The world's best selling handheld gaming platform -- the Nintendo DS -- is quickly becoming the most controversial platform, thanks to a surprising suspect: Scrabble.

Nintendo, despite its few past controversies (such as Wii Beer Pong) has generally steered clear of first person shooters, crime games, and other story lines known to draw public ire, preferring to offer family-friendly fantasy titles.  Another key, seeming innocent, component of its library is puzzle games.  However, it is thanks to one of these puzzle games that Nintendo has become the surprising victim of the latest video game controversy.

Ubisoft, which makes a EC (Early Childhood) ESRB-rated handheld scrabble game for the Nintendo DS, apparently decided to include curse words and slang into its entry's healthy vocabulary.  While the inclusion was overlooked by most people, to one British boy it gave a very eye opening experience.

UK child Ethan Carrington, son of 36-year-old Tonya Carrington, was given the game by his mother and began to play it avidly.  He was mildly surprised when it began to spit out words that he had never seen before and weren't in the dictionary, such as "tits" and "toke".  The little chap nonetheless persevered in his quest to beat the more word-savvy machine.

Then came the final straw to poor Ethan's self-esteem, according to his mother.  During a particularly intense bout of Scrabble, Ethan was on the verge of victory when the game seized it from him punishing him with a triple-letter score for the word "f*ckers".  Devastated by the schooling dealt to him by the game and confused at its strange new vocabulary, Ethan inquired what the word might be to his mom.

Outraged, his mom went to Ubisoft.  Ubisoft smartly responded that if she was being a responsible parent, she would have known to change the Scrabble games settings to "Junior" settings, one of the game's options.  Apparently this would block the game from using its more salty vocabulary.

Furious at the cheek from the game makers, Tonya went to the tabloids, surely out of a desire to protect her child, and not at all out of a cry for attention.  And attention, or perhaps effort to protect her child she indeed succeeded in securing, as the media latched onto the story like hot fish and chips. 

Now Nintendo and Ubisoft are in hot water, for allowing the features to be including the feature in the family-aimed title.  Somewhere, Jack Thompson is laughing merrily at these developments.