I am ever protective of my games. They were, after all, an expensive investment, and I'll go to great measures to ensure they remain in like new condition. As such, I spend a great deal of money on game cases. Nintendo 64. Game Boy. Game Boy Advance. As long as they were available, I bought them. Until now. With the release of the DS, Nintendo (and third parties) have made it extremely difficult to find the proper protection. I contacted a Nintendo representative on the absence of official game cases, and he suggested I just use the actual cases the games came in. Yeah... sure. I'm going to haul those around with me when I go on vacation. Thanks.
Not satisfied, I've spent many hours searching for cases on the Internet. My desperation led me to import game cases, because nobody in America is making them! Well, that's not entirely true. Mad Catz slips two cases in all of its value packs, but I'm not about to pay $30 for a compilation of junk I mostly don't want. I e-mailed Mad Catz on the matter, but I was told there was no way to buy their cases separately.
The first batch of cases I finally got my hands on was a set of "Game Card Armor Cases" from Lik-Sang. The picture of them looked promising, but the actual case is poorly designed. It is much larger than a DS game and has six claws designed to fit around the card. The problem is trying to get the card to fit between these claws. It sometimes takes me upwards of minutes to get the game in, and only then do I feel like I just scraped up the game card's connectors. I don't like.
Fortunately, I made the terrific discovery that Smart Media cards and DS cards are almost the same size. In fact, the plastic sleeves that used to come with Smart Media cards perfectly fit DS games. But I only have a handful of these, not enough to fulfill my entire DS collection. Once again, I turned to the Internet to find a place to buy these sleeves. Nobody has them. Again, I contacted a manufacturer directly, and they said the sleeves were no longer being made. He also said he happened to have two spare sleeves just lying around on his desk, and he actually mailed them to me for free! But it wasn't enough to home my newly purchased New Super Mario Bros.
So after combing through eBay for hours and weeks later, I finally found a Hong Kong seller with a huge stock of "Game Protective Slide Cases." I went ahead and bought a pack just to try them out. They are like a mix between a sleeve and a normal, hard plastic case. The DS game slides in and snaps into place. But if you need to take it back out, you have to tug on it a little. So far, these are the best cases I have found--and I plan to purchase more--but I am worried the snapping in/out effect will eventually do damage to my games.
Alas, my search for the perfect DS game case continues.
Not satisfied, I've spent many hours searching for cases on the Internet. My desperation led me to import game cases, because nobody in America is making them! Well, that's not entirely true. Mad Catz slips two cases in all of its value packs, but I'm not about to pay $30 for a compilation of junk I mostly don't want. I e-mailed Mad Catz on the matter, but I was told there was no way to buy their cases separately.
The first batch of cases I finally got my hands on was a set of "Game Card Armor Cases" from Lik-Sang. The picture of them looked promising, but the actual case is poorly designed. It is much larger than a DS game and has six claws designed to fit around the card. The problem is trying to get the card to fit between these claws. It sometimes takes me upwards of minutes to get the game in, and only then do I feel like I just scraped up the game card's connectors. I don't like.
Fortunately, I made the terrific discovery that Smart Media cards and DS cards are almost the same size. In fact, the plastic sleeves that used to come with Smart Media cards perfectly fit DS games. But I only have a handful of these, not enough to fulfill my entire DS collection. Once again, I turned to the Internet to find a place to buy these sleeves. Nobody has them. Again, I contacted a manufacturer directly, and they said the sleeves were no longer being made. He also said he happened to have two spare sleeves just lying around on his desk, and he actually mailed them to me for free! But it wasn't enough to home my newly purchased New Super Mario Bros.
So after combing through eBay for hours and weeks later, I finally found a Hong Kong seller with a huge stock of "Game Protective Slide Cases." I went ahead and bought a pack just to try them out. They are like a mix between a sleeve and a normal, hard plastic case. The DS game slides in and snaps into place. But if you need to take it back out, you have to tug on it a little. So far, these are the best cases I have found--and I plan to purchase more--but I am worried the snapping in/out effect will eventually do damage to my games.
Alas, my search for the perfect DS game case continues.
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