Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS (Part 1).
by Jason LiThe Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, is a action-adventure game for the Nintendo DS in which you control a blond adventurer with a pajama cap and sword (pictured below) using a touch-screen stylus. I was playing it the other day when…
The hint told me to blow out the candle. I needed to blow out the candle to solve a puzzle.
Confused, I wiggled and moved my stylus across the screen to control my character: I ran into the candle, slashed at the air with my sword, and did a rolling attack. No results. I tried a spin slash. I threw some rocks at it. Nothing. I circled back and checked the hint. It just told me to blow out the candle again.
And then I had an epiphany: I took my stylus away from the touch-screen and blew.
More precisely, I blew into the microphone and out went the candle. Puzzle solved.
Looking for interaction design inspiration? Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS.
(Stay tuned for an interaction that surprised me even more in Part 2 of “Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS.” Coming soon.)
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October 10th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Brilliant! Nintendo never ceases to amaze me with its true grasp of what makes gaming fun.
October 10th, 2007 at 6:18 am
Wow. Is there a better example of a company swimming against the mainstream than Nintendo AND seeing the risks pay off in the market? In biz school lingo, it’s “differentiation” pure and simple. (”Purple Cow” if you’re Godin-ian.)
It’d be interesting to know how long it takes different age groups to figure out that puzzle. And do you think this came from consumer-driven insights, as touted in au courant “design thinking” or did it leap from the mind of a lone designer? (Maybe somewhere in between, but you get the point.)
October 10th, 2007 at 8:03 am
i love how you can make notes on the map. It’s exactly what i do on real missions.. My vote is one lone designer, with Nintendo suppling wifi, touch screen and a microphone.
October 10th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
[…] adaptive path » blog » Jason Li » Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS (Part 1). I can only agree with Li that the DS (and other gaming platforms) are great sources of inspiration for IxDs. (tags: gaming games Nintendo DS Zelda inspiration interactiondesign IxD) […]
October 11th, 2007 at 3:17 am
So, for me, the real innovation in that game is the map you can annotate. That’s beautiful: something usually static and untouchable affords annotation once you have a touch screen. And that’s how people use maps in games: they annotate and hack; nothing’s more useless than a map you can’t hack.
The microphone thing, by contrast, is getting lazy. So many DS games have a blow-out-the-candle moment. Hell, Sim City DS makes you put out fires in your city… by blowing on the microphone. If someone can find something to do with the microphone other than blowing out fires, that’ll be interesting.
(My favourite interaction design on the DS is the puzzle in Another Code, where you have a stamp on the top screen and a piece of paper on the bottom, and you need to transfer the pattern from one to the other. The solution is breathtaking. Anyone care to guess?)
October 15th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
[…] (Tom Armitage alluded to this interaction in his comment to my last post.) […]