Opinion: The ugly 3DS cradle has just undone all of Nintendo's hard work

The life of the Nintendo 3DS has been rocky up to now. With a distinct lack of decent games for the system, and nothing much exciting on the horizon, it was difficult to recommend the stereoscopic 3D handheld marvel.

But just as we were about to give up hope, that price drop announcement came out of the blue, along with the news that plenty of great titles were coming later this year.

Suddenly it appeared that Nintendo may have just saved the day. However, as of this week, it may well have just undone all its own good work, as it revealed perhaps the ugliest video game hardware ever created.

The Expansion Slide Pad, as it has been dubbed, is a cradle in which your 3DS sits, adding an extra Circle Pad to the right of the A, B, X and Y buttons, and an extra shoulder button as well.

Also, it's hideous.

This new hardware is Nintendo's answer to the question of what happens when you release a console too early and then realise all the features that it's missing?

Essentially, the company is going to bang all of the bits and pieces that it missed from the original hardware launch into this new cradle and then charge you a bit more to give your console the functionality it should have had in the first place.

Not much has been confirmed about the cradle, but we really wouldn't be surprised if it contains an extra battery, too, to relieve the 3DS's power issue.

It feels like such a cheap move, and not even a great-looking solution at that. The extra Circle Pad isn't the same size as the original one, and the cradle sticks out to the right but not the left, leaving the console looking horribly lopsided.

Of course, you can be sure that when the Nintendo 3DS Lite is revealed (not confirmed, but it's bound to happen), it will come with all this extra functionality already built in, leaving us true Nintendo fans with a bulky piece of crap to show for our loyalty.

If you're sceptical, just look what happened with the Motion Plus for the Nintendo Wii - an add-on that clipped onto the bottom of the Wii Remote and gave it the functionality it was meant to have from the very start, and was then built in to future Wii Remotes as standard.

Then there's the issue of fragmentation amongst 3DS owners - those who own the cradle, and those who don't.

In a couple of years' time, there will no doubt be games released that require the extra Circle Pad. Hence, original 3DS owners will be required to put money down for the cradle even if they don't want to.

When we originally bought our 3DS handhelds, we were under the impression that the hardware allowed us to play any 3DS title.

Of course, you could argue that the DSi added camera and download content functionality, amongst other things. That's very true - but the DSi wasn't announced six months into the life of the DS.

Along with the recent price drop, one thing is for certain - Nintendo is clearly not as confident in its product as it would like to be.

A company that's confident in the future of its product does not drop the price and add new controls to it just half a year after launch.

And if Nintendo itself isn't confident in its handheld, then why should we be? It definitely puts us on edge about where the 3DS is headed over the next few years.

With the price drop and the end of year software line-up, it looked like the 3DS was gearing up for a very merry Christmas.

Now, with this latest cock-up, consumers will surely be wondering to themselves whether they should just wait until a version of the 3DS comes out with the new functionality built-in.

The answer: yes.