Well, only thirty-odd days to go now. Next month's E3 should prove to be the most interesting in a long time, with the next generation of consoles offering up more questions than answers at the moment. What direction will the industry's gatekeepers steer it in for the next five years? Although we're been offered little to no specifics on Gamecube's successor, Satoru Iwata has done a lot to keep Nintendo fans guessing with his talk of "simplifying" games to capture the large non-gamer market. Given the success of the DS, it appears to be a good strategy; but the DS has also shown us the pitfalls of such an approach, ones I hope Nintendo are smart enough to dodge.

Simpler, innovative game interfaces appear to be the way Nintendo are heading at the moment. Talk of gyrospheres is probably exaggerated, but there's no doubting the Revolution will offer an interface removed from the standards of buttons and the D-pad. This insistence to 'revolutionise' the way people play games is a noble one, but could Nintendo problems in the long term.

The DS illustrates this. It's a wonderful little device, yes, and has a delightful ability to attract people who wouldn't normally play games (something I've been very impressed with), but to equate its deconstructed console mechanics to the design of a home console is folly. The fact that some people haven't been able to grasp is that the DS isn't really a proper games console; it's more of a toy (a dirty word to many gamers). It is a simple toy; designed for you to mess about with and have a bit of fun. The DS' most interesting games encapsulate this: Catch! Touch! Yoshi!; Nintendogs; Electroplankton; the mini-games from Mario 64 DS. Hardly normal console games. The GBA2 will be the ground for Nintendo's more traditional handheld games, with its supped up graphics and PSP-challenging (we hope) library of genre games. Nintendo can afford to go off track with the DS because it has the GBA2 as its insurance console. Not so with the home console: for it is simply Revolution or bust.

New game interfaces in this generation have shown us how much more fun games can be when the standard controller is ditched (Donkey Jungle Beat proves this) but this was fine because we always had the chance to use the traditional controller with our traditional games. Eyetoy was one of the best things Sony has even done for games, but when you were bored with it there was always the chance to stick Grand Theft Auto on and hit some buttons. So to design a whole home console around an interface innovation appears to be a very risky move.

How is the new control method going to affect straight genre games? How are we going to play our favourite beat-em-ups? Or RPGs? Or football games? The reason the DS isn't seeing all that many games going to it is because the touch screen doesn't work well for every genre. No matter how magical or liberating Catch! Touch! Yoshi! is, you're going to get tired of it eventually. What then to play? Your console cost you $200 and you're only getting half the normal play time out of it.

While I applaud Nintendo for continuing evolution of game controls (where would we be without the analogue stick, or shoulder buttons?) they can't afford to be too innovative this time around. If they're too radical in their modelling of the Revolution's interface they'll alienate a lot of developers, and a lot of gamers who are just looking for the games they're used to.

If the Revolution is to be successful, it has to walk a fine line between offering new game experiences and providing to existing tastes.

Additionally, Nintendo have a lot more issues to address in the next generation that how we play their games. Gamecube hasn't reduced their catalogue of problems by nearly as much as we had hoped; the list reads off all too similar to that of five years ago. There's still a great deal of work to be done with third-party developers, despite the ground made with Japan's more famous names; take games in the press recently for example. The PC, PS2 and Xbox are all getting the cute Lego Star Wars - why isn't Gamecube? And Sniper Elite? Godfather: The Game? Cold Fear? Stolen? Constantine? What about Brothers In Arms? I don't quite comprehend why the other formats are getting these games and Gamecube isn't - there's no obvious reason, just the same old hesitancy towards Nintendo I suppose. Public image needs improving and bogus myths need disproving. Simplifying game interfaces is all well and good, but we still need a good stock of games to use them on. So let's not get distracted by a single topic.

Still, next month should provide most of the answers and hopefully ease my worries. In the meantime, Nintendo, do what you do best: be bold, be original, be daring. Just, please, don't be too daring.

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