Nintendo DSi for the younger age group.
The DSi is getting lots of attention and is being billed as the best new game system of 2009. But we wanted to find out for ourselves just how well the game system works for children of all ages. So for our first Nintendo DSi review session, we enlisted the help of six kids in the four to six year old age group. We set each child up with a fully charged game console, a comfy couch or chair to sit in, and a variety of different DS games to choose from.
The games we provided to the kids were the Wonder Pets: Save the Animals, (this was the only game for DS we could find that was rated eC for early childhood), Go, Diego Go! Great Dinosaur Rescue, and Mario Party 64 for DS. We did notice while we were rounding up games that most (if not all) of the games designed for the DS, and by extension the new system, require the players to be able to read. We wondered how our review session was going to go, knowing that our testers didn’t read yet, but we forged ahead. We did alert the parents to the potential for trouble, and they all agreed to sit next to their children in case there were things that needed to be read aloud to the kids in order for the game to progress. That did end up being a good arrangement, so that is something parents should keep in mind when they buy Nintendo DSi for the kids.
The kids doing the testing for us were really only interested in playing the games that we had set out. We introduced them to the internet DSi shop in a friendly tour format, and told them that they could play games with other people on the internet if they wanted. They really didn’t have much interest, and we think that was because the idea of playing with people they couldn’t see was a little abstract for their young minds. This may be a good thing, as parents will be unlikely to have their young children on the internet to get the games on their own or to meet other gamers without supervision.
When we pointed out the digital camera feature, the kids did get pretty excited about it, and began snapping pictures of each other. We unfortunately forgot to equip the DSi units with SD memory cards, so the 256 MB of internal memory was all the memory they had for pictures. You can put quite a few pictures on that limited amount of storage space though, so it turned out alright. We do think that it’s a good idea to buy a memory card when you buy a DSi. If you choose an online store or a dedicated electronics store as where to get one, then the store should also carry the SD memory cards, which can provide as little as 128 MB of storage all the way up to 4GB of external storage space.
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