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Firsthand Impressions of Now-Delayed NVIDIA SHIELD
NVIDIA's Android-based gaming gaming handheld called SHIELD was to start shipping today to customers who had pre-ordered it. Reader MojoKid writes "Unfortunately, in its last round of QA work, NVIDIA uncovered a problem with a third-party component used in SHIELD and will be pushing the launch date out into July. NVIDIA is, however, allowing some members of the press to talk a bit about their experiences with a couple of Tegra 4-optimized games — namely Real Boxing and Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin — and also about an AR Drone controlled by SHIELD with a bird's eye view. The AR Drone streams video from its on-board HD camera to the SHIELD device as you fly. Just launching the thing high into the air and peering into trees or over the houses in the neighborhood is really cool."
...for double the hits.
Ouya could have benefited from another month or two...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NVIDIA's Android-based gaming gaming handheld called SHIELD was to start shipping today to customers who had pre-ordered it.
I see the editor is a fan of Little Ceaser's
people want this?
According to wikipedia there are over 900 million Android mobile devices in the world. That's a lot of potential gamers who want to play something better than Fruit Ninja. At this point EA ports some of their stuff and then there's Gameloft - everything they publish would be laughed off another platform.
I have a Tegra 3 based device - an Asus Transformer - and Need for Speed is the only game I play that doesn't piss me off.
"...but there's no buttons or joystick and so controls suck" Bullshit. I've paired a Wii classic controller through bluetooth and used it to play old MAME arcade stuff. There's countless bluetooth joysticks in the world. Game publishers could code the option to use them (and tell gamers it's heavily recomended) and then start writing some decent games.
I doubt a 100g of fertilizer is going to do much.
I'd rather not encourage them to grow. Wait, is that what you meant?
Say I were to buy an Avatar Sirius tablet to game on. Is there a carrying case option that flips open to reveal a gamepad, like on the Game Boy Advance SP, the Nintendo DS family, and the Shield?
I've paired a Wii classic controller through bluetooth
The application you probably used to do this stopped working under Android 4.2. Now all I get on my Nexus 7 is "No route to host".
There's countless bluetooth joysticks in the world.
But not 900 million of them. How many people would be willing to buy a $60 Bluetooth joystick that clamps onto a phone or tablet just to play a $3 game?
I'm pretty sure most people already have at least one portable device to play games on
The vast majority of these portable devices suffer from one of two flaws. It could be that the device has no buttons for applications' use, making it unsuitable for certain genres such as platformers and fighting games. This is true of most phones and tablets, which ship without a built-in gamepad and aren't bundled with a Bluetooth gamepad. For example, the only buttons on many iOS and Android devices are system buttons: sleep, quit, volume up, and volume down. Or it could be that the device has only one app store whose inclusion policy is unfriendly to small developers. This has historically been true of Sony and Nintendo handhelds; it may have changed recently, but I haven't done any in-depth checks.
Unless "gaming gaming" devices are a thing.
I mean the games could be cool, and the performance great, but it doesn't change the fact they slapped a screen on a controller and called it a day.
At a time when everybody is going crazy about thin devices like tablets and phones, this thing comes out as an affront to good design.
Sure, I guess nVidia is testing the waters and seeing if there is even any interest in them producing a game platform, but I mean its a pretty weak effort IMHO. Maybe their follow up will be more inspiring, if they get to that point. This think almost reminds me of the nGage for its lack of any real focus on design, just a rush to market product to cash in on current trends.
Also considering this thing was originally priced on par with Wii U and only $50 less than the PS4. I mean come on. Even with the $50 price cut this thing is way too expensive for what it is.
I just don't think we need the Ouyas and SHIELDs. We do not need 100 special purpose devices hosting Android games. Make tablets more friendly for living room connectivity, that's all you need, like what Razer did with their Edge products. I'd rather have a tablet that I can use for other things that also happens to play high quality games on my TV easily.
If you are going to repackage phone or tablet guts into a game controller and slap on a screen, you already failed.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
What's the point of mentioning the AR Drone? Any device running Android or iOS (Windows and Linux as well, there are plenty of open source projects that can control it) can do this.
Or wait for developers to add support for a Dual Shock 3 controller paired to an Ouya console.
It's a little known fact that Android supports USB controllers... I use one from time to time on the nexus 7.
Adding a $9 USB gamepad and a USB OTG cable can immensely improve the tablet gaming experience.
Why would someone else be using his PC?
Because not everyone lives alone, for one thing. For "someone else" read "another member of the household" or "a house guest".
f u nvidia! fu
There is no excuse for someone not having their own PC, tablet, smartphone or whatever.
The excuse for not carrying a smartphone is that not everybody has hundreds of dollars of discretionary income to spend on a data plan. Verizon and Sprint refuse entirely to activate voice-only service on a smartphone, and AT&T is known for cramming a data plan onto a voice-only SIM when the SIM is inserted into a smartphone. Should someone carry a laptop everywhere and risk having it stolen just in case he needs to access the Internet at someone's house? And even if so, would you let a house guest use your WLAN?
If they were my children, I'd have bought them each their own PC.
Would you also buy a laptop for one of your child's classmates who is on a play date at hour house but whose parents cannot afford to buy him his own laptop?
I'm married and my wife doesnt like it when I lock myself up in the office and play video games all day. My PC is my media center and my living room console so I do not play at my desk unless my wife is watching TV. But like I said, she also doesn't like when I lock myself up. The shield is gonna be perfect for married gamers.
a video game developer chooses a platform by the size of the audience
it's growing
But how big has it grown? Whether or not a company is willing to port a game to Android to reach Ouya, Shield, and Moga users depends on how well those products have sold. I'm surprised that a lot of manufacturers hide their sales figures from the public. I would figure that a manufacturer would want to brag about how many of its product have been sold to encourage developers to port their games.
How much time/money do you think it takes to implement gamepad support compared to the rest of a game project's development? Maybe a couple of days with an SDK?
Sometimes, the producer doesn't even consider porting a particular game to a particular platform until the platform has gamepad support. In such a case, it might take even longer to get the port up and running, as the port team would have to familiarize itself with the new platform. Ouya and Shield hitting store shelves and the "Gooya" announcement are likely to change this.