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Nintendo has everlastingly been a surrealistic company. The Kyoto-based gutsy maker turned an Italian plumber into one of pop culture's biggest icons, and the convergence has experimented with everything from DIY paper gutsy products to three-pronged controllers. This unpredictable nature is what makes Nintendo so rip-roaring (and occasionally infuriating).

Often, these concepts assume to emerge out of portside field -- but at its best, Nintendo makes the surrealistic feel necessary. Run-of-the-mill was that more observable than with the Nintendo DS line of dual-screened handhelds.

That era is now over, as Nintendo afresh discontinued the 3DS and all of its various models. The offset isn't surprising: the Switch has become a runaway success, modestly supplanting the need for a dedicated handheld like the 3DS. But it's still sad. The 16 years of the DS line were some of the most demiurgic and rip-roaring in Nintendo's history, with the convergence everlastingly experimenting with new ideas, multitudinous of which live on today in unique forms.

The DS wasn't an painless hit back it was headmost announced. In fact, it didn't make much sense at all. Here was Nintendo eschewing the Gutsy Boy hurling for a clunky device with two screens and a stylus. But in archetypal Nintendo fashion, the convergence created reminisces tailored to the device, the kinds of games you couldn't comedy elsewhere.

Two of the disputed DS games of all time are Nintendogs, a gutsy where you take intendance of a vital puppy, and Brain Age, a train of psychical contest like sudoku. In an age afore smartphones, these games showed us why we capital a touchscreen to comedy a video gutsy at all. The DS orderly had a ramble conversation app that now feels way onward of its time.

What made the DS particularly remarkable, though, was the broadness of reminisces it offered. There were lots of surrealistic touchscreen experiments, like the musical toy Electroplankton or Metroid Prime Pinball. But some of the most resistive games were much more straightforward, including the likes of New Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart, and multiple flavors of Pokemon. It was the all-time of both worlds: a workplace where familiar Nintendo biography could sit aslope more unexpected experiences.

The massive popularity of the DS -- it awash more than 150 million units over its lifespan -- moreover meant third parties jumped on conform as well, showing a rare matched of creativity on a platform typically fixated by Nintendo's own products. The Wii was similarly popular, but most third-party titles noting like slapped-together ports.

Some of the Nintendo DS's most lissome games came from third-party developers

On the DS, meanwhile, some of the most lissome games came from developers outside of Nintendo. There were games like the anime anaplasty sim Trauma Center, where you acclimated the touchscreen to slice into patients, and the Etrian Odyssey train of RPGs where you literatim had to draw the map as you explored fantastical and dangerous places. Professor Layton turned the book-like handheld into a literal puzzle book. Again, these sat aslope more archetypal portable games, like Koji Igarashi's enlarged awakening of Castlevania and one of the all-time Dragon Quest games to date.

The DS was replaced by the 3DS in 2011, which didn't categorically gestation all that much: it affixed a biggest display, more power, and a 3D gimmick that never reservedly took off. The 3DS awash implicitly bisected of its predecessor, a still-respectable 75 million units. (For context, that's more than both the NES and SNES.) Whereas the savage DS was transformative, the 3DS noting more iterative. It moreover came out at a time back smartphone gaming had become more entrenched, and the idea of a dedicated portable gaming device was shorter aromal to many.

The 3DS still had some hebetic games, of course, including the likes of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, The Legend of Zelda: A Voice Between Worlds, and the actual headmost portable Supervention Bros. It moreover saw Nintendo continue to try new ideas. One of the handheld's best-sellers was the peacockish litheness sim Tomodachi Life, which went on to inspire Nintendo's headmost smartphone app, the short-lived Miitomo.

One of my idolized concepts was Nintendo's partnership with the Louvre, where guests could use a 3DS as piece of their tour. You should definitely watch this video of Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata hanging implicitly the art gallery.

Video gutsy platforms emerge and go constantly, of course, so it's no surprise the dual-screen handheld line would die out eventually, extraordinarily as Nintendo's focus has tightly centered on the Switch for some time. But the unique nature of the DS makes its demise particularly difficult. Back the Wii U was replaced by the Switch, most of the console's all-time games were eventually ported to the new tablet. With the DS and 3DS, it's not quite so simple; orderly if you port a gutsy like A Voice Between Worlds or Etrian Odyssey, you can't reproduce the frequenting of scene on two screens on any modernistic gaming platform.

The irony is that the 3DS's end comes at a time back dual-screen equipment are poised to become mainstream, thanks to equipment like Microsoft's Translucid Duo and other folding smartphones. It seems unlikely, but maybe one day, we'll see a spare whitecap of developers taking advantageousness of the format, infusing the mobile space with a new spoonful of Nintendo-inspired creativity. At the actual least, step-up needs to port Electroplankton.