It's been an unhappy 48 hours for Nintendo. The 3DS price is being cut by a third, Satoru Iwata's cut his own salary by half, and shareholders have cut the Kyoto company's share price by a double-digit percentage.
There are a lot of things that bother me about this. For one thing there's personal loyalty: I grew up playing Super Nintendo games, I bought a Japanese GameCube on 14th September 2001, I banged the drum for Wii Sports back when everyone was dismissing it as a mini-game compilation, and while my reasons were mostly to do with residual playground bias, I was one of the only people who didn't declare Nintendo mad when it first revealed that its next handheld after the Game Boy Advance would have two screens.
At the time I didn't really understand why the DS was a good idea, but now with the benefit of hindsight I do.
Whether by accident or design (I suspect a bit of both), the Nintendo DS and Wii succeeded - just as PlayStation had before them - by tapping into a latent market; they won their millions of customers because their millions of customers were out there and ready to be won, and DS and Wii were the right systems at the right time.
It's no coincidence that your aunt bought a DS a few years after she learned to do email.
The special thing that Nintendo did wasn't "being Nintendo" or even being good at game design, although those things were helpful - it was designing consoles and software that appealed to lapsed gamers and a rising tide of more technologically amenable women and grown-ups.
It's no coincidence that your aunt bought a DS a few years after she learned to do email. Learning to do email trained her to accept technologies that she had previously never understood and even dismissed, and across these broadened horizons Nintendo handsomely marched at just the right moment.
But the one thing that bothers me more than any other is that the failure of the 3DS - and right now it is a failure, although I hope it finds success - is part of a deeper, more widespread malaise that has been hiding in plain sight for several years: Nintendo has lost its mojo.
First things first, it is a terrible example of a modern electronic entertainment device. It doesn't connect to modern wireless networks. It costs - or at least did cost - more than far more powerful and elaborate alternatives with which it directly competes. It has a single USP - its large, glasses-free 3D screen - and yet it requires software to allow for its absence, so nothing is designed to use it imaginatively.
Say what you like about 3D films - at least when that dismembered penis floats across the foreground in Piranha 3D, it does so with commitment.
But that isn't the problem. The problem is that the huge, evergreen sales of games like Wii Fit, Mario Kart and Super Mario Bros. have masked a significant decline in Nintendo's creativity.
Even if you look back to the GameCube - the last Nintendo console that is considered a failure, of sorts - you discover a host of delightful new concepts. Pikmin (the last truly new Shigeru Miyamoto game that mattered?), Luigi's Mansion and Animal Crossing are among the best things Nintendo has invented since the analogue stick. Even the refurbs were fantastic - think of Metroid Prime, or Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat.
Where are their equivalents on the Wii? Wii Sports was one, and Wii Fit was another, but besides those games the vast majority of Nintendo's output has been unremarkable. Fun and sometimes wonderful - I would recommend a game like Super Mario Galaxy to everybody I know - but rarely creative in the same way as a Pilotwings, or a Super Mario 64.
The Legend of Zelda - in the year of its 25th anniversary - is like a never-ending best man's speech at a wedding: you love everyone involved, you have so many wonderful memories, but you really wish it would just stop now and leave you to your reverie.
Cutting the price of 3DS is a right thing to do (the fact that the makeweight bribe being offered to loyal fans comes in the shape of recycled Game Boy games is part of the problem, mind you), but it is not the solution and nor is anything I can see on the 3DS release schedule.
Nintendo isn't a company that can make another DS or another Wii in the sense that its expectant shareholders desire.
Part of the answer perhaps lies in the Wii U. The demos I played behind closed doors at E3 came from the same place in Nintendo's collective imagination as the best games I've mentioned today, and the hardware feels magical in the way that the best Nintendo hardware feels.
If the passion and invention evident in those brief proofs-of-concept dominates the future direction of Nintendo's software development, then perhaps Wii U can at least be another GameCube. I would dearly love that.
But Nintendo isn't a company that can make another DS or another Wii in the sense that its expectant shareholders desire. The competition for the market Nintendo was first to satisfy is now fierce, and the people competing for it are better businessmen who understand the importance of emerging technologies and consumer psychology in a way that Nintendo does not.
I don't know what the far future holds for Nintendo. I hope that it finds another way to disrupt the markets that - for a few years in the 2000s, at least - it deservedly came to dominate. It won't be easy though - the Wii found itself facing an open goal nobody really knew existed, but the Wii U is a one-legged 40-yard free-kick fired into a crosswind.
As for the 3DS, Nintendo can turn it around to at least some degree - but only if it rediscovers its mojo.
