are more forgiving (closer to a Kirby game, really) and the puzzles are decent.
Contra 4 (DS, Played on Ampown MagicX) – A nice benefit to the MagicX coming loaded with essentially the entire DS catalog is that it means I’m trying games that I didn’t own and forgot existed, and particularly ones that made good use of the two stacked screens. Plenty of games barely used the second screen, or work just fine with the screens side-by-side because they’re unrelated data. This game was made for a device like this, because it’s using both screens with the proper spacing between them as the full play area and you’re constantly switching between them. (And you need a controller, because it's absolutely a classic Contra game.) It’s actually a really
solid Contra game; balls-hard with a full variety of power-ups and some completely insane setpieces including an entire sequence where you climb up and down a rocket as it launches and crashes.
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (DS, Played on Ampown MagicX) – This is another game I haven’t played in years, and I did my replay with an assortment of cheat codes (which, like the grand selection of games, came pre-packaged in this device). It’s actually amusing how fast the game goes when you juice up your monsters so don’t have to spend time on grinding and capturing. I spent a few hours on it and zoomed through the first few islands; the text was a little small but it’s not a bad game for the format.
I tried a bit of
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 which had occupied an early niche of “DS game I spent the most hours on because quests were quick and made numbers go up.” I had a couple of issues with it, the first being that the screen is small for the text size; and the second that I had a rare savestate glitch and lost some progress. This is a game that doesn’t need the stacked screens—I actually wonder if it would be better on either a single-screen more-pocketable device (so it was easier to play a few minutes at a time) or on a bigger device where you’re just committing to it. Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling another 50 hours of it at this juncture.
I also tried some
Cooking Mama, and it also worked quite well. The space you have to work in is a little smaller and you have less precision than with a stylus on a larger screen, but the game has enough latitude that it isn’t really an issue. And the correct spacing between the screens really matters specifically for this game—falling items from the top to the bottom screen appear a lot!
Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts was a little too small; the muted colors already make details hard to pick out.
From the Abyss was bright and distinct enough to be good, though.
There are several big issues with the MagicX: The first is really the loading time—it’s a pick-up-and-play device for DS, and it works great for that in terms of portability (and the ability to use cheats and save states), but it still takes about a minute to go from turning it on to being able to choose a game, which can matter when you want to play 5 minutes of something. Fine for an hour on the train, suboptimal for hope-on/hope-off on the subway.
But the size is the bigger issue: It’s not that big, but it’s too big to pocket, and because it isn’t a clamshell, I wouldn’t want to put it in a cargo-pants pocket without a case anyway. But the flipside is that the screen is still pretty small—shrinking the already-small original DS screens means that it’s harder to read text-heavy rpgs and you lose some precision on touchscreen games. I’m old and my eyes aren’t what they once were, especially during allergy season. (And my fingers are pretty chonky.) Cooking Mama is manageable, but both the hunt-and-peck gameplay of Professor Layton and the details of some puzzles would suffer—and that’s a game that would really benefit from the stacked screen. And something like
Puzzle Quest would be both illegible and hard to maneuver despite being ostensibly a good fit. I had visions of playing the DS Dragon Quest games or other jrpgs that use the stacked screens on this, but it’s just too small and my eyes aren’t up to it.
Overall: I think if your eye still have better precision and you’ve got smaller fingers for the touchscreen, you’ll probably have a better time with this. The device is not by any means a bad device! The controls and build quality are good; the device has plenty of power for everything you want it to do, and credit to them that the battery life is very good; generally 5+ hours on a charge. But I think my ideal DS emulation experience is on a bigger clamshell device.
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