Since no one carries around a DS anymore,
i still do. rare for me to leave the house without it, actually.
let alone one actively running Pokémon,
pretty much the only thing i use it for.
when i first got black (when it was new), was (and still am) annoyed that the bottom screen is entirely wasted on this useless black thing. i hate that the game demands to connect to the wi-fi every time i start it up, and i have to select no each time. hate that if i accidentally touch it (because it's on the fucking touch-screen!) it will try to connect again.
hgss had it perfect. i loved having something useful on the bottom screen in a pokémon game. the entire menu! even dpp had something decent, the pokétch felt like a waste of space at the beginning of the game but once you got the useful screens for it like the item finder and the day-care status that became kind of useful too.
i think the ideal bottom screen for a pokémon game on ds would be a choice of both. by default, the menu, but one could also cycle through various pokétch-esque screens with useful information on them.
but instead they took a gigantic step backwards from either of those options and locked the bottom screen to nagware that desperately wanted to connect to the wi-fi.
i would absolutely have used streetpass a ton, and would likely still be using it when i do play black, if it was politely introduced. if i had to walk into the top floor of a pokémon centre to use it. if it was something i chose, rather than something the game aggressively tried to force me into.
alas, the insistance that i use it constantly made me refuse to ever let it connect. and i never will.
i agree that a modern iteration of the nintendo wi-fi connection would be used for spyware and adverts, because i firmly feel that they would have done that with the bottom screen in black if they felt the wi-fi network would have been capable of that. indeed, there are certain things about the nintendo switch that have made me decide not to buy one each time i've been in a position to seriously consider buying one.
I feel like video games are no longer designed for kids and that also hurts adults who liked said design choices.
interesting, i would have said it feels like more games are designed for children now. everything is annoyingly shiny and bright and covered in sparkles and sound effects and animations. i often wish those things would go away and let me play the game, as they often actually slow down gameplay or visually get in the way of it. HUDs are getting huge, too, intruding further into the screen, and increasingly crammed with stuff that again only serves to get in the way and which i desperately wish i could get rid of.
i know that to some extent this depends on the kinds of games one's playing, but it's reasonable to say that dark souls was not designed for children, and never would have been. instead, the feeling i get is that any game that isn't blood and sex is being explicitly designed
for children rather than just being designed as the game it is.
i actually think pokémon black/white are a good example. i would imagine a child would be more likely than an adult to mindlessly (or accidentally) say yes to the wi-fi, and that's why it was so aggressive about connecting, because the devs expected a child to agree.
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i did use pictochat a ton to communicate with a neighbour a couple of houses down. i can't imagine all five(? four? i can't remember how many there are) chatrooms ever filling up except at a big convention or something, even back when the ds was new.
personally, i think the pokéwalker's player-player interaction could have been better, i remember wishing it basically worked the way (i think) streetpass in black/white was supposed to work. it's a shame. i really would have been delighted to get random streetpass battles and such in black if the feature hadn't been made to be nagware.
soulsilver was the single best pokémon game for a lot of reasons in my opinion. if black is your first, i highly recommend getting soulsilver! (or heartgold, lugia is just more popular)
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