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The Handheld War
The Escapist has an editorial up talking about the war currently raging in the trenches...and not the console war, for once. The new handhelds are duking it out for position, and he makes some interesting predictions. From the article: "Sony's stumble will clear the way for Nokia's N-Gage powered smartphones to be the #2 platform in handheld gaming. I see it developing into a PC-like platform. Think of it like this: Everybody has a PC. Everybody uses their PC for work and web. Some people also use it for gaming - enough people to make the PC, as a platform, the second biggest; it's the same concept with the smartphone."
The N-Gage is basically dead and buried. Nothing will bring it back.
This might be possible for the N-Gage if it were an open platform that other phone companies used, but by it only being in certain Nokia phones the likelihood of that happening is pretty low...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
...this had me really going: "It's the same reason US cars are better than Japanese cars: We've been doing it longer."
What a great joke site, that's the funniest thing I've seen all day...oh...wait...that's not a joke? Oh...sad...
WASTE - The Secure P2P
It's true that cellphones are tending more towards visuals and including more games, but I doubt the kind of games that cellphone users want to play are the same as the ones that handheld console owners want. Cellphone games are mostly a way to kill time, whereas most handheld gamers are looking for a little extra.
In short: people who want to play handheld games will just buy a handheld console, and people who want to play cellphone games are content with the existing, non-N-Gage options.
He claims that the N-Gage will succeed in the fact that it will have the largest installed user base. N-Gage game compatable phones will be purchased by people who don't care, and ignorant pundits will then claim that means it's a successful console. When can we start measuring success in games sold, not consoles? It's the games where the money is made after all...
WASTE - The Secure P2P
There are 40 N-Gage games in the shops and only 32 PSP ones, therefore the N-Gage is better than the PSP. The same logic also shows that Snake is a better game than Half-Life, and ants are more intelligent than people*
* which in the case of the autuor of this article might actually be true.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Marketing and brandname are tough categories to compete in when dealing with such a tiny market. Nintendo and Sony are pretty much the only big players here.
Nokia's N-Gage came out as a joke, a well-repeated and oft-referenced comedy. Side-talkin!
They'll need to sink a lot of money into producing innovative and affordable products. But on top of that, they'll need to dish out a massive marketing campaign to remedy a terrible first impression.
If the writer envisions a multi-purpose handheld gaming system taking over the market due to integrating with other gadgets...Nokia won't be the one dishing it out.
My bet is a later generation of a Sony handheld due to the way they've been trying pack extra features into the PS3 past it's gaming features(Still remains to be seen what features survive into release...). Nintendo will probably try to stick to games and pleasing its hardcore fans.
In my opinion, integration is nice, but people are buying these handhelds for playing games first and foremost. The rest is window dressing.
I'm sorry I tried to read the entire FA, but I couldn't do it. By the end of the second page this guy must have referred to himself in the third person close to 10 times. "Steele Style" was my favorite.
This is the second post The Escapist has gotten, and so far I've found it painful to read an article half full of self horn blowing.
Seriously though, "Max Steele"? Who comes up with this shit?
1) pc for work/console for gaming.
2) mobile phone for calls/gba,ds for gaming/ipod for portable music.
3) games draw way too much power from the mobile phones.
4) gaming while waiting for call=bad.
5) games on mobile phones SUCK.
It sends me into fits of laughter to see people get all hot and bothered because Nintendo is successful. Rather than admit Nintedo won, they'll support the N Gage. Pathetic.
If you want a much better (and funnier) view on where gaming has been and is going, read JiveMagazine.com's interview with Penny-Arcade's Gabe and Tycho. The author of the Jive article doesn't keep referring to himself in the third person. Max Steele reminds me of the Simpsons where Homer changed his name to Max Power because it sounded cooler.
http://www.tomandemily.com
I'm one of the three people who actually own an N-Gage, so I feel qualified to comment on its chance as an opponent of the DS and the PSP.
It has no chance.
