Give the consumers a wow-factor product (not talking about World of Warcraft here), give the consumer some original titles that showcase what the device can do, make it affordable and you are set.

Device: DS

Original titles: Nintendogs, Brain Age, Trauma Center, Elite Beat Agent, Guitar Hero On Tour, Phoenix Right, Metroid Prime: Hunters, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, New International Track & Field, Ubisofts plethora of word and language titles.

I haven’t tried even half of the titles here, but I still use them as examples, and some of them aren’t maybe what you’d normally regard as being original, such as the language titles and the Metroid title, but the execution is original and that’s what counts.

Price: fairly low

The best titles for the Nintendo DS are those that explore the touch screen, and incorporate it into the interface to the fullest, possible extent. This often results in arcade like games, but also new takes on established genres, or genres previously rarely seen on handheld gaming machines.

As for the category “new takes on established genres” Nintendo haven’t always made a good example for others to follow. Mario Kart is the prime example.. they didn’t use the touch screen as a steering wheel for inexplicable reasons and only put a map on the screen, now the critics and public loved it anyways because it performed so well in most of the other departments (WiFi, speed sensation, course layout) and actually controls as well, but it showed that not even Ninty always tried to push the envelope. But why haven’t there been a Pikmin type of RTS game? Maybe it’s simply because the hardware is so weak, or because Ninty cannot allocate that many resources to DS projects, so some have to be scratched. One of the first ideas I got when I heard about the DS was to introduce a radical new control mechanic for 2D platformers such as Prince of Persia. The idea here wouldn’t have been to put the view on the touch screen, but instead do something similar of what Metroid Hunters did, i.e. control the sword–if we stick with Prince of Persia example–on the touch screen and move the character with the d-pad, have the action/view on the upper screen. This would allow for a very detailed control scheme for the sword. Back then i was thinking that you drew swipes as if the touch screen was utilised in a “2D fashion”, but later I realized that the best way to control the action would probably be if the touch screen was utilised in a way as if it was from the view of the the sword wielding protagonist, so if you if you drew a line from right to left on the screen, the protagonist would make a swipe with the sword from right to left, and that’s also the most logical solution; which makes me curious as to why we haven’t seen this control mechanic in a 2D sidescrolling game yet on the DS.

What with “genres previously rarely seen on handheld gaming machines”? Take for example Nintendos own stand out attempts: Nintendogs and Brain Age. There have been a wealth of Nintendogs titles, but that’s really just the same simulation with a new dog attached to it, nothing wrong with that since the dog is what makes the titles, but maybe Nintendo should look into other pet simulations or completely different simulations. As for the brain training titles, Nintendo has said that they wont release more titles, they don’t feel like there would be anything more for them to add. It’s of course great that they don’t go the EA way and “release a new Madden every year”, but there are definitely more things they could do. WiFi competition where you could watch the other players performance on the left or right screen, in the same fashion as the Big Brain Academy works on the Wii would have been great for one. EDIT: I know Brain Age 2 has that kind of multiplayer but it doesn’t work with the WiFi so you can only do it with someone within your vicinity. It would also have been great if they’d narrowed the gap between exercise titles and arcade like titles such as Wario Ware; and with that I mean that they should add a play mode similar to Wario Ware to a Brain Age title. Yes, there is the Brain Age check that you can do once every day, but that age check moves forward from one exercise to another in a very comfortable way (showing an explanation screen before a new task begins). A more “wario ware-esque” play mode would for example probably feature some kind of tempo curve that became more frenetic and in other words harder the longer you managed to stay in the play mode.

Nintendo don’t really tap into the untapped market much, they just explore it, but are they circling around it like hungry wolves or is it just Nintendo teasing the public? Of course it’s not the latter, Nintendo is simply incapable of allocating resources to DS projects, and they are incapable of finding enough developers, mainly because the hardware is so insufficient. Compared to the PSP the DS looks like last gen in terms of technology and if Ninty had stepped back for a while to get a better view of the big picture they would have realised that one of the reasons there aren’t for example a lot of 3d party FPS games for the DS isn’t because the device interface is flawed but because the hardware is. I would go as far as to say that Ninty would get more 1p shooters on the DS if they introduced a DS2.. why? Artistic integrity. Development teams that make 1p shooters want to be able to show off great looking environments, character models. Can they do that on the DS2 they will develop a great game for that system, and here’s the thing.. they will probably even be able to downscale it to the DS in a hurry if they know that there is a market for it. Do I sound contradictory? Maybe a little, but the reason this makes sense is because the developer have already been able to more or less realize their artistic vision on the DS2, so they are happy with that, and the effort they have to put into downscaling it to the DS wouldn’t be a lot, since it would probably more or less be able to use the same control interface. (Sure there’d be accelerometers and gyroscopes on the DS2, but what would that do to the overall gameplay of a FPS game?) In other words: introducing a new handheld would result in more games for the DS not less, at least until the “DS 1″ market is saturated, and you can’t ask for more.