DS: Dropped & Scrambled

I awoke on Monday morning to a loud crashing noise. Something nasty had just occurred in my kitchen. Rather than assuming that a burglar had just fallen through my skylight, I figured my cats had just knocked something over. Again.

Indeed they had. Their latest bout of cat-wrestling on the kitchen table had ended with my Nintendo DS being KO'ed out of the ring and down onto the hardwood floorboards below. For good measure, they had also sent my chunky set of housekeys and a dozen eggs down with it. You heard me. A dozen raw eggs.

The egg carton did a pretty respectable job, having kept nine of the eggs intact. The other three eggs had formed a sizable raw omelette on the floor with a DS in the middle. Not my ideal breakfast. Exihibiting an uncharacteristic level of intelligence, my cats had fled the scene, narrowly escaping certain death. I pulled the DS out of the eggy mucus and set about carefully wiping it clean. Luckily, only the bottom of it had egg on it and it cleaned up pretty easily. Close inspection showed two very small chips out of the silver part of the bottom left corner of the casing, indicating it had landed on it's corner. That didn't fill me with confidence. I opened it up, found it mercifully egg-free inside, and momentarily stopped breathing as I pressed the power button. The familiar DS welcome screens and echoing piano note were followed by a sigh of relief. The DS was fine and had passed this unscheduled stress test with barely a scratch.

It's good to know that the DS can take a fall without needing to be sent to the repair shop. It's inevitable that portable consoles are going to take a beating sooner or later. In this regard, the DS almost certainly has an advantage over the PSP. The DS has absolutely no moving parts, which stands it in good stead in the durability stakes. The PSP on the other hand, has many moving parts and is so densely packed that I can't imagine it taking a similar spill without ending up with a misaligned laser or worse. I'll just need to be very careful when I get my PSP. Leaving it on a kitchen table overnight could be cat-astrophic.