My Wonderswan flash cart came in the mail today, so I've finally spent some significant time with the Wonderswan!
First things first - the flash cart works very well, and loads roms extremely quickly once they're flashed to the cart. I found out (well, was reminded) the hard way, though, that there's only ONE slot for saves - meaning, if you, say, play Final Fantasy II for 45 minutes, save, then boot up Judgment Silversword, your new JS save will overwrite the Final Fantasy II one (guess who this happened to lol). So that sucks! You can back up saves on your PC, though, of course, you'll need to connect the cart to the PC every time, so it's one game at a time, probably, for the most part. Which is fine, since I'm here for big RPGs anyway.
But anyway, the Wonderswan itself is really neat!
If you hold start and turn the system on, you can change the settings to display your name (or whatever) like in the picture above. It also will save what you want the default volume to be on power on, which is handy because the max volume is way, way too loud, and it gets annoying turning it down every time you boot the system. I like the personalization, it's nice.
The buttons feel better that I thought they would - since they're built into the rubber pads that actually contact the board, I thought they'd be squishy and mushy, but they feel pretty good, considering. Judgment Silversword played just fine, despite being a bullet hell shooter (it's actually a really cool game, I can see why it's so valuable).
Despite running on one AA battery and having a super bright, backlit IPS screen, the battery life seems like it's pretty good - I played for over an hour at max brightness and with sound on, and didn't see the battery low indicator until the very end, and since it's just one AA... you just save your game and swap a new one in and you're good to go (I have 8 rechargeable AAs so I should be good to play this thing for a while).
This came at a good time for me - I have a long weekend, so I'm going to put in some more time with the cart and system and report back. I'm weirdly in the mood for FF2, so I'll be playing that, I think...
First things first - the flash cart works very well, and loads roms extremely quickly once they're flashed to the cart. I found out (well, was reminded) the hard way, though, that there's only ONE slot for saves - meaning, if you, say, play Final Fantasy II for 45 minutes, save, then boot up Judgment Silversword, your new JS save will overwrite the Final Fantasy II one (guess who this happened to lol). So that sucks! You can back up saves on your PC, though, of course, you'll need to connect the cart to the PC every time, so it's one game at a time, probably, for the most part. Which is fine, since I'm here for big RPGs anyway.
But anyway, the Wonderswan itself is really neat!
If you hold start and turn the system on, you can change the settings to display your name (or whatever) like in the picture above. It also will save what you want the default volume to be on power on, which is handy because the max volume is way, way too loud, and it gets annoying turning it down every time you boot the system. I like the personalization, it's nice.
The buttons feel better that I thought they would - since they're built into the rubber pads that actually contact the board, I thought they'd be squishy and mushy, but they feel pretty good, considering. Judgment Silversword played just fine, despite being a bullet hell shooter (it's actually a really cool game, I can see why it's so valuable).
Despite running on one AA battery and having a super bright, backlit IPS screen, the battery life seems like it's pretty good - I played for over an hour at max brightness and with sound on, and didn't see the battery low indicator until the very end, and since it's just one AA... you just save your game and swap a new one in and you're good to go (I have 8 rechargeable AAs so I should be good to play this thing for a while).
This came at a good time for me - I have a long weekend, so I'm going to put in some more time with the cart and system and report back. I'm weirdly in the mood for FF2, so I'll be playing that, I think...