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Nintendo NX Is a Portable Console With Detachable Controllers, Says Report (eurogamer.net)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Eurogamer.net: We now have a good idea as to what the Nintendo NX will consist of thanks to a new report from Eurogamer. According to a number of sources, Nintendo's upcoming NX will be a portable, handheld console with detachable controllers. Eurogamer.net reports: "On the move, NX will function as a high-powered handheld console with its own display. So far so normal -- but here's the twist: we've heard the screen is bookended by two controller sections on either side, which can be attached or detached as required. Then, when you get home, the system can connect to your TV for gaming on the big screen. A base unit, or dock station, is used to connect the brain of the NX -- within the controller -- to display on your TV. NX will use game cartridges as its choice of physical media, multiple sources have also told [Eurogamer]. Another source said the system would run on a new operating system from Nintendo. It won't, contrary to some earlier rumors, simply run on Android. [...] The system will harness Nvidia's powerful mobile processor Tegra. Graphical comparisons with current consoles are difficult due to the vastly different nature of the device -- but once again we've heard Nintendo is not chasing graphical parity. Quite the opposite, it is sacrificing power to ensure it can squeeze all of this technology into a handheld, something which also tallies with earlier reports. Finally, we've heard from one source that NX planning has recently moved up a gear within Nintendo ahead of the console's unveiling, which is currently slated for September. After the confused PR fiasco of the Wii U launch, the company is already settling on a simple marketing message for NX -- of being able to take your games with you on the go."
Anyone who wants decent mobile gaming has already got a choice of dozens of devices that also do more than just play games. I don't understand the logic behind this. Perhaps it'll work in japan but it'll be a dismal failure everywhere else. Still, its their billions to burn. Meanwhile playstation and xbox just keep on trucking...
Another "novelty" from Nintendo, perhaps its last at this point. Don't know if anyone told the people at Nintendo, but I can already take my games with me. In fact I've been able to do so for about a decade now, with a device that nearly a third of the entire world has. You can even catch Pokemon using one! I saw a pair of 11 year old boys in bikes doing so excitedly this weekend, while a pair of 10 year old girls sat near a fountain and did the same. To bad Nintendo doesn't actually make Pokemon Go.
And yes, I expect someone will try to say that unlike a smartphone you could possibly play Darksouls or the like on an NX. But the moment I want to play Darksouls on a morning train commute is the moment you can divide by zero.
It's a Tegra X1 (possibly successor.) Enough power to emulate an original Wii if Nintendo wants to.
I recall several stories about the Wii U confusing customers as to whether it was a new console or not due to the similar name. See for yourself https://www.google.com/search?... I'd just link the top story, but Polygon can DIAF.
I can see now why Nintendo has been so far hesitant to allow their franchises (old games specifically) to be ported to iOS or Android. There is a lot of money on the table and I think they know this. So I think we will see this portable NX feature a fair amount of retro gaming. This, in addition to the mini-Nintendo they are about to release. Except I can't imagine anyone carrying one around around in addition to their smartphone.
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Anybody remember the Dreamcast? The memory cards for the games had a screen and went into the controller; they served as a second interface in some respects. But you could also remove the memory card and play some minigames on it like a tiny console.
Every time Nintendo launches a new system, there's the same chorus: "It will fail miserably!" And every time, it's wrong - sometimes drastically so. For me the most interesting aspect of this is the smooth transition between mobile and traditional-console gaming experiences. Continuing a console game on the go smoothly and vice-versa is something I've always wanted to be able to do without fiddling around copying save files at best, and without a big fat "nope" at worst. I suspect I'm not alone. I think they're making the right bet here. It's interesting that this aspect is completely unmentioned in the comments so far.
The 3DS install base is north of 50 million, and despite it being five years old they still sell about a million of them per quarter.
I'm not entirely sure how that counts as 'loses'.
What people will want to know is what the new Mario title is going to be and what characters are going to be in the Smash Brothers title.
Nobody really gives a shit about anything else concerning Nintendo consoles. The gimmicks are the smokescreen to get other console makers desperate, thinking that this is the reason for the Nintendo's success and they embarrass themselves by trying to copy the gimmick only to be shown that the gimmicks were pretty much the reason people were wondering whether they really want to put up with it just to play the next Mario title and Smash Brothers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At least this time their system will be able to run the code from PS4/Xbone, which probably will make possible to downport games to it, like running at 720p rather than having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and having to redo the whole texturing/models to fit into the tiny memory.
"but once again we've heard Nintendo is not chasing graphical parity". Which means it won't reach library parity, and you'll see games on Xbox One and PS4 but not NX, like the current situation with WiiU. Nintendo cannot survive on first party alone.
Really? That's funny. They seem to be doing pretty well. I bet you think Apple should also sell macOS separately for any x86 computer, right?
