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Why Must You Destroy The Industry, PSP?
Because I know you haven't had your fill of the surreal today, Grand Text Auto has up a link to a Flash movie which depicts a climactic battle between the consoles of old and the PSP...using the end of Final Fantasy VI. Commentary available at Game Girl Advance. My favorite part is where the GBA, GameBoy, GameCube, and N64 team up to defeat the Master Famicom and Rob. Actually pretty cool, if long.
They're also not destroying the industry by any means. They're destroying Nintendo's dominance of the handheld market, but that's always been a fragile thing, enforced by half-assed competitors like Nokia (and even Nintendo themselves with the Virtual Boy), but that's always what happens when a market leader stagnates and is blindsided by a new competitor.
The PSP and GBA/DS is a lot like the PS1 comming out back in the SNES days. Nintendo was caught with hardware that hadn't changed much in years, and hadn't had serious competition in a long time. The time was ripe for somebody else to break into the market. The GBA is still very much alive, though, so at least it won't be as decisive as the SNES's downfall. We won't all forget Nintendo in six months. When the N64 came out, a lot of people I knew basically said, "What? Nintendo still makes games?" At that time, my SNES hadn't even been pluggged in since the PS1 launch.
The DS was certainly a radical change, but so far it doesn't have the game lineup. An innovative system means nothing if it doesn't have innovative games, but a completely mundane and uninnovative system can excell with innovative games, and that's what Sony wants to do with the PSP.
I just hope that Nintendo doesn't respond to the PSP like they responded to the PS1. I can't see any two ways about it: The N64 was a lousy system. Just about everything in it and its games - especially it's early games - felt to me like they were in desperation mode, trying to get something - anything, for that matter - on the market to compete with the PS1, just to keep the Nintendo name in the market.
If they produce a handheld system like that, just to meet the PSP, then they're really going to end up loosing that handheld war you see comming, and they're going to loose it badly. Nintendo's console offering still hasn't gotten back where the SNES was, and it'll be rough for them if they end up in the same position in the handheld market.
But, then, with each new generation of systems, the leaders can shift around all over the place. In 1993, could you see Nintendo virtually erased from gaming in two years? Before the PS1 came out, the word "Nintendo" meant video games. My friends would say, "Want to come over and play Nintendo?" even if they had a Genesis, because Nintendo and video game were the same words. That changed fast with the Playstation, and Nintendo was marginalized really until the Gamecube came out.
I thought the Dreamcast would be the end of Sony, and then the PS2 blew it out of the water. Before the DS came out, I was expecting a stellar system with amazing and innovative games. Now I have the system and a disappointing set of games. Those weak games made me expect another massacre when the PSP came out, but that hasn't happen yet. With the next set of consoles comming soon, who knows what happens. Nintendo might be back on top. Everybody involved has a shot, if they play it right.