Games N Music for the Nintendo DS

I picked up Games ‘n Music up at Walmart for about $35. It was just inexpensive enough to try out for fun. It is a game card that allows you to play videos, music and homebrew games on your Nintendo DS. It came with a 128 MB Micro SD card loaded with 25 games. The included card was enough to hold two hours worth of video, but I bought a 2 GB card and now I can play almost 11 hours of video on Nintendo.

You can see a video demonstrating Games n’ Music here:

Click here to see the video

As you can see, the video looks really good. Their software to convert video is amazingly fast. I used the lowest quality conversion and it still looks really good on the screen. Sadly, the video player leaves something to be desired. You can’t fast forward or reverse the video. If you go out of the video you’re watching and then go back in, it will restart you at the beginning of the video instead of where you were last and there is no way to fast forward to where you were before.

The MP3 player is a little better because it allows you to scan through the song. It also allows you to skip to the next song. Unfortunately, there is no good organization for the music and it doesn’t read song title from the MP3 data.

The games that come with it are utter crap. Sorry, but there is no nice way to say it. They are not worth the small storage space that they take on your card. They don’t use any of the buttons on the DS, even if the game would be better played with the button controls than a touch screen. There is no way to get out of the games without turning off your Nintendo. You can’t reset or hold down the start button to escape them.

I have been able to run some homebrew software using this card, but honestly, I haven’t been able to find anything good out there. I don’t know if this card is making them crash or if they are just substandard and crash all the time. I guess when it comes to online software available for free, you get what you pay for.

I compared the video quality of the Nintendo DS running Games n’ Music with the Video iPod and the Samsung U-740. You can see how each of them handled this Galaticast video.

Nintendo DS, Video iPod and Samsung U-740 Video Showdown

The Games n’ Music conversion “squishes” wide videos to make them fit on the DS screen instead of letterboxing them like the iPod and the Samsung U-740 did. I feel like that should bother me, but honestly it doesn’t. My standards for video go way down when I’m watching it on a tiny screen. The cool thing is I can load up my card, keep my DS in my purse and pull it out to watch a video whenever I want. I could do the same thing with my Treo, but it is SO difficult and time consuming to get video to work on my Treo. It’s as easy with Games n’ Music as it is with the iPod. I just wish they would let me download a fix for the video player.

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