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Editorials   The Nintendo DS: A Pre-E3 Analysis
- By Eric Tajchman

Not too long ago, Nintendo announced its new hardware product, the Nintendo DS, to a dazed and confused world. A resounding “WTF!!!!1!” could be heard typed around the globe. Game forums went nuts with anti-Nintendo rhetoric and anti-Nintendo fanboys on those forums grew in hostility and vehemence. This is not uncommon with Nintendo. Many of the things they announce seem to go over rather unwell with a large portion of the gaming populace, but in the end the idea proves successful and people buy it and enjoy. However, this Nintendo DS may be the one oddity that people may be correct about. There are two important concerns I have with this new piece of hardware.

The first is that Nintendo is going to be it’s biggest competitor by offering two competing machines from the same company. Despite Nintendo’s claim that the machine is not designed as a replacement for either the GameCube or the GameBoy Advance, the product is definitely designed to be a portable if not handheld system. Informed consumers and gamers will most likely notice the difference in the two systems, but the casual gamer and average buyer aren’t as likely. In fact, it’s bound to confuse the heck out of them. Even the informed and enlightened are stumped as to what to make of this new machine.

Just about every news media outlet offering coverage of the Nintendo DS have equated the machine to Nintendo’s ill-fated Virtual Boy system, created by the late Gunpei Yokoi. I mention Yokoi-san because in many ways, the Nintendo DS sounds like an idea from the same R&D1 man who brought us the Game&Watch, the GameBoy, and the Virtual Boy. In fact, some of the later Game&Watch handhelds even had a second flip-top screen a la Nintendo DS.

However, while everyone says that this new machine is nothing but a virtual Virtual Boy, one has to remember that the Virtual Boy did have some innovative games with it, and despite its horrible sales and optometrists' disdain for it, the Virtual Boy did not hamper Nintendo all that much, if at all. At the time, Nintendo had the extremely well-selling SNES and GameBoy to provide a rich source of revenue. However, Nintendo doesn’t have that luxury with the upcoming system. In fact, its strongest market and its star product are in danger of being overtaken by the Industry Machine called Sony and its own handheld, the PSP. Nintendo either doesn’t see this, has a sure-fire contingency plan to counteract all negative consequences of their DS, or is going in with blind faith towards an industry that hasn’t recognized Nintendo’s complete dominance in almost 8 years.

My second concern with this system is much more serious. The most influential reason as to why Sega dropped out of the console contest with its Dreamcast actually stems back almost 10 years before, when the Genesis and Super Nintendo were at their most popular and just before Sony’s Playstation came to fruition. Sega, however, was researching how to create the next console long before Nintendo gave thought to it. How to create a new console that was more powerful and took advantage of new technology was Sega’s query. Thus, Sega released the 32X, an add-on for the Genesis that turned the 16-bit machine into a 32-bit behemoth. But, this was just before the popularity of CDs, and so shortly thereafter, Sega released the Sega CD, an add-on for the Genesis that made the machine capable of reading games from CDs. Time passed, and after Sony and Nintendo split on their SNES CD project and the former announced its Playstation, Sega also announced its own new system, the Saturn.

Here’s the problem. For an entire year after the Saturn launched, Sega was still giving equal support to the Saturn, the Genesis, the 32X, the Sega CD, the Game Gear, and (believe it or not) the Master System. Many third-party developers became discouraged at the indecisiveness of Sega to fully support a single platform. Many publishers became frustrated that sales of their games on a Sega system were being severely hampered by their same game on a separate Sega system. In essence, Sega was competing with itself, and in the end the lost.

I see this problem with Nintendo announcing their new Nintendo DS, though not on so much of a hugely catastrophic scale. Nintendo already has a strained relationship with many third-party developers and publishers. Offering a new platform to create games for has the potential to confuse publishers and game makers and push third-party relations over an insurmountable barrier. While some developers have expressed interest in the Nintendo DS, many more are likely to have the same negative response that gamers across the Internet had.

However, this is all mere speculation on what we know now and what I know about the industry in the past. Nintendo has also announced an explanatory meeting in March hoping to clarify on many aspects of the new system before it is officially unveiled at E3 in May. As always, we’ll be at E3 to bring you news and impressions on anything and everything Nintendo.