Nintendo is in the fortunate position that they needn't rely on third party games. They have a pretty well stocked catalog themselves. Mario, Smash Brothers, now probably Pokemon, too, what more "exclusives" do you need?
Noticeably, Nintendo has always been the "odd man out" when it came to games libraries. Non-exclusives for XB or PS usually eventually came out for the other system, but Nintendo always had a nearly distinct game library from the other two. That does matter. It means that Nintendo doesn't have to compete with them on their turf. XB and PS have always been busy one-up'ing each other in specs, mostly because, well, if you have the same games on both systems, what matters is simply "where does it look better" and "where does it run more smoothly". If you're dealing with a completely different game base, you can't compare. More over, the games have a vastly different focus. Where PS and XB focus on action oriented games where multiplayer is mostly a thing of online gaming, Nintendo's consoles always had a distinct focus on local multiplayer, complete with a lineup of party games and controllers that were, compared to XB and PS controllers, VERY basic and simplified, so you didn't first have to learn to play, you could simply pick them up and play. Maybe not perfectly, but most games were of the "easy to pick up" kind that lends itself well to party gaming.
So I do think that Nintendo can (and will) survive as this "niche" player. It has a few strong IPs in their pocket, and since they themselves own that IP, there is exactly zero danger that this IP would ever go to another console, hoping for a bigger market share there. Even the WiiU, which was a train wreck from conception to inception to realization to actually playing with that piece of garbage, couldn't prevent that. I still don't see why anyone thought the WiiU was a good idea, and I don't know anyone who really wanted that console, but, well, there's nowhere else you could play Mario games. And Smash Brothers. And the other consoles simply suck as party consoles. Even more than the WiiU, believe it or not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wrong question. The question isn't "Why wasn't the WiiU a hit?" The question is rather "Why is an abomination like the WiiU, the biggest design blunder in console history (and yes, I do remember the Atari 5200, the 3DO, the Saturn, the Philips CD-i and yes even the Hyperscan, why do you ask?) selling AT ALL instead of going into blissful ignorance like the aforementioned other design atrocities?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because the WiiU is not an abomination at all. It bombed due to political reasons, i.e something went amiss between Nintendo and the 3rd party publishing houses that meant that they didn't release their games on the system.
For some strange reason I actually like the gamepad screen a lot better than my large TV when playing virtual console games. Could be that they where designed for a small screen to begin with (or it's just me that's crazy).
Which is funny considering that back in the day the same game could be released for both the Amiga and the Sinclair Spectrum. And in those days the gaming market where much much smaller than it's today. So no I don't think that the slightly less powerful hardware in the Wii U has anything to do with the missing 3d party games, it's all political, i.e they decided to not support Nintendo for whatever reason.
For example Watch Dogs where ported but never the DLC even though it didn't contain code. Also we had Resident Evil Revelations (so Capcom did port their game engine) but never got Revelations 2 or any of the other RE games that utilized the exact same engine that where already ported.
Like, say, mostly that Nintendo wanted everyone and their dog to include the stupid handheld-screen-gimmick in their games that didn't really make it very possible to port your games to any other console, so unless you got some Nintendo-exclusive deal you probably didn't want to tie your company's fate to a console that had a lukewarm reception?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But if I go buy the game cart at the flea market, download a dump of the same cart, and play it on an emulator, in practice nobody is going to sue me.
And if you buy the Game Pak and a Kazzo or Retrode dumper, you have a defense under 17 USC 117(a)(1) (or foreign counterparts) if someone does sue you, so long as you can afford a lawyer and don't distribute the dumps.
Why don't modern games do free-to-play the way Doom did? The first episode was available without charge as Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead, and additional episodes were available in paid expansion packs titled Ultimate Doom and Doom II.
A smartphone does not beat an Atari 2600, because fundamentally it doesn't have enough buttons.
In theory, a multitouch device can support seven actions per thumb: tap, hold, swipe up, swipe down, swipe left, swipe right, and large swipe. Swipes can be combined diagonally. That already gives you more gestures than a 2600 controller. One might make a platformer by using tap to stop, swipe sideways to go (large swipe to dash), swipe up to jump, and tap with the other thumb to shoot. Do any Android games use a similar control scheme?
Adding physical buttons to smartphone or tablet is not a problem. I constatnly use my iPega controller
How many other people own that controller or others like it? I haven't seen one third-party controller maker release sales figures, and without them, it becomes hard for a for-profit company to justify developing a game targeted at a particular third-party controller. It's also bulky to carry in a pocket.
I think there is lot of money to make if Nintendo released an attachable controler that hosts the device such as smartphone as its screen with built-in battery. AND also released its vast library of oldschool games on it. They have means to do it via all this virtual console stuff they have on their current systems.
