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It's funny how many things can happen in a short period of time. Then you take the time to reflect upon those things and try to come to some conclusion, even though there was no question to start with. Yeah, I know, I'm not making any sense. I'll just go straight into the meat of the subject, maybe that'll help.

It seems just like yesterday, I bought my Nintendo DS. The first SKU, mind you; or the DS Fat if you prefer. Now, I realise that it will soon be the time for Nintendo to announce its successor, and that made me think. First off, how about a short (and probably inaccurate) recap of the system so far?

The sytem was off to a rather slow start, but heck, it was one cool novelty, and Meteos rocked. Some people thought that the DS would sell poorly and get no support due to its unconventional approach to gaming. This pretty much coincides with the time Nintendo started their new "Disruption/Blue Ocean" strategy/business mindset. Then developpers started making a few interesting games that we wouldn't have imagined doing before. (Seriously, would you have given Trauma Center a chance at succeeding on another console at the time?) Slowly over time, the little handheld that could picked up some steam. Then came the DS Lite, and now you'd be hard pressed to find a gamer without one. Even people who have never been much into gaming have one. They're playing on the bus, in the waiting room and veen at work. It's all the rage. There has to be a statistic somewhere showing that there are 3 DSs sold per person in Japan.

Fast-forward to last week. A game you may have heard of is coming to said system. You know it; Chrono Trigger. After listening to the clock ticking for like an hour, I looked up other Square Enix projects. Final Fantasy 1 through 6 have been remade (most on GBA), 3 and 4 getting a radical, three-dimensional facelift. Crossovers with main entries like FFCC: Ring of Fates and FFXII: Revenant Wings have been made for DS. Dragon Quest IX, a main entry in the franchise, will be exclusive to the handheld.

That ignited a spark in my brain. A stupid spark, maybe, but a spark nonetheless. With all those remakes and whatnot, doesn't it feel like the SNES all over again?

I noticed I have over 20 games for the DS only, with about a dozen more that I want to get my hands on. There are truly many games on the DS that have reached critical acclaim, become niche favorites and provided fresh experiences. In some weird way, I feel like it's 1993 again. The 16-bit era, sometimes considered the Golden Age of gaming. I may be digressing here for a moment, but I also feel like the industry is going somewhere, doing something much bigger than we could have thought at the release of the DS, which could be the console that ushers in a new epoch. (Am I using this word in a proper context? Regardless, gotta watch the hyperbole...) Again, this is another discussion entirely.

So now we speculate on the future of the DS. Sure, it's still got a year or two left in it, but it will need a successor eventually, right? I listened to IGN's Nintendo Voice Chat podcast today, and they briefly discussed what the next Nintendo handheld will be. While listening to that, I realised it may be harder to come up with something viable than I had originally thought.

The only reason it would need two screens is if it is backwards-compatible with DS games, which it pretty much needs to be in some sense. You have to keep a touch screen on there. Then you need a new format, one that won't be hacked as easily. Now you end up with two cartridge slots still, and they take up space. Speaking of space, how about some internal memory? Of course you'll want to expand the system with that, because it wouldn't make business sense to not enable digital downloads, you'd lose out on too much money. Now you want the system to fit into Nintendo's all-inclusive strategy, meaning it has to be one with its home console cousin. If you're going to make it fully compatible with the Wii, wirelessly, of course, you have to make the DS2 can handle the digital stress of constantly streaming info inbound and outbound. If Wi-Fi is a major component, you'll need an efficient battery, one that won't die quickly. Last of all, and more importantly, you have to do this so it's both affordable for the consumer and profitable for the company.

That last paragraph is naught but a glimpse of the challenges that face the engineers working at Nintendo; at least, I would assume so. Come to think of it, maybe the DS will last longer than we think, and we won't see the prototype for its successor before another 3 years or so. Maybe it will come out with the Wii 2, like a dynamic duo setting out to conquer new markets...

Okay, my brain's tired. If you read the whole thing, congradulations. You just put up with a lot of barely sensical rambling. But, hey, that's what I like to do. 

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