Thank you for playing

Nintendo, along with several dozen other companies, have filed a suit at the Tokyo District Court, according to Kotaku, in their continued effort to halt the sales of the R4, a device which slots into a Nintendo DS cart slot and houses a microSD card onto which users can copy videos, photos, text files, homebrew software and, well, pirated DS games.

Nintendo's motives are entirely obvious and understandable. The R4 makes DS piracy easy and available, which is bad for business, and they control the platform. I presume that they have a strong legal case to make and that they'll probably win. However, I am personally quite sad about these developments.

Mostly it's down to the homebrew. Talented amateurs out there are elevating the DS from a gaming platform to a full-blown PDA with excellent scheduling and diary software, text readers and video players. These are all things Nintendo could have and should have released to further push the DS to the forefront of handheld devices. Nintendo has, quite rightly in some aspects, chosen to be a "simply games" company, focusing on fun and input schemes to bring gaming to a wider audience. Since the Gamecube have they stated that they are not interested in the number of triangles on screen or raw processing power and, considering the wild hotcake in a blaze success of the Wii and DS they certainly weren't wrong about that strategy.

Yet I feel the full potential of the DS remains locked. Very few eBook carts have been released (in Japan) and no good diary software has been made available for purchase. With the touch screen input and WiFi capabilities the DS is screaming to be more than "just a gaming console" and by and large, that is exactly what it has remained. Talking cookbooks and TV tuners aside, it could have been so much more.

So homebrew is not just picking up Nintendo's slack, it is also providing other excellent uses. A lot of amateurs and hobbyists have been creating their own titles, with varying degrees of success, giving them valuable experience in console game development. Others have ported with great love and care those older titles from other platforms for which the market is too small to make publishers care about. For all the crying and begging for DS ports of classic LucasArts adventures, for example, it has been left to the homebrew scene to create an amazing port of the SCUMMVM engine. Homebrew is a truly wonderful thing. But it is, of course, sadly diametrically opposed to Nintendo's licensing business.

But however much annoyed Nintendo might be with the hobbyists it's obviously the pirates that have them fuming. It's undeniable that the R4 facilitates piracy. A simple Google search will result in a long list of sites that offer roms for download and putting them on an R4 to play is extremely easy, even though some clever anti-piracy measures have been experimented with. Nintendo could find ways to force working anti-piracy measures into their games, at some cost no doubt, so inevitably the R4 must die.

This is a shame. I hope sincerely Nintendo will at least consider incorporating the better aspects that homebrew has brought us so far into whatever is next for the DS. While the R4 lasted it brought us some great things. It's a shame that that inevitably brought with it the piracy that will eventually get it suppressed.