The Nintendo DS system will note that the Rumble Pak is installed on the system menu screen with a special "DS Option Pak inserted" message where "Start GBA game" would show up. Putting the Rumble Pak cartridge in a GBA system will not work -- the system won't boot up beyond the Game Boy screen.
The only game that officially supports it right now is the game that it comes packaged with it. Games will have to be written with the Rumble Pak in mind for the vibration feature to work. Metroid Prime Pinball puts the Rumble Pak to work by offering jolts and shimmies when the Samus ball whacks into obstacles and hazards.
Either our cartridge is broken, or the DS Rumble Pak is one of the noisiest Rumble Paks Nintendo has ever built. When playing Metroid Prime Pinball, we can hear the rumble mechanism more than we can feel the rumble effects in the system. It's so loud, in fact, that it sounds like a metallic "chirp" whenever the rumble is activated. We'd rather just not put it in the system at all. Good thing it's free, because at this point we wouldn't bother buying it as an extra.
This is odd because we've experienced handheld rumble in other Nintendo forms. Wario Ware Twisted GBA and Game Boy Color games like Pokemon Pinball used types of rumble that were quiet but effective in their feedback. Our Rumble Pak for the DS doesn't perform nearly as well as Nintendo's previous rumble efforts.
The game, however, performs much better than the rumble pak does.
Members who own this Hardware: