Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
logo design by man bytes blog

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Opera DS: Downloadable Demos?

I want to start by saying I don't think this would happen. I could totally frame this as a "I heard from a dude who was sitting in between a Nintendo employee and a snake on a motherfckin' plane" ... but I wouldn't do that to you people. I respect you, you know, as a woman.

That said, I don't see why Nintendo couldn't capitalize on Opera DS to distribute downloadable demos. Technology wise, it seems like a slam dunk. The reason, I imagine, Opera DS won't support flash is that nobody wanted to write the third party application to support it. The way plugins work with a browser is pretty simple, albeit a little clumsy. If the browser tries to fetch a reference to a media type it doesn't understand, it looks for a plugin to handle it instead.

While it's understandable that Adobe didn't want to put in the effort for a DS Flash player, it's less understandable why Nintendo couldn't write a DS demo player. Click a link, Opera DS denotes the filetype as being a demo and kicks it off to the same code which Nintendo uses to download a demo from a wifi station. Now when you're sitting at home reading about a new game, you just browse to Nintendo's site and give it a try. Like downloading a demo from Xbox Live ... anywhere you have internet access.




tagged: ,

2 comments:

Patrick said...

Once again, I'm pretty sure they're trying to bottleneck the DS demo stream to be via Wii. They've already announced that DS demos will be automatically sent via Wii Connect 24 and transferred via local WiFi. Its a bit more cumbersome than just letting the DS do it, but Nintendo has been known for centralized measures over distributed elegance.

Josh said...

It wouldn't surprise me, but I do think it's a mistake. I'll take my DS on a trip, read a game review ... and I could try it out in the hotel. The Wii being in the living room is only mildly less limiting than having to go to Best Buy, for people who really travel with their DS's.

And for evidence, The Girl takes it to work daily.