DS Rumble Pack

[Wizard]

When Metroid Prime Pinball hits shelves next week, the game will come packaged with a Rumble Pak accessory that shoves right into the Game Boy Advance slot of your Nintendo DS system.

 

The Rumble Pak, called quite simply the "Rumble Pak", vibrates when the Nintendo DS tells it to. Code within DS software will trigger the innerworkings of the cartridge to spin and vibrate, which, in turn, causes the Nintendo DS system to vibrate as well.

 

 

The Nintendo DS system will note that the Rumble Pak is installed on the system menu screen with a special "DS Option Pak inserted" message where "Start GBA game" would show up. Putting the Rumble Pak cartridge in a GBA system will not work -- the system won't boot up beyond the Game Boy screen.

 

The only game that officially supports it right now is the game that it comes packaged with it. Games will have to be written with the Rumble Pak in mind for the vibration feature to work. Metroid Prime Pinball puts the Rumble Pak to work by offering jolts and shimmies when the Samus ball whacks into obstacles and hazards.

 

Either our cartridge is broken, or the DS Rumble Pak is one of the noisiest Rumble Paks Nintendo has ever built. When playing Metroid Prime Pinball, we can hear the rumble mechanism more than we can feel the rumble effects in the system. It's so loud, in fact, that it sounds like a metallic "chirp" whenever the rumble is activated. We'd rather just not put it in the system at all. Good thing it's free, because at this point we wouldn't bother buying it as an extra.

 

This is odd because we've experienced handheld rumble in other Nintendo forms. Wario Ware Twisted GBA and Game Boy Color games like Pokemon Pinball used types of rumble that were quiet but effective in their feedback. Our Rumble Pak for the DS doesn't perform nearly as well as Nintendo's previous rumble efforts.

 

The game, however, performs much better than the rumble pak does.We'll have a full review of Metroid Prime Pinball later this week.

>>DS.IGN

[DeathZone]

Thats a pretty cool addition. Since we're on topic, I have a Ds, but I lost the charger for it. DOes anyone know any stores that sell them? I tried EB Games, and FYE, but they dont have it. I might just have to order another one from Nintendo, but I want that to be my last resort.

[Samor]

I love Pinballs. Whatever the review says about the rumble, it's worth a shot

[SuperKoopa]

I'm personally just going to wait and see what the game sites say about it.. I don't really like pinball that much, especially the virtual kind. The Rumble Pak does look rockin', though.

[oshisama]

a gba charger works with the ds.