Books on your DS? Hands on DS Bungaku Zenshuu

All those train advertisements for DS Bungaku Zenshuu work. After seeing them for the past couple of days, my curiosity peaked and I headed over to a DS download station to see what all the fuss was about.

This is probably obvious, but you hold the DS in book mode when you use DS Bungaku Zenshuu. When you want to turn to the next page you slide the stylus right or tap the right edge of the touch screen. If you need to go back you slide the stylus left or tap the left side of the screen. Quite intuitive and the page turning sounds are a nice touch. You can quickly flip through pages by tapping the bottom of the screen. This brings up a scroll bar that you can drag to a page of your choice. The other neat feature is you can set virtual bookmarks. Once you place a bookmark you can tap on it to immediately fly to that page.

One odd note is Nintendo chose not to include the kanji reading technology from the Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass in DS Bungaku Zenshuu. You might remember that in Japanese version of The Phantom Hourglass you can tap on kanji, which would prompt kana to come up. That feature would have been immensely useful in DS Bungaku Zenshuu. Instead you get eye straining furigana placed to the right of the characters.

Perhaps a video demonstration is in order? See a shaky-cam video past the break.

[youtube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=xiEyZKBcgYY[/youtube]