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Gaming, In My Opinion
The Battle of the Handhelds’ - that’s what people are already calling this year’s E3. The yearly exhibition is easily the best place for the three giants (Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft) to reveal the latest tricks they have concealed up their sleeve. This is always the best time for the three to compete with each other, trying to steal the limelight from each other. This year, the tactics seemed to be revolved around the next wave of handheld consoles.
Here, Nintendo has always emerged victorious. The Game Boy and its children pioneered and then dominated the handheld market since it came into life, seeing off competition such as the SNK NeoGeo and the Sega Game Gear, despite some of these having been technically superior machines. Thanks to backwards compatibility, GBA owners can play well over 5,000 titles of portable gameplay, spanning across all genres that you can think of. True, an incredibly majority of these are third party, licensed knock-off cash-ins that aren’t even worth your breath, but even without those, there’s a staggering amount of games available for Nintendo’s handhelds. The invention of the GBA was more of an evolution than a revolution. Sure, the graphics became much better, and the ability to play four player games with only one cartridge was impressive, but in the long run, this was just the natural course that the Boy was going to take. And from the announcement of Sony’s plans to create the PSP, the faithful GBA’s days were numbered. Remodelling it to create the stylish-yet-samey, GBA SP was never going to be the solution! Nor was the creation of the E-card reader and the wireless adapter (though these might have had more impact if they’d seen the light of day outside of Japan!). Nintendo have always been better than Sony and Microsoft at one thing; secrecy. Nintendo’s plans are probably tightly locked up every night in a titanium, subterranean vault, with every key swallowed by the heads of the corporation and every employee in the know threatened with razor sharp samurai swords swung dangerously close to their most precious bodily parts. Or not. The fact is that Nintendo never let slip anything. So there was a great deal of rumour-mongering when Nintendo announced it was developing a top-secret “new game product”. All manner of things were surmised: a Nintendo-only version of the EyeToy, something connected with online gaming (yeah, right!) or that the “new game product” was merely the unsightly bongos from Donkey Konga. That said, having looked at DK Jungle Beat, congratulations are in order to Nintendo for thinking of another use for those bloody things! Barely a day or so into the New Year, Nintendo announced that this “new game product” would be the DS, with even the European Nintendo website (possibly the champions in the field of crapulence!) offering full speculations. Very little else was revealed, though the various artists’ impressions that did the rounds were most amusing (I recall seeing one labelled DS2, boasting no less than nine screens) and all seemed to be based closely on the SP, which I guess isn’t too far from the truth. So E3 passed and the PSP and DS were effectively unveiled simultaneously, and are in direct competition right from the off. How does Nintendo’s dual-screened deity fare against what was always going to be a crushing blow from Sony? Well, today the world is largely concerned with graphics. You can deny it all you like, but it’s true; stylish and/or realistic graphics are what separates the men from the boys, the games from the garbage and the consoles from the crud. PS2 had the best graphics going for ages, then the Cube stepped up with better graphics, just before the Xbox showed up with (inevitably) incredibly stunning graphics. And in this element of the competition, Sony takes it, hands down. The size of the screen helps here; possibly bigger than the DS’ two screens put together. The overall package gives graphics close to PS2 quality, while the DS follows timidly behind with graphics that are only just post-N64. Therefore, in the eyes of the unknowing public, the PSP will seem the sweeter deal. Hell, I’ve seen the screenshots and I’m damn tempted myself! But as far as unique selling points go, that’s all the PSP has going for it. Yes, I’m aware that the PSP has WiFi capabilities, and will be able to play movies on it but the DS also has WiFi and movie…no, wait, make that two selling points. And, yes, I’m also aware that the PSP will have an USB port to connect peripherals such as a keyboard and stylus, but the DS has these as standard. The PSP is essentially an evolution, rather than a revolution. Handhelds were eventually going to become 3D and, though it has done so much faster than we could have dreamed, the PSP isn’t exactly world-changing simply because it got there first. The DS, then. What does it have that can compete with Sony’s incredible graphics and movie playback abilities? The most important answer is the two screens. This is a revolution rather than evolution, though it may not seem apparent at first. Many of you are now thinking “So what if it has a second screen? It’s only going to be used for maps, menus and statistic pages!” Unfortunately, this is true; it is highly unlikely that third-party companies are going to use the two screens to their full advantage, but the potential is astounding. Apparently, this potential has already been realised by the technical demo, Submarine, which impressed the world press, but we gamers can’t really experience it until the machine is released. Suffice to say, if used judiciously, the dual screen feature will change the way of handheld gaming. The fact that both screens can cope with three-dimensional graphics is impressive. Most artists’ impressions believed that only one screen would be able to cope with 3D, making the DS a scaled-down version of the GC-GBA link (which is probably where most third-party developers will take their ideas from – hardly world-changing stuff!) The ways in which the console can be controlled is also revolutionary to gaming. Touch screen capabilities, voice recognition software and a microphone; it all points to some titles where you merely need to hold the console, with no buttons needed at all! Soon, we’ll be seeing portable versions of the highly original N64 experiment of Hey You, Pikachu, though hopefully it won’t be Pokemon-based. The extra slot for GBA games (hardly original, but not unexpected) can also come in useful; imagine a trading card battle game (along the lines of Yu-Gi-Oh!) where you could use the E-Card reader to scan in your monsters and BLIP! they would appear on one of the screens. The possibilities are endless. And finally, the DS has something that Nintendo has always used well; connection. Using the WiFi technology (which, incidentally, will automatically power up if your sleeping DS detects another user up the thirty feet away. This is a less-than-subtle nod to the Nokia N-Gage’s ability to detect other handsets nearby), you can chat or play with up to 16 people who are with you, be they strangers you pass in the street or friends you have gathered around you. Herein lies the problem. Nintendo is a predominantly Japanese company, in a predominantly Japanese society, and therefore has predominantly Japanese ideas. That’s not to say that this is a bad thing, but as hard as they try, Nintendo won’t be able to understand Western or European gamers as well as the international monopolies of Sony or Microsoft. In other words, as much as we’d love it to, Nintendo’s devoted fans are not going to be able to ride the train to work and find they’re surrounded by fellow DS gamers. Of course, both companies have claimed that the two machines are not in competition, but they have to understand that to the unknowing public, they are. And in a world that prefers ‘Bigger, Better, More’ to ‘Ooh, that’s interesting’, the DS will not be able to foil the PSP’s plans to dominate the handheld market. Nice try, though, Nintendo! |