Nintendo's ongoing dominance of portable gaming has had a schizophrenic genesis. The original Gameboy had a brick-like, toyish quality which made it look natural only in the hands of children; its sequel, the Gameboy Advance was slightly more attractive, but no more mature, and it was cursed with a screen so poor people took to soldering in cathode lights to make it usable.
Then, unexpectedly, Nintendo got it right with the the Gameboy Advance SP. The Advance SP sported a design that was so elegant and grown-up that it revolutionised the social perception of handheld consoles. Suddenly, unveiling your Gameboy on the plane drew admiring glances regardless of your age or questionable self-awareness. Genuinely pocket-sized and utterly desirable, it seemed Nintendo was taking intelligent cues from the Mac school of design.
But then something went wrong. The Nintendo DS, its latest handheld, has clearly suffered a lengthy entanglement with the ugly tree. It's a genuinely progressive piece of hardware, admittedly, but it's far more likely to draw laughter rather than lust in public.
Silver plastic has had its blingy moment in the sun, and on the DS's fatted frame looks simply tacky - it might be going for Powerbook stylings, but without an aluminium body it feels more like a Camden Market bootleg.
The introduction of new colour schemes next year should do it some favours - the jet black model especially will give it a much sleeker appearance - but it's unquestionably lost the aesthetic war with Sony's impending rival, the PlayStation Portable (PSP). Being a pure games machine with no extra features, the DS is also in the shadow of the PSP's movie and music functions, too.
But where it has won out is in innovation. Its second screen is a PDA-style touchpad, immediately opening up a good half-dozen new ways to interface with games - drawing, rubbing, dragging, pushing, pulling, writing...
The most unexpected surprise from the DS is how intuitive and easy it is to steer Mario 64's primary coloured heroes or Metroid Prime's first-person perspective using the touchscreen and the console's bundled thumb cap.
It's a small plastic nipple on the end of shoelace-like strap attached to the DS, which slips over your thumb so you can use the bottom screen in a similar fashion to a laptop touchpad, without risking greasy, acidic thumbprints all over the screen.
