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Hands-On With The Tapwave Zodiac
Thanks to IGN Pocket for their hands-on preview of Tapwave's Zodiac handheld gaming system. The author suggests: "Whether or not Tapwave has the marketing muscle to steal away important market share from Nintendo remains to be seen, but at the very least the company has made a huge first impression when it comes to handheld system design." This Palm-compatible handheld has custom 3D game titles, including Spy Hunter, which IGN found "...very reminiscent of the PC's early years with the 3DFX Voodoo card", but overall, concerns about lack of "hard partnerships" with big publishers and the fact that the "price [$299-$399] definitely needs to come down" have the previewer worrying that this "great handheld design with incredible technical potential" may ultimately go neglected.
superior but inferior(and there was already gp32 around). superior in hardware but expensive and jumping into a market that needs lots of $$$ up front for advertising if they want to make it happen in the long run(and they also need some games with long long long lasting appeal).
also having two different models, what were they thinking? i bet the games do look and feel nice though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I really want a Zodiac, and I really want it to do well. This thing is what the N-Gage should have been. With a cellphone added in, in a well designed, non-taco way, and the ability to run Linux, this thing would be the ultimate convergence device with a reasonable amount of power to boot.
Mind you, with all that said, I would quite like a GP32 too, if just for the ability to home brew hand held games out of the box.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
See, Nintendo pretty much has a monopoly on handheld gaming now. And usually I'll tell you that monopolies are bad, you all know the reasons. But this one is good! Nintendo doesn't use it's handheld monopoly for evil. They don't gouge us on prices. They don't make crappy games. They don't shoot puppies, lobby congress, or eat dead babies. They have a monopoly because they have in the past and continue to provide the highest quality handheld gaming experience. If they stopped doing it, they could very well lose their seat at the top.
But until then, why are these other companies even trying? If anything the GameBoy is just getting stronger, not weaker. And unless the gameboy starts sucking right now, none of these new handhelds have a chance. Especially at that kind of price point. I want to know what is going through the minds of these people when they decide to go up against the GBA. They know they are going to fail, so don't even bother, you're just throwing away money. You could have given me that money! Or you could have bought a bunch of GBAs and games for your friends. Or shiny new laptops from Japan. Wouldn't you rather have that than a useless handheld gaming system with 2 games that nobody will ever buy or play?
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The Tapwave has more games that will be available than the article makes it sound. I would really like one, but the price needs to come down by about $100 for me to buy one. I would consider it an upgrade/replacement for my current Palm that can also play good games and act as an MP3 player (I don't currently have). It looks like something that I would actually use on a daily basis. Like the N-Gage was supposed to be, but is not.
"They don't gouge us on prices."
They tried.
When Advance came out, games were $40 each. Completely ridiculous. For about a year they dropped and started coming out at around $30. Now Nintendo is creeping the retail price on games back up. Expectedly popular titles are coming out at $35 now (Pokemon, FFTA, AdvWars2).
Makes me glad I bought a flash cart. I still buy all those popular titles (except for Pokemon which I will never play) I just can't afford to buy the cheaper possibly less quality ones.
The one thing I have always liked about Nintendo though, they've been smart enough to make the portable devices themselves under $100 always with real concerns for portable devices like battery life and size. I abhored the Advance when it came out, now I can't wait for the next iteration.
So I guess if you meant the price of the device you were right, but the price of the game, no.
This unit is going to fail. It costs too much plain and simple. It looks really great and I wouldn't mind owning a neat little gaming system like that, but not for that price! Price is going to sink this thing back into the depths of obscurity.
The price needs to come down? Bah.
If you were comparing this with a GBA SP- yeah, $300 is a lot. But, if you compare it to other PalmOS handhelds on the market, it's not bad. Where else can you get such a machine for $300? Two SDIO slots? 320x480 screen? Sony and PalmOne machines with a screen that size go for $400 and up.
I think this device has a lot of promise, and unlike some ugly, mangled foetuses like the N-Gage, it may make it in the world- although, probably as a pretty niche player. But to me, that seems to be their goal- to provide a decent gaming system and PDA not to kids but to people with the money to spend on a PDA but still have the desire to game. Sure, you could be like me (and lots of folks here, I expect) and own a PDA as well as a GBA- but if you're already going to spend that much on a PDA, why not pay the same price (or cheaper) for one with some good gaming options?
Hell, even if it never got many of its own games, it'd still be nice to have decent game controls for all of those other PalmOS games.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I don't think that the Tapwave is necessarily trying to go mass-market like the N-Gage has obviously attempted to. I think their target is 20-40 year old business people and the PC enthusiast/LAN gaming market. In terms of aesthetic design, it's obviously much better design than the N-Gage, and dare I say the standard GBA, rivaling in at least design and layout to the GBA-SP.
I think the best way to categorize the Tapwave is that it's the American wonderswan; quiet, not terribly grandeous aspirations (i.e. eliminating Nintendo, as is most likely Sony's ultimate goal with the PSP), but something that will probably succeed on a limited and specific basis.
The big question for me is will games be limited to 32MBs or will some games allow the user to use the full 128MB? They have two versions, this is confusing to interested buyers, do I go cheap or do I go big features. The only difference that I'm aware of is the larger memory, which should only at 10-15 dollars to the price. If they wanted lots of memory for holding movies MP3s etc... they should have given all units 128MB and only made one unit. If the games will be limited to 32MB the 128 is only for program and data storage while in Palm mode which is find but probably overkill for a great portion of the market, SD cards are pretty cheap and offer better (no battery) long term storage. Having a new product with a bit open question as to which model is more appropriate was a huge marketing SNAFU (read fuck up) if there was only one price I would have bought one as soon as I saw it, now I want to wait till I see where its going before I buy!
I'll going to reiterate what I wrote in an earlier post to a related article. This product may have a chance, even if it's much more expensive than a GBA. As others have said, you need to think of it as a PDA plus gaming, not the other way around.
Consider PC's either before soundblasters. (Or you could make a similar arguement pre-3DFX). Before soundblasters came out PC's seemed like a silly place to play games. Consoles were much cheaper and had better games. Never-the-less PC's became a popular platform for games once the hardware could support it. This is despite the fact that a soundblaster costed as much as the game console did alone. That's because people need computers anyway, so they might as well have fun with them. Likewise, people need PDAs anyway, so if this isn't priced too high it has a decent chance. I haven't shopped for a PDA, but it seems (and others seem to agree) that the price is not out of line for this device as a PDA without gaming.
Now, I can't predict whether or not it succeeds. A lot will depend on marketting. The fact that there's been a number of front page stories on Slashdot about other PDA's, but this device repeattedly only appears on the gaming page is worrysome. It will also help a lot if the system is open enough to let anyone write games for it. Remember the best computer games in the early soundblaster era were shareware games from small companies like Epic, Apogee, and of course ID. Also, being able to run somewhat questionable software such as emulators, etc, would be a big win, (for me at least).
The guy who made the Liberty Gameboy Emulator for the PalmOS is connected to a product that allows you to develop for Windows Pocket PC, Palm, Windows Smartphone and Symbian Series 60 all at once. They've recently released a licenced Atari emulation product that comes on one MMC and is compatible with all the platforms above. Products like these are potentially more of a challenge to the GBA than any one single product. Why buy a GBA when whatever powerful pocket device you've already got will run a game you want?