Nintendo DS Review

The DS was launched as a third pillar beside the GameCube and the Game Boy, an experiment Nintendo could afford to lose, and it became the company's most successful product. The touch screen invited games that had no controller equivalent, and Brain Age, Nintendogs and the Professor Layton puzzles brought in commuters, parents and grandparents who had never held a d-pad.

Underneath that, the traditional library was superb: two Zeldas built around the stylus, a Mario Kart with online play, the Pokemon generations that sold tens of millions, and a run of role playing games that made the machine the spiritual home of the genre for years. The hardware was underpowered and the original model's screens were dim, which the Lite fixed. It is the console that widened the definition of who plays games, and the library earned the audience it found.