| txrattlesnake said: After over a decade of maintaining the Gameboy and later the Gameboy Color (based off of NES architecture) as the dominant handheld console, Nintendo released the Gameboy Advance in 2001. And this handheld seemed to capture all the excitement and spirit that Nintendo had in the 16 bit era with SNES (it may have been a little more powerful than SNES -- it is supposed to be a 32 bit machine while SNES was a 16 bit machine) and many key franchises from Nintendo's illustrious past including new games from Square came back to this Nintendo handheld. Truely it was as if The Super Nintendo was reborn in the portable.
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Just to nitpick, (and these are nits that I'm picking, because your overall gist in this paragraph is right on), the GB and GBC weren't really based on NES arcitecture, only had similar capabilities. The most obvious being that the NES was running an 6502 processor, while the GB series was running a custom z80 based CPU. Secondly, the whole "bit" thing is more of a marketing thing. The Intellivision was 16-bit, the original Xbox was 32-bit. (Sorry, but I always feel compelled to point crap like that out.)
As for the overall question, while the DS and N64 have similar capabilities, they are both very unique creations. The N64 went right along with the general 3D-mania of the time, which was to take 2D out behind a shed and shoot it. Which is a shame, because so much could still have been done with 2D gameplay. But the people wanted 3D.
In many ways, I see the DS as everything the SNES wanted to be, and then some. Looking at games like Yoshi's Island, you can see Nintendo knew that much more could be done with 2D gameplay. That potential wasn't really realised until the DS and games like NSMB. Furthermore, the touch screen allows it to do stuff no other console, except, perhaps, the Wii can even think of.
In my mind, the DS is the ultimate 2D system, while still packing a very good 3D punch.
