Nintendo DS Lite intelligently designed hand-held games console
Nintendo really shouldn’t be here now. Its Game Cube console, if you believe some areas of the press, has been a total failure, while the Nintendo DS was all set to be completely overwhelmed by Sony’s PlayStation Portable hand-held.
And yet here we are. After the PSP’s strong start, Nintendo’s DS has shot ahead in sales, the Game Cube has still managed to ship over 20 million units worldwide and the forthcoming Wii console has been garnering the kind of positive buzz that money alone simply can’t buy. And it’s arriving on time.
Nintendo has, to be fair, been arguing for some time that there’s more to games machines than sheer brute force. Certainly on paper the PSP eases ahead of the DS in terms of sheer performance potential.
But in the same way that the original monochrome Game Boy saw off the colour Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear, the DS is winning many friends, and rightly so. For Nintendo has focused, wisely, on the software.
And that doesn’t mean retreading as many old franchises as you can dig up. It’s about games that may not have the best graphics, may not look the finest in the shop window, yet in terms of playability and originality, they’re simply fresh.
