Ah, Nintendo. Every iteration of hardware, you do something completely new and stupid. How you’ve survived as a hardware company this long completely baffles me. That, above, is the redesigned DS. Yes, it was announced just over a year after the original model, which is next to the Virtual Boy, from an ergonomic perspective one of the absolute worst designed pieces of hardware I’ve ever used.

The problems with the original DS are numerous. The screen, which is periodically used as a fake analog stick, is too far away to actually reach with a thumb comfortably. The edges of the unit eat into your palms, and the corners deaden the nerves in your hands. It looks like they’ve rounded off the edges, but the fundamental problem of needing to *reach* to the screen, and thus, press up against the edges of the unit have not been fixed at all.

The position of the buttons, so close to the right edge, means that you can’t rest your thumb in a comfortable position anywhere on the unit. It looks like there’s some potential that the gap between the screens has changed, which would be a pretty fatal flaw. I’m going to assume that it’s just an optical illusion created by the fact that the unit’s getting smaller overall, and not that Nintendo’s hardware engineers are insane.

So, fine. It looks more iPod like. Welcome to 2002. It maybe looks more congruent with the Revolution design. Good for you, turning something that was probably the ugliest handheld ever, into something that doesn’t make my eyes want to vomit.

The games are good – no question – the DS has been worth it two or three times over, just for Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! but the hardware itself… oh, man. And this redesign really just doesn’t do shit for it. What a shame. Talk about a missed opportunity.