This morning, a FedEx man came knocking. "Oi!" he said in a thick, drunken brogue. "Is this Toiteen?"

I perceived by his inability to pronounce the theta phoneme that he was, in fact, from Dublin 4. As I live in Dublin 6, this would usually be enough for me to frantically slam the door in his face and call the Gardai: Dublin 4iners are not welcome in the well-to-do area of Ranelagh. Still, I welcomed him, because tucked underneath his beefy forearm was a package containing my DS X-Treme review cart.

The DS X-Treme Cartridge is the current top-of-the-line in DS flash carts. Currently, DS Flash Carts are a convoluted affair, in which you link a regular GBA flash cart with a long ribbon to a DS cart called a PassMe device. Or so I understand: it sounded so inelegant and convoluted I never bothered to try.

But the DS X-Treme? Just an amazing little device.

I've spent a few hours fiddling with it. Expect a full review as soon as I put in some more time, but this is how easy it is: you plug the cart via USB cable into your computer. It is immediately
recognizable as a removable disk (like a keydrive) on both Windows and OS X. Transfer was lightning fast.

You then simply drag homebrew programs, mp3s or roms over to the cart, eject the cart and plug it into your DS. When you load up the cart, you can select from a list of programs or games, or play mp3s. The interface for mp3 playing is extremely slick, gathering information from tags, just like an iPod. Naturally, the playbacks a bit hampered by the tinny speakers on the DS Lite, but I'd imagine the fidelity's quite a bit better with some headphones.

So far, I have yet to find anything short of DS Doom that doesn't simply work. DS Doom? I suspect I'm doing something wrong, because other people report success.

Since this probably needs to be said, I am testing ROMs, since for me, that's the real use for one of these carts: keeping numerous games on a single cart, for convenience's sake. However, I am testing only games I own, and when the full review goes up, I'll even post pictures of me holding up the boxes to prove it. needless to say, ROMs seem to work fine, which I'm sure will be a big plus to the vast constabulary of pirates out there. There's plenty of space, though: I was able to put 15 games on the cart before it ran out of space.

Another neat little feature is that the cart actually features these adorably flashing disco lights, when you plug it into the computer, have your DS turned on or are playing music. You can even adjust the settings to change the color to anything you'd like. It's nice to see a company make a nod to Gay Gamer with some brightly flashing pink and purple lights.

So far, I am just hugely impressed. I've used GBA flash carts before and not a single one of them was this elegant or well thought out. Expect a longer review later in the week. For now, check out these early reviews:

Review at GBAtemp.net
First Grope: DS-Xtreme Nintendo DS Media Enhancer, over at Gizmodo

Unless the thing spontaneously explodes, I imagine I'll give this a very high review. If you're interested in preordering, you can go over to the official site and find a reseller near you. It's pricey... around $135... but, so far, it seems to be worth every penny. An extremely elegant solution. Florian Eckhardt

DS X-Treme [Official Site]

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