David Emery Online

The Playstation Generation

26 April 2005

So, after waiting for a while Sony have finally announced that the PSP is coming out over here in the UK (and the rest of Europe) on the 1st of September, for the pricey sum of £179 – which isn’t so bad compared to the US, when you account for VAT and that the dollar will likely be even worse come September. (Link to full information on GamesRadar)

The competition between the PSP and the Nintendo DS is quite an interesting one, which sums up the two ways the industry is going at the moment; Sony is aiming slap bang at the mainstream gaming market that it has done so well with over the successive Playstation generations, and looks to do so again with both the PSP and the Playstation 3 (to be announced at E3 next month). This is also the same market that Microsoft is going for, and is currently where the money in the games industry is; with games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half Life 2 and Halo 2 all selling millions of copies to gamings traditional vanguard.

Nintendo, however, are trying to do something completely different; mostly due to necessity to prevent them from becoming the next Sega (who have fallen from being one of the main forces in the industry to being an also-ran). Nintendo’s current strategy seems to be to try and innovate out of their current hardcore gamer/children niche, which sees them getting dwindling sales as the market moves towards the Playstation mainstream, and try and expand their niche towards the untapped corners of the market; to attract people who don’t play games at the moment, indeed, to attract people that wouldn’t even dream of playing games at the moment.

The DS is the first attempt to truly realise this, although Nintendo started experiments of this nature with a variety of slightly off-kilter games on the GameCube, including Donky Konga: a game that comes with a set of bongo drums you attach to your GameCube. While the headline feature of the DS is its dual screens, the main innovation is the touch screen, which has the capacity to bring a whole new types of games to handheld gaming.

This new philosophy can be most exemplified by two games; Wario Ware Touched, already available, and Nintendogs which will be out later this year (and may end up with a different name). Both games make heavy use of the touch screen, and both are not “typical” games, with neither traditional objective-based gameplay nor shooting or sporting based (genres which make up most of the games available on other platforms).

Both these games have instant appeal to non-tratitional gamers; Nintendogs in particular is an obvious land-grab by Nintendo to try and corner the female market, and it may well prove to be successful. However, for all this rhetoric that Nintendo and its fans are churning out about innovation, and revolutionary gaming (indeed – the code name for Nintendo’s forthcoming console it “Revolution”), almost the entirety of the DS’s line up is ports or rehashes of previous games – and, due to the reliance on the touch screen as opposed to having a proper analogue stick, many suffer from control problems.

In the end, I think that Nintendo may well be on it’s last legs, at least as a hardware company. While I don’t want to make predictions (they never come true), I can’t see the DS winning out in the long run over the PSP – even if Nintendo lasts out this round, I think PSP2 Vs Gameboy NextGen will be a forgone conclusion. While the idea of revolutionising gaming is an admiral one, I don’t think the gaming industry wants to be.

Postscript:

That turned out quite a lot longer then I anticipated; personally, I’m going to hold out for a PSP – the lure of GTA, Gran Turismo, Mercury and others outweighs Mario DS (which I’ve got on the N64), Wario Ware (which I have both on the GBA SP and the GameCube) et al.