I got to play Nintendo at work 
I knew there were advantages to working at a newsweekly, but I never thought it would pay off in video games until today. I've been bugging one of the technology writers about the new Nintendo DS and he received one by mail yesterday and told me I could play with it. Well, today he made good on his promise and told me I had all day to play with the DS and let me just say, it's pretty cool. The Metroid Demo makes good use of the touchpad. You use it as you to turn, aim, and jump and then use the control pad to strafe, shoot, and move forwards and backwards. It's a really cool concept. The DS also seems to come jam packed with networking abilities. It has the ability to start and join network games of Metroid, but it also has something called PictoChat, which lets you join one of four chatrooms to type and draw pictures. Each room can hold 16 people and it looks like it would be a fun way to gather interest for a network game of sorts... or just kill some time on the metro. Unfortunately, no one else in the building has another DS, so all of those fancy network abilities are untestable. Still, it looks cool and I can't wait to get my hands on one of my very own. In the meantime though, I'm going to try to work as quickly as possible so that I can play with it some more. And, in other news, it looks like they'll be shipping the DS a week early. So go pre-order it or put it on your Christmas list and we can meet up on the metro for some wireless chat and gaming.