Then why hasn't every third-party developer on the NES and Super NES released iPega editions of its games?
Yeah its called "crap hardware that made it prohibitively expensive if not downright impossible to port" which is exactly what will kill this turkey as well.
Look here is what you and Big N just don't seem to be grasping, its a hell of a lot different now than it was during the days of the classic consoles, games are INSANELY expensive to produce now and every penny you have to spend above initial development could mean the difference between profit and loss. Now lets look at the competition....you have X86 Xbox, X86 Playstation, and X86 PC....what do they have in common? Oh yeah X86! Thanks to two of the big three consoles being X86 a dev house only has to make one game and then do some minor tweaks to release for all 3 platforms.
But if this is legit what you will have is 3 platforms you can release on with coding your game in X86 versus only 1 console if you port to Nintendo and if that wasn't enough if TFS is to be believed its gonna be underpowered to boot which means they'd basically have to start from scratch and code specifically for this thing.....companies simply aren't gonna do that, not when there are so many PS4, XB1, and PC players that they can sell to.
And this isn't even addressing the rotten elephant in the room which is the consoles today are already being pushed to the limits which is why we are about to get Xbox Scorpio and Sony Neo....and you expect to have devs code a version of the game for a system that isn't even as powerful as what they are coding on now when they are already having to use every trick in the book just to get their monster titles to run?
When the wii U came out you had game dev after game dev saying "our game engine won't run on that" and ignoring it and mark my words, the same will be true here. this will sell strictly to the most hardcore of fanboys who will buy anything a new Mario or Zelda comes out on but as we saw with the Wii U there just isn't enough of them to make a console viable, but the ONLY way you'll see a GTA or CoD or Dark Souls on this thing is if its a crap smartphone game using the name.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I really wish the Android Play Store had a search option to only show games priced $5 or more, because micro transaction and spam-the-player are dismal experiences.
Would a 1-episode game available without charge on Google Play Store, with additional episodes available for in-app purchase, also be a "dismal experience"?
Other Slashdot users seem to be under the impression that large families already buy a console for the TV in each kid's bedroom.
I don't know why you think they should be able to survive on releasing the same games that exist on two other consoles already. Why would anyone buy a Nintendo system at all?
Nintendo's salvation lies in strong third party support, but they won't be the same games as are on the PS4 and XBox.
Game budgets for PS4 and XBone are enormous. The pipelines are huge, and hard to fill. When you've got that much horsepower, you need a lot more creative staff to make sure there's actually something worth rendering. If Nintendo produces a modestly equipped console that has decent graphics, it will be a much lower barrier to entry.
I don't know why you think they should be able to survive on releasing the same games that exist on two other consoles already. Why would anyone buy a Nintendo system at all?
Because if you can only afford one, the number of good Nintendo games is far fewer than good non-Nintendo games
Nintendo's salvation lies in strong third party support, but they won't be the same games as are on the PS4 and XBox.
Yeah they'll just make different versions and/or entirely new games like they did for WiiU, oh wait.
Game budgets for PS4 and XBone are enormous. The pipelines are huge, and hard to fill. When you've got that much horsepower, you need a lot more creative staff to make sure there's actually something worth rendering. If Nintendo produces a modestly equipped console that has decent graphics, it will be a much lower barrier to entry.
Which is why $Publisher, rather than making $Game for all 3, will make it for only 2 and not go through the extra expense of an entirely different game for one system.
For convenience, I shall quote the relevant part of the statute:
tlhIngan wrote:
That defense doesn't work because you're format-shifting.
The format shifting is "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine".
Mask works have higher protections
Mask works are covered under chapter 9 of the U.S. copyright statute. And as flink pointed out, protection under chapter 9 subsists until the end of the Gregorian calendar year of first publication plus ten more years (17 USC 904). It's shorter than even a patent.
You can already play games on the go and on the big screen if you have both a Vita and the Playstation TV microconsole (which is basically a screenless Vita) Not even taking into account that the vita can do Remote Play with a PS4.
and controllers that were, compared to XB and PS controllers, VERY basic and simplified, so you didn't first have to learn to play, you could simply pick them up and play.
Only with the Wii, the N64 and Gamecube controllers were more traditional.
And the other consoles simply suck as party consoles.
That depends on how you #define party console.
One of the issues is that people "think" there are no "party/family-get-together" games for the PS4...since you don't see those games on the shelf. But there ARE some party games....the thing is they're mostly in the Playstation Store.
So when a "Wii Mom" goes to the game aisle and sees "Game party pack 2016" or "Happy fun time sports-with-mii's" in the Wii/WiiU section, and then goes over to the PS4 section and sees: Fallout 4, Destiny, TESO, ModernSeasonalRealisticSportsGame2016, Duty Calls: Medal of the Battlefield Ops Master Shooty Sergeant eXTREEM edition, Demon Souls, etc etc..she's going to think there are no party games for the PS4.
