1UP.com's Jeremy Parish had the enviable privilege of playing through the first hour of Nintendo's upcoming adventure, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. He describes the experience in detail and outlines how Spirit Tracks builds on the stylus-driven controls introduced in the previous Nintendo DS Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

As it happens, Princess Zelda will take an active role in the gameplay this time around, which is bound to be more interesting for her than sitting around and shying away from a monster man-pig.

Read the preview and mark your calendars: The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks is coming to North America on December 7!

The Super Mario Bros. usually occupy the Mushroom Kingdom, but everyone needs a change of scenery sometimes--whether they want it or not.

If you're thinking of diving into Bowser's gut, you'll want to arm yourself with my review for Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story.

The sixth issue of French gaming magazine "Amusement" features a series of articles and photos about consumer frustration with buggy, malfunctioning hardware. The photos of users throwing their bricked handhelds through solid walls are particularly intriguing.

Look at the photos and relive your personal frustrations at GameSetWatch. Tiny Cartridge also has a very nice high-res version of one photo, which captures a red Nintendo DS Lite rocketing through a solid wall. The photographer is Romain Laurent.

RPG fans will be pleased to hear Nintendo plans to throw its marketing weight behind the North American and European releases of Dragon Quest IX. Dragon Quest is an enormously popular RPG series in Japan, and Square-Enix's initial decision to release the latest major installment on the Nintendo DS instead of a console came as a surprise.

Nintendo held a Q&A session at an Investor's Meeting last week, during which Nintendo executive Shinji Hatano said he'd like to see the Dragon Quest series gain popularity outside Japan. He claimed Nintendo and Square-Enix will combine their efforts to expose Dragon Quest IX to a new audience.

At the same session, Nintendo EAD General Manager Shigeru Miyamoto was asked about his recent projects. Miyamoto has been discouraged in the past from talking about his hobbies and projects for fear of them being lifted by the competition. However, Miyamoto said he's been thinking about game ideas that employ something similar to Dragon Quest IX's "sure chigai" mode, which exchanges information with other passing Dragon Quest XI players when their DS's are in sleep mode.

"Dragon Quest IX's passerby communication has caused the number of people walking around outside using their DS systems to increase greatly, and I'm thinking that I could probably make something unique like that.

"Also, recently we got a cat."

Miyamoto's cat-related addendum has gamers believing that he may well be working on a feline-centric follow-up to the enormously popular Nintendogs games. If that's the case, it's worth wondering what kind of tricks players will be able to teach their cats. "Eat?" "Sleep?" "Caterwaul at 2 a.m.?"