Forum Posts Following Followers
3190 242 1989

The Nintendo DS...what's a leftie to do?

My boyfriend, a.k.a. my frugal half, plays many of the games that I buy and forget about, or that I have no intention of playing, such as really complicated RPGs. When considering my DS purchase (which I have reserved--prompted by all the new great coverage), he asked me how he was going to play any of the games that I would likely buy and abandon on the shelf.

He’s one of four lefties in a nuclear family, and so far gaming has never been difficult for him, because he has managed to work around it. However, when it comes to writing utensils, there’s no negotiating his preference. He’s as rigid about it as I would be. There’s no way I could maneuver a pen (or stylus) with my left hand, nor he with his right. So when he asked me how he would be able to play the DS, I was honestly at a loss for words.

My uneducated opinion (and forgive me if there has been an announcement related to this) is that they have three options.
1. They create a leftie DS. This seems the least likely of the three, because that’s certainly not very cost efficient. It would be a neat consideration though if there’s no other way to accommodate the other-handed.

2. They offer the ability to reverse map the controls. I don’t know if this could even work, with an eight directional d-pad being mapped onto four face buttons, but that seems to be the cheapest of the considerate solutions.

3. They do nothing. While I suspect this is really the final answer, and that Nintendo’s official response might be that lefties will just have to learn how to use their right hand for the limited stylus use, it kind of sucks. Nintendo, I thought you were the friendly company. Please say this isn’t so!