Saturday Soapbox: 3DS Six Months On

But then what? Very little, as it turned out. And with sales still flagging Nintendo - to its credit - responded with a drastic and unprecedentedly early price cut, with the console plummeting to a far more attractive £115 at some retailers.

Just as critical, the advertising campaign around the price cut marked a dramatic change of tack. "The next-generation is here"; "amazing graphics"; "This is not DS, this is 3DS" - a tacit admission that these were the things Nintendo should have focused on in the first place. And not a single mention (other than in the small print) of 3D.

As hard as Nintendo, Sony, Sky and movie companies flog it, stereoscopic 3D still lacks any sense of irresistible momentum. Nintendo's focus on this feature - and to be fair, I doubt any marketing team would have done it much differently - obscured the vital fact that 3DS is far more powerful than DS. But the messaging - and even the name of the console itself - failed to communicate this.

This effective relaunch was good, positive stuff and console sales almost tripled in the immediate wake of the price cut. But without any massive games to back it up, sales soon dropped off again. Nintendo's biggest recent release, the 3D remake of Star Fox, did not do anywhere near Zelda's numbers, charting at No.9 in a slow week.

The sudden appearance of the bizarre Circle Pad extension further complicated matters. On the one hand it meant an exclusive Monster Hunter title for the platform (a huge, huge deal in Japan); but on the other it served to highlight a fundamental limitation of the original design and suggest to would-be buyers that a full revision may be on the horizon.

It's been a tougher first six months for 3DS than anyone expected. Irrespective of any missteps Nintendo may have made, iOS has in the meantime continued to explode in popularity as a portable gaming platform, offering pick-up-and-play fun often at a fraction of the price of handheld console games.

Both Sony, whose Vita launches next year, and Nintendo should be worried about the price pressure Apple's success is putting on their full-whack portable products. To argue about the relative depth of content is to miss the point.

For Nintendo, it is at last about the games. And as 3DS's first Christmas approaches, hope comes in the shape of its greatest asset, with Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 both imminent.

In other words, exactly the games that should have been there from day one. Games that will define the system with exclusive, fresh content to set it apart from rival platforms. You know, they type of games Nintendo has always made.

It seems so obvious in hindsight, but Nintendo's success has always been driven by a focus on amazing, surprising gaming experiences facilitated by great tech. Even with Wii, the technology was never an end in itself, and it would not have been the breakaway success it was had it not come packaged with its definitive experience: Wii Sports.

The reason 3DS has struggled to capture the imagination so far, then, is because it's been too much about the technology, with too little in the way of games to show us why we should care.

So my mum was right: it's all about the games. When they come, she may well learn to love 3DS, too. But for Nintendo as well as existing 3DS owners, they really can't come soon enough.