Great Expectations - And no let down!!! (100 Classic Book Collection (DS))

Member Name: valve90210

Product:	100 Classic Book Collection (DS)
Date:	15/04/09 (217 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A great collection of brilliant books, very easy to use

Disadvantages: bad hyphenation at times, constant page turning

I quite enjoy doing a bit of reading from time to time, normally before I settle down to sleep at night to help me switch off, so when I saw the advertisements for 100 Classic Books Collection for the Nintendo DS, I was quite tempted by it.

I did a bit of reading about it and found a list of the books included, which I have to say is really quite an impressive list which I would imagine includes something to cover the interests of pretty much everyone. The collection really does contain some classic novels from some of the most celebrated writers, the full list being:

Louisa May Alcott
(Little Women)

Jane Austen
(Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility)

Harriet Beecher Stowe
(Uncle Tom's Cabin)

R.D. Blackmore
(Lorna Doone)

Anne Bronte
(The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)

Charlotte Bronte
(Jane Eyre, The Professor, Shirley, Villette)

Emily Bronte
(Wuthering Heights)

John Bunyan
(The Pilgrim's Progress)

Frances Burnett
(Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Secret Garden)

Lewis Carroll
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass)

Wilkie Collins
(The Moonstone, The Woman in White)

Carlo Collodi
(The Adventures of Pinocchio)

Arthur Conan Doyle
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes)

Joseph Conrad
(Lord Jim)

Susan Coolidge
(What Katy Did)

James Fenimore Cooper
(Last of the Mohicans)

Daniel Defoe
(Robinson Crusoe)

Charles Dickens
(Barnaby Rudge, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities)

Alexandre Dumas
(The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers)

George Eliot
(Adam Bede, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss)

Henry Rider Haggard
(King Solomon's Mines)

Thomas Hardy
(Far From The Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of The D'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree)

Nathaniel Hawthorne
(The Scarlet Letter)

Victor Hugo
(The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables)

Washington Irving
(The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon)

Charles Kingsley
(Westward Ho!)

D.H. Lawrence
(Sons And Lovers)

Gaston Leroux
(The Phantom of the Opera)

Jack London
(The Call of the Wild, White Fang)

Herman Melville
(Moby Dick)

Edgar Allen Poe
(Tales of Mystery and Imagination)

Sir Walter Scott
(Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley)

Anna Sewell
(Black Beauty)

William Shakespeare
(All's Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Henry the Fifth, King Lear, King Richard the Third, Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello - the Moor of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale)

Robert Louis Stevenson
(Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island)

Jonathan Swift
(Gulliver's Travels)

William Thackeray
(Vanity Fair)

Anthony Trollope
(Barchester Towers)

Mark Twain
(Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of Tom Sawyer)

Jules Verne
(Round the World in Eighty Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)

Oscar Wilde
(The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray)


Having read a bit of Charles Dickens when I was at school, and bizzarely having actually enjoyed his story-telling, I was quite interested in reading more of his work and was pleased to see that he was very well represented in this collection. I was also interested to read quite a number of the other works, so I decided to buy this product.

When I loaded it up I was presented with what is basically a book shelf to scroll along with all the books on, from here I selected Great Expectations by clicking on it. I had the opportunity to read about Charles Dickens and a bit about the book but I skipped those and got straight into reading.

Holding the DS rotated so it's like you are holding a book, the two screens act as a double page for you to read, once you are finised reading these pages, a quick swipe of the touch screen in the appropriate direction turns the pages for you, if you want to go back to a previous page, again a simple swipe of the touchscreen turns the pages for you.

If you don't want to use the touch screen for page turning you can also do so using the consoles buttons which you can programme within the settings menu so any page you want cn pretty much be assigned to turn pages back and forward.

If you are lefthanded, you can select to hold the DS rotated clockwise so the touchscreen is on the left.

When you are done reading, you can place a bookmark in the book to mark where you've got to. Up to 3 bookmarks can be left in each book so it's possible for multiple readers to keep track of their progress.

Using this bit of software (it really can't be called a game) really couldn't be more simple, it really would be suitable for anyone to use, even complete non-console gamers!

A nice touch is the inclusion of relaxing music and sound that I find really helps me relax and get into my reading.

Having done a fair bit of reading on this software, I would have to say, it is a brilliant idea and works very well indeed, however there are a couple of drawbacks which personally I feel mean it can't be given a full 5 stars and hence the 4 star rating.

The first problem is the amount of text on each page, even when set to small text, there is not a huge amount of text on each page which means if you are even a moderately quick reader, you will be constantly turning the page. Whilst this is not exactly much of a problem it can make it a bit harder to read some of the works where paragraphs can be very long and having to turn the page so often can hinder the flow of the writing making it harder to read (and when some of the included titles are quite hard going as it is, this could be annoying)

The second problem is the sometimes terrible hyphenation of words on the screen which again makes it harder to keep reading at times.

These two problems aside, I have to say this really is a wonderful bit of software, simple enough for anyone and everyone to use and a massive collection of books (there are even 10 more to download if you have a wifi connection, though I've not tried this yet) from some truely great authors. This really will keep you going for a very long time!

Part of me wishes I commuted to work on the train rather than driving as this would give me much more time to read, as it is I only realy read before I go to sleep and with the nice relaxing music I find my brain is switched off and ready to fall alseep very quickly so I don't get a great deal of reading done in each session!!

If you enjoy reading and have a DS, this really is a must have! A wonderful innovative and different use for what is really turning into the best handheld console ever!!!

Summary: If you like reading you really must get this!!!