ASH marks debut of 2 gigabit DS cards

This week's Japanese release of ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat marks a first for DS releases. Mistwalker's FMV-heavy RPG comes on an unprecedentedly large 2 gigabit card—twice the size Nintendo themselves said was the maximum for the DS when it debuted at E3 2004.

Game systems generally measure in bits, not bytes; a 2 gigabit card is actually 256 megabytes.

I wouldn't be suprised is DQIX ends up being another game that pushes that DS capacity limit.

Another cool advantage of having a cart based media. Size/contents/cost can really evolve/improve over the lifetime of a console!

By the time we get around to the DS II - 1Gbyte carts may be common.

DQIX and also Tales of Innocence (which is fully voice acted) are both likely to use 2 Gigabit carts.

the DS will soon have more storage than the Wii.

What if Nintendo had built something in both the DS and Wii and they could assimilate (propable typo here) into another console Transformers-like (along with the sound). Madness!

OT Japanese DS gamers are in for a real treat this holiday period, eh?

With just a sip of beer I could say this looks like a PS2 game.

As far as I can see from the scans (oh how I hate scans) the graphics are magnificent for a DS game, I wonder if the DS can handle it without any slowdown?

don't be deceived by the screenshots, the in game graphics aren't that spectacular and in places are pretty disappointing, often using 2D sprites over a 3D background.
The battle scenes that look very detailed are actually pre-rendered, hence them looking so good and hence the huge cart size. I don't think many games, not even DQIX will top 128MB for a while yet.