Retrospective: Listen, We Have to Talk

For the last year the DS has become the domain of this swell of casual/cutesy noise. A search for the word "baby" across 2009 offers me games like My Baby 2: Boy & Girl, Dreamer: Babysitter, My Animal Centre: Baby Animals, My Baby World, the quite terrifying potential of Babysitting Mania, Petz: My Baby Panda, and Hello Baby.

There are 29 games with "Petz" in the title, and a further 15 "My Pets". There are currently 51 releases in the "Imagine" series. I daren't even search for "horse".

(The Imagine series is a sinister collection. Seemingly created by a 1950s corporation to ensure little girls don't get ideas above their station, they encourage ambitions to be a Fashion Model, Cheerleader, Party Planner or Beauty Stylist. While you can be a Doctor, the series has yet to include Imagine: Business CEO, Imagine: Philosopher, or Imagine: Politician.)

Of course some of these games might be brilliant. I make no claims as to their quality, merely their subject matter. It's clear there is a massive audience for this, an audience far larger than for Rub Rabbits or Slitherlink. But it has brought with it the collapse of the DS as a machine for innovation, inspiration and the joyously strange.

We're treading water. I feel as though we're less appreciating each other's time, and more putting up with each other. I hate saying this, I hate being the one to acknowledge it, but it hangs unspoken in the air between us like a brooding cloud.

Over the years what was once so intriguing about the DS has become familiar. Once, just having the screens above one another, mimicking Nintendo's Game & Watch, was such a peculiar choice. But now it's the DS, we know the DS, we recognise the DS, that's just how the DS is. The DSi may have bigger screens, more features, but it's still the old, familiar DS.

There are still games to come. Next month brings Ace Attorney: Miles Edgeworth Investigates, and I couldn't be much more looking forward to a game. But this is surrounded by Sushi Go Round and Little Book Of Big Secrets. March promises an English language version of Rittai Picross, called Picross 3D. But then there's also Gina USA Power Shopping, Jigapix Love Is, and Animal Country: Life On The Farm.

There was a time when each week brought at least one enticing new DS title to explore. Now looking across the schedules is a troubling landscape, with occasional glimpses of shelter.

Unless you're a 12 year-old girl, of course, in which case it's a bonanza crop. But the man who wrote that love letter to the DS those years ago, it is not for him. The madness is gone. The weirdness was a temporary diversion as people grew used to the device, found out how to make it ordinary.

Sure, you're thinking Scribblenauts. You're protesting about the ongoing Professor Layton series. And they're there. The DS isn't to be abandoned or mourned.

But the relationship has changed. Even here there isn't the spirit of the strange that once ruled. There aren't running gags by multiple developers to use the initials D and S in their games' subtitles, nor the in-gag of concealing outstretched hands on game covers. It's moved on, occasionally offering games that recall the past. And that's sad.

I have no plans to leave you. I'd never cheat on you. But, look, ever since the beginning of 2009 you've been so different. And around the beginning of 2009 I made friends with the iPhone. And sometimes I feel like it just understands me better.

It might be coincidence that it was at the beginning of 2009 that the iPod Touch and iPhone sprang into gaming life. But it's unavoidable that this is now the place to look for mad, weird, inventive, inspired, interesting, novel and deranged gaming. The cheaper prices, easier availability, and sheer range of choice, from developers who are once more alive with the possibilities represented by this new device, have replaced the DS as the home for the strange. The DSi has not made any dent in this, nor indeed seemed to try. Perhaps this is the way it will always be.

I know we have plans. I know there are some good times to come. But I'm frightened of the gaps between. Our hopes punctuate a coldness we cannot deny any longer.

I don't know what I want to do. I don't want to break up. Please, don't let us break up. But you have to let me know you still want me, that this is more than prolonging the familiar, repeating the routine. I love you. I'll always love you. But we have to acknowledge it. We're in trouble. We're not right.

Love always,

John