This is my second GameSpotting, and it's going to be about the Nintendo DS again. Just a warning. If you want to read about things that are not the DS, I encourage you to check out the entirety of my journal. There's a link somewhere on this page.

I honestly don't want this to be a running theme--I do know about and have opinions aonother things, and I don't want to be "that guy who won't shut up about the DS." But I had a thought the other day about the DS, because somebody was asking--on a notorious video game forum which I will not name--about how many people actually planned to play the DS outside of their homes. I think I answered that I'd mostly play it at home and on airplanes... not so much on the bus to work.

The reason I bring this up is because I actually don't think this is very important, my not really wanting to play the DS in public or to use it to kill time while making use of public transportation. That is, it's not very important to me that the DS is portable. In fact, I don't think it's very important at all that the DS is portable. The portability of the hardware is merely incidental; the way its design worked out it just happens to be portable. The primary reason for being of the DS is not its portability.

This stands in stark contrast to pretty much every other handheld system ever produced. The Game Boy's entire reason for being was to be the first portable, programmable system. The Atari Lynx was to be the system that brought color graphics to the portable realm, the Game Gear was a Master-System-but-portable, the Turbo Express was a Turbo-Grafx-but-portable. The Wonderswan and Neo Geo Pocket were attempts to compete with the aging Game Boy that might have worked if not for Pokemon. The PSP is a PS2-but-portable. Or it's a Lynx-but-way-better. Sony hasn't decided yet, but they'll let you know.

What all of these machines share in common is that if they were not portable they would be unremarkable.

But the DS--Nintendo's own indecision about whether it's a hardcore gamer's delight or the device that will bring gaming to the masses notwithstanding--if the DS was not portable, if it were a home system with all of its included features, it might be a strange beast but it could not be called unremarkable. The DS' design grew from the questions "what if we built games around a touch screen" and "what if we had a consumer game product that used two screens"? The bizarre love child of Punch-Out and an ATM.

It doesn't matter where you play the DS. It's not just supposed to be a time killer on the bus, no more than a book, though perfectly portable (much more so than the DS, even) is "supposed" to be read on the go. You're not somehow wasting the potential of a book, or the DS, by enjoying it in a chair at home.

I talked this over with a friend, and we could only find two examples of hardware that fell into this category of portable systems that had some other raison d'etre aside from mere portability. Unfortunately for my argument they are the Virtual Boy and the N-Gage. The Virtual Boy was, somehow, portable in that it could run on batteries and be taken along on trips. But its primary function was to play games using a 3D display. The N-Gage merged a cell phone with (bad) games. Even if the Virtual Boy were not portable, were battery power not an option, it would have been a unique system. And the N-Gage... well, it's still a great idea in theory, isn't it?

In any case: it is certainly advantageous for Nintendo if people think of the Nintendo DS as "the next Game Boy," because of the sales and word-of-mouth hype that will most assuredly spring from that image. And if you look at how Nintendo is promoting the system in the US--trumpeting its wireless multiplayer and the graphically hot Metroid Prime demo--it's clear that to an extent, Nintendo wants American gamers to buy into that image.

But that's not all the DS offers. Remove the portability from the PSP--mount it on the wall of your house--and it immediately becomes far less appealing. Almost useless, in fact. But anchor the DS to a stationary spot in your home and it is still just as compelling a gameplay option.

As a gamer, that's why I'm genuinely excited about the DS. And if you agree or disagree, there's a comments link also somewhere on this page, isn't there?