It's one of the problems with digital downloads, it is hard for SCEfoo to market them to people who aren't already on PSN so they might as well not exist to "casuals". Even then it is hit or miss. I only just found out about Brut@l a couple of days ago.
Cannot reply. Seems /.'s lameness filter thinks it's lame to explain why Gamecube controllers are less intimidating to non-console players and why this (rather than the game lineup) is the reason the GC is more of a party console than XB or PS.
But when you look at the controllers and compare them, I'm pretty sure you can figure it out yourself. Just imagine you never saw a PS2 controller and should now figure out
a) which one is the main controller stick
b) what buttons might be used for what
c) what those 4 buttons on the left are supposed to be.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So that is why the same companies could port their games to Xbox360 and PS3 which isn't x86 based. Or why for example both Ubisoft and Capcom ported their engines to the Wii U but then only released one or two games?
All those insanely expensive things that you talk about are in the design phase of the game, the code which is the engine is mostly standard stuff these days (of course they improve it slightly from time to time) which is evident in the low costs that where involved when Assassins Creed 3 and 4, Watch Dogs or Resident Evil Revelations where ported.
And was it released late due to real problems or because it was an afterthought? In any way the delay hurt the sales and this Ubusoft saw as fact that there where no demand for their games on the Wii U and they stopped all ports.
Obviously, I haven't seen the device, but just listening to the part about detachable controllers makes me skeptical.
A console needs everything built-in, or else it doesn't become standard. Having options is nice, but optional attachments aren't going to have any significant positive impact on usability, as it always the case for consoles. The drawbacks are obvious, though. Extra cost, extra material that makes it bulky, less room for a battery, less durability, and so on. It's not a good idea. This also assumes the controllers will be included, as they'll have to be so NX is not just another tablet. If you lose a controller, will replacements be easy to get, given that this setup won't be for multiplayer? You can't buy a replacement/second Wii U controller, for example (last I heard).
I won't even bother commenting on trying to get a portable playing on a TV. Let's just hope that Nintendo doesn't forget what made the Gameboy and their following portable consoles: terrific battery life. I have a feeling Nintendo is aiming at those phone gamers who have gotten used to running to look for a power plug and charging every chance they get... assuming the thing comes bundled with an actual charger, unlike some Nintendo hardware.
The Wii U hasn't done so well clutching on to 1st-party exclusives.
Because developers who implement IAPs tend to do it in such a way where you cannot outright buy a game. You will always get nickel and dimed for something.
The documentation for the OUYA development kit described two kinds of in-app purchase: "entitlement" IAPs, which are purchased once and then forever associated with your store account, and "consumable" IAPs, the nickel-and-dime energy-mechanic crap that game reviewers love to hate. Sale of downloadable campaigns through IAP would be an entitlement, something you "outright buy" to the extent that it's possible to "outright buy" something downloadable.
just take a look at the permissions they request.
Part of overreaching permissions relates to a limit of Android's manifest file prior to Android 6 "Marshmallow". If an optional game feature requires the use of a permission, such as the camera, microphone, or contacts, the application has to request it at install time whether or not the user chooses to enable the feature associated with the permission. Before Marshmallow, there was no way to mark a permission as optional for the user.
Episodic video games and DLC are a scam to get people to pay more for a full game.
Not new. The pay-per-episode concept has been around as long as expansions have been around, dating back to Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) and StarCraft: Brood War (1998). Even if a game with all its optional downloadable campaigns costs $120, games nowadays are far longer than games used to be, and a single $120 game has far more play time than three $40 games used to.
Those systems already had a huge install base which made it profitable to port...yeah how did that work out for the Wii U? Oh yeah they didn't get shit for ports and it tanked.
You are gonna have 2 octocore APUs at 2Ghz+ versus...a cellphone. Yeah I don't see them getting shit except for Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja which I really don't see selling many units, do you?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So a system that is more powerful than the 360 and PS3 is now smeared as a cellphone. Yeah I will look forward to playing say Xenoblade Chronicles X on my current cellphone.
Doom, with its limited interactivity works fine.
Which Doom are you talking about? The first Doom isn't in Google Play Store. I searched, and all I got were Doom 3 ($9.95) and several apps whose titles included "Doom" but were unrelated to Idthesda's franchise.
Besides, how would I go about trying a paid game in order to understand how its input method works? Back in the old days of cartridge- and CD-based consoles, I could rent the cartridge from a local video store, and I could scan my local friends' collections on their shelves. Nowadays, with paid downloads, I'd have to ask each of my local friends whether he or she owns each game on this list, and I don't foresee much success in that especially in an era where one's gamer friends are more likely to live in a different city.