Topic: Very disappointed thus far...

I don't have a DSi... but I'm siding with Chicken Brutus. Aquia looks awesome. But banjo seems hard to play. You might have to settle for ukulele. Or perhaps I could get a balalaika and we could play Tetris music. That would put the dragon and her banjo to shame.

LOL wut?

As an obvious Dragon Quest fan hold off on trading in until Square Enix decides on whether Dragon Quest Wars will make it stateside or not. Mecho Wars by Luc Bernard's team also looks promising.

Don't judge the DSi yet. It's only a few weeks old, you can expect any downloadable service to produce a lot of crap before the quality appears. Look at Shakespeare, when he was only a few weeks old all he used to produce was crap - lot's of it, and it stank! The world had to wait years until he produced Romeo and Juliet. Same applies with the DSi.

In other words: stop whining and be patient. Enjoy the good stuff that the DSi currently has to offer and wait patiently for what is to come in the near future (Art Style games, Mighty Flip Champs, Dragon Quest Wars, etc). The DSi has tons of potential - give it a chance.

Aquia is a really hard game, and I won't pretend to be good at it post level 5 or 6, but I think it's lovely. The music is beautiful and the game is soothing. You can get into really serene rhythms with it once the chains start going off...

If you go into it wanting to "finish" it, you'll be disappointed. But if you don't mind starting at the beginning every time and just making it as far as you can, it's a lovely little experience.

PictoBits, by contrast, seems to intentionally cater toward those who like to advance in a game by increments, and ultimately conquer it. That's okay--there's no right or wrong way to design games--but I think I kind of prefer the endless expanse where progress is determined by how well I do.

None of this precludes me from taking part in a banjo duel, mind you.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions everyone. After waking up this morning and finding out my new game was 'Pop Star' or whatever, I had to vent a bit. There are a few games I will wait to see if they release over here, such as Dragon Quest Wars. But still, someone mentioned it here again... "Why are you complaining about what's available when it's so new?" Well, maybe I expect a little more out of a company that has been doing this for awhile. The big 'N' has been in the business of releasing games for quite sometime now and even though the DSiWare is a new platform, they just went through this with WiiWare didn't they? I don't own a Wii, but from what I've read/heard, it was pretty bad when it started too. Is it naive of me to think such a large company would learn from it's past experiences and/or mistakes? Should I not expect quality games for a system I just dropped $170 on? Why do I have to wait for games that I enjoy? Are all gamers young and old pigeonholed into only puzzle or social games? Seriously, people spend a lot of money on these systems and I don't think I'm out of line for expecting a little more than what we got so far.

How long have you had your DS? If you got one at release day, you might remember how much the game selection sucked. We had Mario 64, and the Tetris game came out a while later. It took over a year before anything playable started hitting. It takes a while to make new, good stuff. As evident by our crappy selection of Wario Ware remakes, card games and magic ports that were already coded for the DS and fit as DSiWare titles.

Luckily the turn-around for small DSi games should be faster than full games. Like how dr. mario and the art series have been made. Puzzle games aren't very time consuming to produce.

Sure, some of the games are pretty bad. Some are rip-offs and should have been free or 100pts. But I think time will win out.

...though I'm not sure everyone that has posted on here read anything more than the title of the thread...

Um, really? It seems to me you got a batch of really good replies to this topic, and I'm not sure what you think people are overlooking. Try to be a little more respectful of those who responded, because it looks like everyone has done so seriously.

I wouldn't complain too much about the DSi. At least it can play all the games your Lite can. Oh Wait...
(Sorry, I know DSiWare will get much better and DSi Enhanced games will come out but I just had to)

I was just going to say, the DSi is more than just DSiWare. The bigger prettier screens, better sound, streamlined interface, decent (and free) web browsing, capability to update the system as improvements are made...I won't even bring up the camera and music player cuz those aren't so useful, but still. I'm extremely happy with mine!

No, there isn't a fabulous selection of downloadable games yet...it also sounds like the style of downloadable games aren't your type (puzzle and social). Keep in mind that these games top out at a price point of $8. What kind of newly released retail DS game would you expect to get for between $2 and $8? I'm thinking that a beautiful game with great depth and hundreds of hours of play is still going to cost $30 at a brick-and-mortar store no matter how many mini-games we get to download for two bucks. Downloadable inexpensive puzzles are one of the reasons I bought the DSi, so I'm wondering what kinds of games you were expecting when you bought it? I can't imagine anything on the level of GTA Chinatown coming out as an $8 download.

FWIW, Pictobits is HARD! Dang, that thing is starting to frustrate me! Aquia is challenging too but at least the music is nice and relaxing!

