If you walk into a bullet with zero lives left and at the same time earn an extra life, the game rewards you with 99. Lucking into this glitch is the only way I could beat Contra 4. I needed almost every one of those lives, too. 
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lol wow. That sounds extra lucky.
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I haven’t forgotten. Modes: I’ve got Panic mode, arcade mode, and tour mode with both challenge and standard options as well as Expert tour mode. I’m guessing there’s an expert arcade mode?
Edit: Just unlocked Panic mode Touch. Wasn’t expecting that. It isn’t as Moreish as the regular panic mode though.
As for awards…not many it seems.
Ah! I had forgotten 
Some of the awards are for the online mode, as you can see, which has thwarted my attempt to catch 'em all.
I’vd got a massive set of notes that I need to polish up and maybe publish as an FAQ or something.
I just submitted a request to Wiimmfi to try to get Pang back online. Fingers crossed!
Oh that would be neat. Does it retain the leaderboard data from the GameSpy days of Nintendo WFC?
Not sure, I imagine a clean sheet.
Getting excited about it now.
I really want an archive quality printed book of all of the Iwata Asks interviews.
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Gah… that should totally exist. Why doesn’t this exist? 
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Agreed
Picked up a cheap Japanese DSi on Amazon about a month ago. Still waiting for it to arrive, but I’m now kinda wishing that I went with an LL instead after reading impressions in this thread.
Yea… the regular size still had better pixel density though. And that’s closer to the size the devs had in mind when designing DS software. So you’ll still have an amazing experience.
For me though, size is a pretty big deal. I shoot for the largesy native res screen when possible these days. I realize pixel density means very little to me now as long as the resolution is native.
If you grabbed it for cheap and it has well calibrated screens, I’m sure someone would take it off your hands for a decent price rather than play the panel lottery for themselves.
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Yeah, I remember when the DSi XL released I thought I wouldn’t ever want one because of the low pixel density, but I didn’t fully appreciate how pixel art worked with the gaps between pixels or scanlines to produce a smooth image back then. And no one really knew about the high quality of those displays as Nintendo has never been great at boasting about tech specs.
That said, you’re absolutely right that devs would have been targeting the smaller screens. While the majority of DS games work great and play fine on the XL/LL model, there are some games which suffer a little. The spinners in Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents are a lot harder to, erm, spin on the XL due to the larger screen size. Yoshi’s Touch and Go is magnificent on the XL, so I guess it depends on whether a game requires you to move something really quickly.
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Thanks for the replies. I’ll see how I feel about the DSi when it arrives.
I’ve been thinking about GBA too, so I was tempted to maybe pick up a DS Lite instead, but the dpad on mine broke (it struggles to register right and down these days), and I’ve never really been a fan of how soft the dpad was on my device in the first place. I may just play my GBA games on Wii U VC (already bought Aria of Sorrow recently) and a modded 3DS using Virtual Console injects though, as I don’t exactly have a large library of GBA games in the first place.
Usually with membrane d-pads/buttons if you just take the system/controller apart and clean the contact pads really well you can fix the spotty registering of input.
“Everyone buys a DSi XL”
Myself included.
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I bought 2!
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Thanks for the advice! I’ll look into doing that.
So with the advent of the new “DNS change” method of getting back online through Wiimmfi the challenge then became “How the heck do I get my modern router to talk to my old but gold handheld?”
My router is an Asus N56U_B1 and it runs a MediaTek chipset. Some extensive googling later and I have set up a separate hidden access point with just the right settings for success on a DS. I’ll leave it here just because.
If anybody needs any help doing anything similar for their router, just shout.
# custom AP for Nintendo DS compatibility
load WLAN SoftAP driver
# NDS specific
iwpriv ra0 set HT_BW=0 # 20MHz channel bandwidth
iwpriv ra0 set HtBw=0 # 20MHz channel bandwidth
iwpriv ra0 set WirelessMode=9 # b/g/n mode
# WEP specific
iwpriv ra0 set AuthMode=SHARED # shared key
iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=WEP # WEP security
iwpriv ra0 set Channel=0 # 2.4GHz mode
iwpriv ra0 set IEEE8021X=0 # needs to be off in this instance
iwpriv ra0 set DefaultKeyID=1 # default key is number 1
iwpriv ra0 set Key1=2004AD2013 # hex for key number 1
iwpriv ra0 set SSID=DS # our choice of SSID
iwpriv ra0 set HideSSID=1 # hide from prying eyes
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