Review of DS Lite Action Replay

I bought two of these for my two kids for Christmas, and each one works perfectly.The boys were so stoked being able to max out their Pokemon on Diamond and Pearl!Whoever said "cheaters never win" obviously didn't use an Action Replay DS for playing Pokemon Diamond.Really was money well spent.As another reviewer put it, they were the Kings of the DS!Given that, I want to try to address some of the complaints I've seen about this excellent product.

I easily installed the software on my computer (Windows XP operating system -- I can't address it's compatibility with Vista or Mac), and easily updated said software by clicking on the "update" icon.Updating the codes on the device itself wasn't as intuitive as I originally thought, though, and I initially couldn't get it to work because my computer couldn't "see" the device.Yes, the instruction booklet could be written more clearly; however, anyone that has more than a nodding acquaintance with computers shouldn't be put off by what is an all-too-common complaint with computer components:poorly written instructions.After I *carefully* reread those instructions it was obvious what my problem was.The Action Replay DS must be inserted in the Nintendo DS (with the cable attached to the device and plugged into a USB slot on your computer) and the Nintendo DS must be then powered on for your computer to "see" it and to enable you to update the device.I'm guessing the small amount of power trickling through the USB connection isn't enough to enable the thing to work, but whatever the case is, you have to have it in a powered-up Nintendo DS for it to update.If your computer can't find the driver for your Action Replay DS, just tell it to search the internet for it and it'll find it for you (it'll find something called "NDS" something or other), then just tell it to install it.

Once you've established connectivity, if you use the software to do a "quick update" it will delete all the codes currently on the Action Replay DS and attempt to replace them with all the codes on codejunkies.com for the Nintendo DS.What you'll find is the hackers at codejunkies.com have been busy writing new cheats for new and old games since your Action Replay DS was packaged.The end result is they have more codes than your Action Replay DS can hold, thus, when you get about 80% of the codes loaded, it'll give you a message along the lines of "update canceled, memory is full" and will stop updating the Action Replay DS.Since it takes several minutes to get to that point, I recommend you only update the codes for those games you actually have.Just peruse the codejunkies US list, and drag the folders for the games you want to the main window, and the software will replace the existing data (if it already exists on the Action Replay DS) with the new data.There are other ways to manage this, too, and I'll leave it to you to read the instructions to find out.

In any case, I'll bet you ten bucks that 99% of the complaints for this are from people who didn't follow the directions.It's OK to complain when something truly doesn't work, but it just makes you look foolish when you didn't even follow the written instructions that came with the thing.Besides, other than smashing it with a hammer, jamming a crayon in the cable socket, or cutting the cable, I'm not sure how you could "break" this thing.Of course, 7-year-olds are prodigies when it comes to breaking things, so I guess I shouldn't speak so fast.Anyway, I hope this all helps someone out there.



Click Here to see more reviews about: DS Lite Action Replay