Indeed; I love Aquia, and I think of it as both a puzzle game and a bizarre music game. When I play it, I usually hook up my DSi to some big speakers, and I not only try to beat the level, but throughout I'm also mindful of keeping the music interesting, timing my shoulder buttons (that wonderful percussive sound) and my melodic movements up and down the board in order to build the atmosphere. It's a sublime experience, and made even more frantic by the great difficulty on the later levels, but there's nothing comparable to that moment when you're nearly out of air with the music muted and you just manage to clear an air bubble, bringing the entire musical accompaniment back into crisp focus so that you can go about setting up some more chains against that backdrop. Great fun.

dont forget that nintendo will soon release dsi exclusive games through retail.

Fine. I believe I brought up some good points without trying to ignite any sort of argument. I KNOW it's new, I KNOW there is a history of slow beginnings to these sort of things, but if you've read any of my posts, I believe you'd see my feelings on this. jeanniepep - Are 'Real Soccer' and 'Pop Star' small puzzle or social games? No, they are both full and complete games in their own respects, what I'm trying to get at is why do we have to wait for an abundance of choices for quality games when we just dropped $170 for the system plus another $20 or so for the points card? Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Japanese market have a lot more choices? And before you say "Well, that is where the system and most of the games are developed"... I say, that's fine, but then hold off the US release until you got your 'stuff' together. Chicken Brutus - I did acknowledge the good replies and suggestions, again, read my post. But there are some that didn't get past the title of the thread, just read some of the responses and you'll see some of the questions they asked of me had already been answered.

Again, I am glad I found this site/forum, but I had no intention of flaming or getting flamed. I was just looking for some intelligent convo and responses to what I feel is a legit issue that I have brought up. I feel that I speak for a lot of older gamers. If I'm not mistaken, many of their DS commercials are aimed at my age bracket as well.

You must have a curious definition of "flame" if anything in this thread fits the bill. It's been a polite conversation so far, so don't change that. If someone has flamed you that I haven't seen, use the "! Report" button in the upper-right button of that post, and our benevolent moderators will swoop in to your rescue.

It's been an interesting conversation that I've been particularly interested in, myself, as an on-the-fence potential DSi buyer. I'm about to go on a week long trip, and I'm seriously tempted to get one just to play Aquia when I'm not driving. It seems like this thread is pretty evenly split between those who are and aren't satisfied with the service though, so I'm having second thoughts.

Aw, come on now. Couldn't we settle this issue over a nice cup of tea?

Anyway, I feel Mikarlo's pain. I've long awaited the Virtual Handheld to appear on VC, and besides games with "Art Style" in their title, DSiWare has been nothing but disappointment. Sure, there's a few promising-looking games coming up, like mighty Flip Champs, but everything else is completely pointless.

Sorry Adam, I'm not exactly forum-knowledgeable, bad choice of word I suppose. I just felt no one was understanding the point I am trying to state, rather it feels some are just telling me to stop complaining w/o reading my side of the issue. I would just like realized answers/arguments to why some are defending DSiWare instead of just saying...stop complaining and it will get better.

Others have said that the service only just started, which seems reasonable to me. Someone else listed quite a few good games. If they don't particularly appeal to you, that's unfortunate, but they seem to please a lot of others. I wouldn't expect many games that break from the puzzle or mini-game genres due to the nature of the service.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is, no one really cares if there isn't an amazing retail release every week, but for some reason these download services have higher expectations attached to them. I sort of understand this for Virtual Console since there is a huge supply of games that could be released, many great, and with almost no effort. But I don't think it's fair for WiiWare and DSiWare games since they take development time, so I'm not sure that "it will get better" is such bad advice.

Look at it this way.
The DSi is nothing more than a stopgag to gain some quick cash.
It's nothing much more than a DS with a couple of cameras slapped on & this downloadable software service.
The only software stand to be any good are 3rd party games which be buried by a whole bunch of cheaply made WarioWare excerpts Bit Generations remakes & countless number of clocks.

I be awaiting for Nintendo to reveal there DS successor they may even hint it at E3.

My response to that, Adam, is two fold. 1. If releases to the US market take so long to develop then why would Nintendo not wait to release this to us till there is a sufficient amount to please all their buyers? Of course the answer to this is $$$, but then it needs to be advertised to the buyers that what they are purchasing now may not be fully adequate. $170 is a lot of money to some of us. I refuse to purchase a Wii or PS3 because of the ridiculous prices. And 2. It seems the Japanese market has more than just puzzle/social/mini game genres. I'm not questioning the fairness or anything like that, just that before you release something to the US market and advertise it to all age groups...make sure you've got enough in the tank to appeal to all age groups. I don't feel that is unrealistic.