Nintendo Labelling Charges Anger

A few years ago my daughter got an Nintendo DS for Christmas. It arrived with a Spongebob accessory pack featuring that lovely yellow on the headphones and car charger. Needless to say, the charger that came with the DS and the one with the accessory pack have gone missing. They're probably in the house somewhere but your guess is as good as mine as to where that might be.

Last night I got an urgent text message from my daughter. "We can't find my cousin's charger!" So I suggest that before they leave for the water park today they stop at Target to get a charger. This is a well received idea and they do that. Problem? It wasn't a DS charger but a DS Lite charger.

It seems they decided to make all the DS accessories incompatible to the DS Lite ones. (I won't get into how much I hate that marketing tactic, suffice it to say it is one of the worst for consumers.) Argh! So they're both going to do without their DS for the two hour round trip to the water park. I told her I'd stop and pick one up before driving down to New Jersey to get her later today and she was most grateful.

I decided to try Circuit City first as I know they have a decent selection of accessories for video games. I find the DS section and start looking at the chargers. I discovered very quickly that it seems the stuff for the DS is being phased out to make room for the sleeker, more stylish DS Lite. That's certainly understandable. What I don't understand, however, is why they didn't change the logo for the Lite version.

All the packages had the lovely Nintendo DS logo on it, then in significantly smaller letters an indication that it was for the DS Lite only. As you can see in this picture. It took me 15 minutes to find one that would actually still charge the original DS and I had the sales guy look at it to make sure the label was right and it would in fact charge my daughter's DS.

I will be writing a letter to Nintendo and whatever government body oversees their labelling practices. The lack of change to the logo for the DS Lite is misleading to buyers. Most of the packaging I saw at Circuit City lacked the bright blue sticker drawing your attention to the fact that it is for the DS Lite only. Even the guy who worked at Circuit City had to read each package closely to see if it would work with the original DS. It would be an easy fix to the logo, too -- just run the letters LITE alongside the DS vertically. Simple, simple fix and there would be no more confusion for consumers. Will anything change? Probably not. But I can't just sit here and watch consumers be tricked by faulty labelling either.