Our origami repertoire isn’t what anybody would reasonably call broad, starting and ending as it does with a plane, a box, and a very square flower. It’s not that we don’t care - we can well appreciate that being able to fashion something like this would be one almighty feat.

Enter TDK Mediactive. The Japanese studio has put together a Nintendo DS non-game entirely dedicated to teaching fumbling, fat-fingered origami greenhorns like us how to get our paper-folding on. The game - full title Minagara Oreru DS Origami - is to include instructional videos for over 100 different origami models, including a hamster, penguin, turtle, bird, wedding dress, and the classic crane.

The top screen is used to show players where to make folds in their paper, and the touchscreen is reserved for the videos, which can be paused, rewound or what-have-you at the touch of a stylus. Hey - let’s see what TDK’s own site says about the game, courtesy of Google’s translation tool:

"That the folded paper is snapped, the stooge is made skillful, it is said that the brain is made to activate. From one paper, making three-dimensional modelling ones is useful to rearing the imaginative power and the expression power."

Hmm, quite. Anyway, DS Origami is launching in Japan on August 9, when it will join the growing number of training games that have rapidly become omnipresent on Nintendo’s handheld phenomenon. The question is: after being taught gardening, yoga, skin care, the art of drawing manga, and now this, what’s next?