The DSi launches on Sunday and I am giddy with excitement. When the DSi was first announced, I was pretty ho-hum about it.  At the same time, I knew I would buy one as the need to purchase new Nintendo hardware is coded into my very genetic code.  I was ho-hum about the original DS, the DS Phat if you will, until I Ninentdogs came out.  Then I had to have one.

When the DS Lite came out, I was all over that like stink on a monkey due to the various improvements made to the device.   The DSi brings improvements, no doubt, however none of them, on the surface, appear to be as profound as the changes from DS Phat to DS Lite.  Think of this as the DS version of upgrading from DVD to Blu-Ray where the upgrade from Phat to Lite was like going from a VCR to DVD.

Now, I resolved myself to buying a DSi months ago once they were available for preorder as I would like bigger screens, the ability to change the brightness without having to go to the main menu and the ability to go to the main menu without rebooting the thing, but what I’m really excited for is the SD card support and even that feature didn’t get me all hot and bothered until two weeks ago.

What happened two weeks ago?  It’s pretty simple. I started playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

GTA: Chinatown Wars is set in Liberty City, same as GTA IV and GTA IV: Lost and the Damned.  Chinatown Wars only has two islands (no Alderney here) however all of the popular Liberty City landmarks and boroughs are present.  If you’ve played GTA IV, you’ll recognize what you’re seeing in Chinatown Wars.  At several points you even tussle with The Lost, a biker gang that is an obvious nod to the gang you meet up with in GTA IV and lead in GTA IV: Lost and Damned.  Chinatown Wars is an incredible amount of fun, made even more fun by the ability to recognize places I passed by every day when playing the game’s older brothers.

So I’m playing this fantastic portable version of GTA and I’m straight off the heels of playing Lost and the Damned which was as good a piece of DLC you’re likely to find out there and I thought, man, wouldn’t it be great if you could get DLC for Chinatown Wars the same way you could for GTA IV?  (The fact that I read that new races would be available for all versions of the upcoming Blood Bowl after release except for the DS version didn’t hurt either.)  Then it hit me.  The DSi supports SD cards, which means more storage.  The DSi will be able to play games off of the SD cards, or at least move content off of the cards and into the onboard storage for game access.

Holy crap.  Is DLC now a possibility on the DSi?  Will I be able to buy a Chinatown Wars expansion pack with more characters, more missions and more weapons?  Not knowing what the hardware limitations are in regards to accessing the SD card storage while playing a game, I could just be dreaming here, but if Nintendo was able to enable SD card game play on the Wii with nothing more than a software update, why not have the same thing for the DSi.

Once I got started thinking about this, my mind went to even more glorious places.  Imagine a game like GTA for the Wii and the DSi where you can play all you want, doing whatever in the Wii version, and then, once you’re done, you can save your player, with all of his or her stats to your SD card, slap that card into a DSi and then continue your adventures in the portable version.  Once done in the DSi version, you took the card out, put in the Wii and continued.  Maybe each version has missions or features that are only in that version, as an incentive to buy both versions.   Obviously, there would have to be some concessions made in each version to make up for what the other doesn’t have, but still, even with this, if the game had a big enough hook so that you didn’t want to stop playing it, being able to bring it with you when you leave would mean that you never had to stop playing it.

If the ultimate ending point is a unified console, as some pundits would lead you to believe, then this type of connectivity should be part of it.  I buy two copies of Galactrix, one for my PSWii360 and one for my DSP.  When I’m done earning experience on the console, my save can be loaded up in the handheld.  I don’t have to sacrifice time playing on one version for time spent on another.  All time is towards progress in both versions.  Good Lord.  Can you imagine?

In the mean time, I’m going to try and be happy with what the DSi brings, rather than dream what could happen, only to find that it won’t happen.  Still though, when I unbox the DSi and slide the SD card in, it’ll be hard not to dream of a day when leaving home means you don’t have to leave your games behind.