Hey, this rumor was around prior to the launch of the DS as well! Rumors are being recycled!
Also, the hardware is sounding unusually beefy for a Nintendo system. Nintendo really needs to bundle up with a cell phone vendor before Apple gets its act together and puts decent hardware controls on an iphone.
No, the ignorance is sounding typical. Nintendo has always had more powerful hardware than their biggest mainstream rival in any generation UNTIL the Wii.
Or perhaps you are thinking of the handheld market where their "when the tech is affordable and mainstream" tactics are a proven-successful strategy? Heck, because the DS beat the PSP to launch, it's hard to say that it counts because they STILL had the most powerful mainstream gaming handheld at launch.
Sure, the SEGA GameGear was more powerful than a GameBoy, but how many million-selling software titles did it have (not counting Master System)? I'd bet "none." Even the classic black and white GameBoy had million-seller after million-seller. My point is that they are incomparable. It's like comparing the NEC Turbo Express to it. "What?," you say, to which I would say, "my point exactly," and I even own one. Besides, like the SEGA Nomad after it, it was just a repackaged previous-generation console- literally. The GameGear was a Sega Master System and could play SMS carts just like the Nomad played Genesis carts and the Turbo Express played Turbo Grafx cards (yes, "cards").
NES trounced the Atari 2600/2600 Jr, Atari's ONLY "mainstream" attempts
by far with Atari being their closest competitor. Even as a die-hard gamer, I had never even HEARD of the SEGA Master System then. Not many in the USA had.
SNES was clearly superior to the Genesis with hardware scaling and rotation, higher colors/transparancy, more background layers, and even a dedicated sound CPU (SPC700).
The N64 was clearly superior to the PlayStation with the only serious competitive disadvantage being storage-space.
The GameCube was clearly superior to the Playstation 2, their biggest mainstream competitior.
EARLY in the GCN's lifecycle, they announced that they would no longer try to compete by simply upping specs, as the competition was now doing this too (Microsoft) and 3D games had reached the level where the same games could be made on any platform no matter how many more polygons it could render or pixels it could shade, they would just be "less pretty" on older hardware. They are right. The same "games" from this generation can be made on the GameCube, only less pretty. Thus, the Wii was born as their FIRST home console that didn't take the lead from their biggest competitor in a given generation. True to their word, the underlying hardware was only improved using smaller processes and more memory with the same basic capabilities while the storage and I/O, IOW, how you PLAY the game, changed drastically. These were the kinds of changes that COULDN'T be done on GCN hardware without costly expansions and market-fragmenting accessories which would only guarantee failure (SEGA CD, SEGA 32X, Turbo Duo, Jaguar CD, etc).
The only people who think the Nintendo DS' touchscreen is "gimmicky" are those who haven't been playing portable games for years, prompting the "touchscreen = gimmicky?! LAWL!" reactions. Let me put it this way: The PSP can't do a damned thing the PS2 can't do. The DS, OTOH,
CAN and
FREQUENTLY DOES. Get it? Anyone saying so sho9uld be FORCED to sit down and play a level or two of Elite Beat Agents and they will have their foot firmly placed in their mouth by the end of the first stage. It demonstrates a similar level of ignorance to say that Nintendo's history has had them always releasing inferior hardware. It's just not true.
