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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."
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.