Saturday Soapbox: Nintendo's creative decline
The 3DS' woes are part of a broader problem that remains unaddressed.
Even if you look back to the GameCube - the last Nintendo console that is considered a failure, of sorts - you discover a host of delightful new concepts. Pikmin (the last truly new Shigeru Miyamoto game that mattered?), Luigi's Mansion and Animal Crossing are among the best things Nintendo has invented since the analogue stick. Even the refurbs were fantastic - think of Metroid Prime, or Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat.
Where are their equivalents on the Wii? Wii Sports was one, and Wii Fit was another, but besides those games the vast majority of Nintendo's output has been unremarkable. Fun and sometimes wonderful - I would recommend a game like Super Mario Galaxy to everybody I know - but rarely creative in the same way as a Pilotwings, or a Super Mario 64.
The Legend of Zelda - in the year of its 25th anniversary - is like a never-ending best man's speech at a wedding: you love everyone involved, you have so many wonderful memories, but you really wish it would just stop now and leave you to your reverie.
Cutting the price of 3DS is a right thing to do (the fact that the makeweight bribe being offered to loyal fans comes in the shape of recycled Game Boy games is part of the problem, mind you), but it is not the solution and nor is anything I can see on the 3DS release schedule.
Nintendo isn't a company that can make another DS or another Wii in the sense that its expectant shareholders desire.
Part of the answer perhaps lies in the Wii U. The demos I played behind closed doors at E3 came from the same place in Nintendo's collective imagination as the best games I've mentioned today, and the hardware feels magical in the way that the best Nintendo hardware feels.
If the passion and invention evident in those brief proofs-of-concept dominates the future direction of Nintendo's software development, then perhaps Wii U can at least be another GameCube. I would dearly love that.
But Nintendo isn't a company that can make another DS or another Wii in the sense that its expectant shareholders desire. The competition for the market Nintendo was first to satisfy is now fierce, and the people competing for it are better businessmen who understand the importance of emerging technologies and consumer psychology in a way that Nintendo does not.
I don't know what the far future holds for Nintendo. I hope that it finds another way to disrupt the markets that - for a few years in the 2000s, at least - it deservedly came to dominate. It won't be easy though - the Wii found itself facing an open goal nobody really knew existed, but the Wii U is a one-legged 40-yard free-kick fired into a crosswind.
As for the 3DS, Nintendo can turn it around to at least some degree - but only if it rediscovers its mojo.