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Prelude to the PSP Launch
Josh writes "Because the Japanese Launch is quickly coming upon us, we at PsiNext decided to put together an editorial which talks about the important events in getting to the final product release for the PSP. It is a good chance for those who are just getting into the PSP to catch up on what has been happening for the past 18 months." From the article: "The dream of a portable gaming unit began many years ago for Sony, around the time Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) was preparing to release the PS2 to the world. Work began in 1998 under the codename "E.T." and it was to be Sony's first stab at the portable gaming market to try and take down the then industry leading Nintendo with their GameBoy."
I'm sure developers are looking forward to breaking even if the PSP takes off. Seriously though, if you're gonna launch a portable, launch a portable. Don't try risk adverse techniques; they screw early adopters and the market share. Every PSP that could have been sold but wasn't is a loss, a customer that every game developer just missed a chance on. If I were a developer, I'd be either pissed or sceptical, depending on how committed my own company was to the PSP.
UMD is relatively small, somewhat smaller than a gamecube disc. But I don't think its a brilliant move; I know that they're pushing the format as a portable, low-power media but nothing reads it, and given Sony's style, nobody but Sony ever will. I mean, do you plan on purchasing any movies released on the UMD format?
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Open Source Sysadmin
"I think its a terrible tragedy that Nintendo has the console with the pointing device - Nintendo wouldn't know what to do with a pointing device if it was shoved up their ass, meanwhile Sony would have bought out Blizzard already by now if they had a good console for Diablo and StarCraft (which have been shitty on consoles up until now due to the lack of pointing devices)."
Spoken like a magazine-grade pundit! Of course, that's not saying much, given the "Tiger Beat" state of games journalism. Or perhaps it's saying a lot.
Anyhow, I think it's funny that you say that Nintendo, whose existing touch-screen control implementations in the form of the minigames in Super Mario 64 DS are brilliant, and who have had the good judgment to have Namco and Sega doing cool games for it (the upcoming Pac-Man game and the launch game Feel the Magic spring immediately to mind), have no clue what to do with the input device that they themselves implemented. You then go ahead to point out that Sony, by your understanding, would know better than to make such cool games available and would instead bring PC ports to portable gaming, resulting in a better portable product in your opinion. All this, based on what? Clie? Vaio laptop trackpads? What?
"DS will be the better console, have an extensive library of utterly fascinating and innovative games that get boring after five minutes, and about 4 games worth playing long term. The PSP will have fourty thousand games, but a signal-to-noise ratio of 5%, and none of their games will be better than those top 4 Nintendo games - but they'll have an endless library of "pretty good" games to play the hell out of."
You mistake Nintendo for Sega. It's Sega that does the highly-conceptual, heady games with limited appeal. (They often appeal to me, but that's beside the point.) Nintendo does "everyman" games, and very well at that. Those best-of-class Nintendo games you mention are often simple games, done to perfection. After all, what is the Zelda series at its core but a third-person hack & slash with RPG, platformer, and puzzle components to it? That puts it in the same genre as Landstalker, Soul Blazer, Alundra, and any number of 3D games. And yet....it's the game series plenty of console gamers would consider as the perfect game of its type. The others I specify, while all very good, don't really even come close.
The PSP will have good third-party support, but, oh, what's this? The Nintendo DS third-party developer list is longer? Several key devs have announced DS games under current production but haven't even publically claimed PSP support at all yet? Not to be too cheeky, but both points kinda throw a wrench in the argument that the PSP is more lucrative in the development comparison.
I agree to a point. I mean there's absolutely no doubt the games look amazing. But the battery life issue and UMD movies are the kiss of death. It's almost emberassing how bad UMD movies are going to fail. I don't like to speculate much as anything can happen, but making people buy the DVD and UMD is insane. The only way I can see UMD succeeding is if the discs cost 1/4 of what a DVD costs, or they are given away for free in magazines, etc. Like promos.