The N-Gage sucks. The screen is too small and tall instead of wide, which makes it useless for most games (Sonic N actually doesn't use about 30% of the screen, which means it's even smaller than most N-Gage games). The buttons are crap. The directional pad is crap. It sounds worse than the cheapest Radio I've ever heard. It's capable of 3D graphics, but not of usable 3D graphics, so most 3D games are pretty much unplayable, and since people don't seem to want 2D games anymore, most N-Gage games are 3D. Even though you don't have to take the battery out to switch the game, you have to tell the N-Gage that you want to switch the game, wait for it to confirm that, open the N-Gage Game slot thingie, switch the game, wait till the N-Gage acknowledges the game, start the game. Turning the N-Gage on takes at least 30 seconds and took me up to 2 minutes in some cases. It has no shoulder buttons, and the button placement makes it really hard to use more than two or three buttons. The N-Gage actually needs a SIM card, otherwise you can't even turn it on. It is so slow that it can't emulate classic Gameboy games at decent speed. Zelda is playable, but you can forget about action games. The N-Gage is a pretty decent phone, and I like the button placement, but it's too big, and it has no touch screen, which would be useful for the phone interface.
And these are only some of the problems I've been having.
Of course, some Series 60 phones can play N-Gage games, but the button placement is even worse than on the N-Gage.
Nokia might become a serious player in the handheld gaming segment, but not with this hardware.
Games will cost similarly for both systems for the consumer, but in the case of optical storage, fabrication costs _much_ less
Fabrication of Nintendo DS game cards isn't as much cheaper than fabrication of UMD discs as you'd think, given that Nintendo will soon be moving to new cheaper OTP memories manufactured by Matrix Semiconductor for Nintendo DS game cards. Given that Nintendo could afford to give away DS cards containing the Zelda: Twilight Princess trailer at E3 2005...
The games that _do_ use optical storage get much more storage space as well, offering the gamer more media content, like longer videos, better music, higher polygon models, better textures, key aspects of many modern games, giving developers more degrees of freedom. The only tradeoff is load times
The other tradeoff is that games that use PSP features cost more to produce in the first place, and in the game console software business model, the cost of making the first copy is spread across the purchase price of each of the first million copies or so. Compare Lumines for PSP ($40) to Meteos for Nintendo DS ($30), or any of the high-end games for PSP ($50 each) to any of the high-end games for Nintendo DS ($35 each).
which most gamers will already be used to.
Not necessarily. Gamers who have already owned a handheld system are used to handheld load times, which are rarely if ever more than 5 seconds on the GBC, GBA, or Nintendo DS. On the other hand, one high-profile racing game for PSP is said to take 70 seconds to load a race track that takes 150 seconds to complete.
Ultimately, the PSP will have a bigger library of games than the DS.
The set of PSP titles has to compete not only against the set of Nintendo DS titles but also against the set of GBA titles, as the Nintendo DS hardware plays 99 percent of GBA titles. About 2100 GBA titles have been released (counting multi-region releases as multiple releases).
"Sure, the DS may have TWO screens, one of them being a touch screen, allowing developers to get a bit creative, but it's just a matter of time for the novelty effect to wear off and for people to realize that these features do not actually enhance the gaming experience by much."
A touchscreen is much more efficient for any menu-based game, any game requiring a virtual keyboard, games with user-created content, "hands-on" games like card games and board games, and any PC-based genres like RTSs and FPSs. The second screen, while not entirely necessary, will nevertheless be useful for displaying stats, navigating menus, providing a map, and many other functions that would clutter the HUD in a typical game. Not only that, but the built-in mic will be almost necessary for online communication, provided that Nintendo utilizes it. Between the mic and the onscreen keyboard, the DS lends itself to networked games far better than the PSP does. Now it's up to developers to support it, but with Nintendo finally taking some initiative, third-parties will join in time.
I agree with the comments everyone else has made: namely, the author is on crack and the N-gage is dead. However, I'd like to point out that no one has mentioned the demo Nintendo did at E3, where they used DSes to make VoIP phone calls. In other words, if Nintendo ever feels like releasing the software for it, you'll be able to make free call to other DSes and possibly computers and phone lines at any WiFi hotspot. So basically, it's a portable phone that makes cheap calls.
Score one more for the DS.