Is it the next big thing?
By now, many people have purchased the DS, through pre-order or allow themselves to be tempted in the store by the look and feel of this interesting little device.
THe concept for the DS is sound, of course, given Nintendo's obsession with connectivity. That is right, I threw the gauntlet down and said obsession. There is no other way to really understand the big N's decision to do the things that it does with it's handhelds. Back in the year, there was a rumor in the industry that Nintendo actually feared the PSP for some reason. Why? After all, the most successful system to date, in all it's forms, is the Game Boy. This titanical empire of handheld gaming has held off the likes of Sega, Neo Geo, and the other rag-tag bits of handhelds that have briefly surface here and there to try and knock Nintendo from it's lofty perch on top of the hand held mountain.
Maybe the little bit of doubt came back to Nintendo from back in the day. Back in the day, a company called Sony decided to topple Nintendo from another throne, the Console war. Nintendo, the bad desicion-making company that it was, decided to go against current market trends and go wiht cartridges. From there, the rest is history.
So, maybe there is somethign to fear after all. The DS, while a cool looking little guy with it's stylus and duel screens is still, at heart, a cartridge-based system. While the DS is nifty, there is still a heavy sense of connectivity to be involved. The heads at Nintendo still claim that the DS will be " A important part of the new system", only leading us to beleive that the trend of connectivity will continue. While I am not a fan of some of the DS's features... namely the thumb pad...I have to give pause to any doom filled Nintendo theories. Again and again Nintendo's demise has been forcasted, but the come up on top in some way. I still think that the mightly gaming company is running out of it's bag of tricks, it might not be enough to count the gaming company out. People were sure that the 64 was going to be the end of them ,and still the GBA kept them afloat.
I guess the real question is how long can the hand held keep a company afloat?