Strengths:

Plays all old GBA games, which gives it a huge library of favorites right out of the gate

Cart-based games mean no loading times and a long battery life

Nintendo has ruled the handheld market for more than 15 years, so they know it better than anyone

Nintendo makes the best first-party games in the business, and a few million people will buy anything to play a new Pokémon game

It’s possible to play multiplayer games across multiple DSes with only one cart of the game

Weaknesses:

Front and shoulder buttons are too small (and they don’t have the same satisfying give of the GBA’s buttons), and the lack of an analog stick is a step backward for 3D gaming

Cart-based games also mean worse sound and less storage space for things like speech and video

Big and, well, pretty damn ugly—won’t win any beauty contests, unless those “minor tweaks” become major

The touch screen seems prone to scratches, especially when you’re rubbing a stylus over it all day (Nintendo says it is working on a solution)

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Electronic Gaming Monthly.