Christmas is a special time of year for me. Between all of the Christmas movies, family gatherings, cookies, and hopes of snow, I don’t play video games all that much over the holidays just because everything gets so busy.
That being said, a lot of gamers like myself tend to strongly associate a system or game with the holidays, and I’m no exception. When I do play a game during Christmas, I make sure it’s on the Nintendo DS.
Despite being discontinued for well over a decade, the Nintendo DS needs no introduction. It’s the second-highest-selling console of all time, helped revitalize Nintendo after two home console generations worth of underperformance, and gave us plenty of video game franchises that have since become beloved franchises. I know that if it weren’t for the Nintendo DS, I probably wouldn’t care all that much about the upcoming Apollo Justice remasters and the new Professor Layton game releasing in 2025. But my reasons for cracking out my DS during the holidays all stem from one of my favorite Christmas memories.
My parents never understood the appeal of video games. To this day, they mostly see them as toys, which is technically correct, but they still got them for me and my brother because they knew we liked to play with them. Whether it be tracking down a copy of Pikmin 2 for my birthday when I was in high school years after it went out of print or driving me to my local Gamestop to help me buy T and M-rated games when I was a child, they knew that video games made me and my brother happy. They will still refer to any handheld system as a Gameboy and think every Nintendo game is Pokemans, but there’s a quaint little charm to how they’ll support my interests despite their lack of awareness.
This all brings us to the Christmas of 2005. By that point, I was a pre-teen, and my brother was in high school. My brother was an adamant Sony fan, and I tended to play his hand-me-down games and systems, which were mostly Nintendo ones. I was never a big fan of the Gamecube, but I loved my Gameboy Advance. I played Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga every year, fell in love with the Mega Man: Battle Network series, and, of course, made sure to play some Pokemans. So when Nintendo announced their next handheld, the DS, I knew I wanted to play it. Even my brother, who at the time was only interested in M-rated games like God of War, took an interest. But I knew that asking for a new system was a big ask for my family.
It’s not that money was really hard for us growing up, but it was more that a new system was seen by my parents as forsaking the last system. My brother and I each got our own Gameboy Advances in 2003 with the release of Gen III of Pokemon, which wasn’t even two years ago at that point. We still had a lot of GBA games, and the DS, for all of the attention that it was getting, didn’t have games that were immediately interesting to us. We couldn’t care less about Brain Age or Nintendogs. We wanted to exciting new games in franchises that we loved. Those franchises, at the time, weren’t impressing us on the DS. Yes, there was a remake of Super Mario 64 on the DS, but given that we already had the original game, what was the point of getting it? Even then, would my parents see the need to get the DS if it had games we already owned?
So we put it on our wishlists, but we both expected not to get it. We instead put games from systems we did have on our wishlists and accepted that that was what Santa would probably be bringing us this holiday season. It’s not that we were disappointed by this, but we both kind of knew that it was unlikely we would get a DS, let alone two of them.
So then Christmas morning rolled around, and my brother and I ran downstairs and waited for my parents to get their coffee and sit by the tree. We passed presents around and opened a bunch of different gifts. I can’t tell you what we got my parents that year or anything else my brother and I got, but I can tell you about the first major gift I unwrapped that year. It was a Nintendo DS game – Mega Man Battle Network 5: Double Team DS. I was instantly confused by this. I had played Battle Network 5 before, but never heard of this version. Is this a remake? Why remake a game that’s not even a year old? Also, why would we have a DS game under the tree? We didn’t have one. Unless…
At that moment, I excitedly showed it to my brother, and we both realized that there was a Nintendo DS somewhere under the tree. We didn’t know where, but there had to be one. So we manically started looking for gifts that it could be. We tried to scout for video game console-sized boxes and opened any Nintendo DS case-shaped boxes we could find. We found a box for Mario Kart DS. Another box contained Yu-Gi-Oh: Nightmare Troubadour. We even found a box that had Super Mario 64 DS in it! A whole cavalcade of DS games all under the tree, with us then finally finding not one but two Nintendo DS systems just for us – a white one for me and a blue one for my brother.
We were thrilled and thanked our parents to the moon and back. I made sure that throughout all of Winter break, Mario Kart DS occupied my time. I raced through every track, did all of the single-player content, and even dipped a little bit into time trials. Whenever I could, I would borrow my brother’s DS and play the minigames in Super Mario 64 DS nonstop until he wanted to play the main game. And from then on, every year, without fail, whether intentionally or not, my parents made sure to get me a DS game at Christmas.
In 2006, I got Mario & Luigi: Partner’s In Time. Then it was Mega Man: Star Force. A new year, a new Nintendo DS game, all the way up until 2012 when I was gifted Pokemon White 2. By that point, the Nintendo DS had long run its course. The 3DS had recovered from a notably weak launch, mobile gaming had begun to replace handheld gaming, and the visuals of the DS were now seen as antiquated and dated. But I didn’t care. It was still a new DS game for the holiday season, and I would take it with me wherever I went, whether it be to the basement, my bedroom, the car when we were driving to see relatives, or to school to play in between rehearsals for the school musical. Even when I got newer hardware revisions like the DSi, I still made sure to play through a new DS game each holiday season.
So here we are in 2023. I moved out of my parent’s house years ago, the Nintendo DS has become retro, and that fat white DS I had has been stained yellow from age. Yet I still manage to play a new DS game every single year. It’s not even something I realized until I went out of my way to hunt down a copy of Monster Tale a few months ago. I had read all about it in Nintendo Power back when it first came out but never got to play it because I was just interested in other games. But now that I have expendable income, I felt that I could play one of the games that eluded me as a kid and save it for the holiday season after I played the big Fall releases.
And I do that every year now. Last year, I nabbed Sonic Rush. The year before that, I tracked down a copy of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. It’s a tradition now that I don’t think will ever stop. The memory of hunting for the Nintendo DS underneath that tree and seeing all of those games that my brother and I were about to play was something almost euphoric. And seeing my parents purchase new games they had no idea about was admirable because they knew it made me so excited to see a new game for me to play. I don’t know if my brother still has his original DS, but I still have mine, and I won’t get rid of it under any circumstance. The amount of Christmas joy and memories contained within that yellow-stained brick alone will stop me from ever parting with it. And even if there are no new DS games, and there never will be, I’ll still find a way to crack open my DS and play a new game each and every holiday season because, for me, it simply isn’t Christmas without my Nintendo DS.
