Nintendo DS Details Revealed

[Ranger REG]

And that's probably a wise decision. For myself, Nintendo has never disappointed with a handheld game console, and I don't expect them to do so now.

Maybe. But then again, Nintendo never had any competition in the portable market before. Not even from entertainment PDA's. Hopefully this competition will make them even more determined to stay #1 with the consumers.

 

[WizarDru]

Maybe. But then again, Nintendo never had any competition in the portable market before. Not even from entertainment PDA's. Hopefully this competition will make them even more determined to stay #1 with the consumers.

You mean other than the Neo Geo Pocket, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Atari Lynx (I and II), Nokia Ngage (I and II), Sega Gamegear, Sega Nomad, NEC Turbo Express and the Bandai ColorSwan? Nintendo has always had competition for the market...often facing technologically superior competitors. I remember how cool it was that the TurboExpress could actually play the same games that my TG-16 played...but I wasn't paying the price they were asking.

 

[Ranger REG]

Well, they left most of them in the dust. It's equivalent to an early Mike Tyson fight. You blink and the competition is over.

As for Nokia N-Gage and cellphone games ... pbbbltt!

I've yet to see some serious competition.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

I was merely replying to someone's earlier point that the wireless feature wasn't a throwaway, which I disagreed with. In point of fact, the PSP has much better wireless capacity: it's supposed to be 802.1 compatible, which should allow it a full range of functionality the DS can't touch (since the DS can only work with...another DS, and only at range of 30-100 feet).

If you look back to your first post, the wireless notes that the DS will be 802 compatible.

 

[WizarDru]

You're right...I originally thought that the use of 802.11 on the DS was ONLY with Nintendo's proprietary protocol. This clarification from Nintendo clears that up "The DS technology also provides for a wireless LAN connection, which could allow a theoretically infinite number of players to connect at a hot spot and compete at a central game hub on the Internet, even if they're thousands of miles apart."

However, with Nintendo only guaranteeing a 30 feet range, but saying "it should reach much further" they're trying to eat their cake and have it, too. I would be very much suprised if the PSP doesn't feature much better wireless reception and much better integration of wireless technology.

I suspect, purely on a gut level, that the Sony will also be easier to hack for purposes other than what Sony intended. Which will be cool.

 

[WizarDru]

Well, they left most of them in the dust. It's equivalent to an early Mike Tyson fight. You blink and the competition is over.

Some of them, sure. But the Sega GameGear was expected by many to be a Gameboy killer, and it helds it's own for a while. The TurboExpress was a technically superior system with a larger collection of games...that was completely squandered by a company with no clue of the market. Oh, and the fact that it was 4 times as expensive as a GB.

Nintendo wasn't always so dominant in the handheld market, and they were much more vulnerable in 1991 and 1996 than they are now. Remember, the Lynx came out at the same time as the original Gameboy, and had color, stereo sound and 3D capabilities. But it was also $90 more expensive at release time, had no killer apps and was released by Atari, who's name was now badly tarnished with retailers. Even then, it was plagued by production shortages in 1989, as they couldn't meet demand. Nintendo could and did. Nintendo was at the height of NES popularity, was cheaper and had killer licenses. Even with all that, the Lynx was on the market from 1989 to 1994, with it's best years being 1991-2. The Lynx II was the redesigned version, and was only $99, making it sell much faster. The Sega Gamegear is what killed the Lynx, not the gameboy (well, and Atari itself).

The thing is, most of the competitors to the Gameboy didn't understand what made the GB so popular: it's form factor and battery-life. The Lynx and Gamegear were both heavier, and went through batteries like crazy. The TurboExpress was just too expensive, and the neogeo pocket...well, it just stinks.

Sony, one hopes, understands these things. Sony's two biggest problems are it's insular design culture (two competing MP3 player designs, for example) and it's insistence on trying to force certain technologies it's enamored of, regardless of consumer desire. Do we really need Mice with memory-stick slots? The UMD format sounds like a potential problem: mini-CDs don't sound like they'll be able to withstand the punishment of portable gaming the same way that cartridges can.

 

[Alzrius]

The N64 wasn't a collosal failure...but it didn't recapture ground lost to the Playstation. Nintendo's refusal to leave the inferior ROM cartridge behind, their terrible licensing practices and lack of acceptance because of them...those led to it not being a huge success.

I was under the impression that the lack of abandoning the cartridge format is what lead to the licensing troubles. From what I understand, the cartridge format was faster in terms of loading time, and the N64 itself was a system with greater processing power than the PS1, but for the third-parties, the amount of work needed to put a game on a cartridge, as opposed to a disc, was much greater - essentially making more companies unwilling to put their work on a cartridge, even as a port from an existing game; and that this was the major loss of the N64 to the newcomer that was the PS1, not any particular follies in terms of how they approached licensing deals.

Of course, no one is perfect, and Nintendo has made some bad decisions also, such as driving Silicon Knights from a second-party company to a third-party one because Nintendo wanted them to focus more on play controls, and Silicon Knights wanted to focus more on storyline.

The thing is, most of the competitors to the Gameboy didn't understand what made the GB so popular: it's form factor and battery-life. The Lynx and Gamegear were both heavier, and went through batteries like crazy. The TurboExpress was just too expensive, and the neogeo pocket...well, it just stinks.

Sony, one hopes, understands these things.

Well, those of us who are system loyal to Nintendo hope that Sony doesn't understand these things at all. Still, that was a very cogent breakdown as to why the Game Boy has trumped all other handheld systems. Truth to tell, I'm still unsure why the Game Gear lost to the Game Boy; can you explain why it wasn't the GB-killer people thought it would be? Especially since, as I recall, Sega always had a stronger advertising presence (at least on television) than Nintendo.

Btw Dru, nice avatar. Everyone loves Magical Trevor.

 

[drothgery]

I was under the impression that the lack of abandoning the cartridge format is what lead to the licensing troubles. From what I understand, the cartridge format was faster in terms of loading time, and the N64 itself was a system with greater processing power than the PS1, but for the third-parties, the amount of work needed to put a game on a cartridge, as opposed to a disc, was much greater - essentially making more companies unwilling to put their work on a cartridge, even as a port from an existing game; and that this was the major loss of the N64 to the newcomer that was the PS1, not any particular follies in terms of how they approached licensing deals.

It's not any more work to put a game on cartridge, except that games had to be designed to use less memory; the 650 MB or so that a CD could hold was far more than the largest cartridge could reasonably be at the time. And the other thing was that cartridges cost considerably more to make (especially the largest ones); pressing CDs is cheap. So as long as the $50 price point for new games held up, game makers were looking at a lot more profit with the CD medium (until cheap CD writers and mod chips made piracy easy).

 

[WizarDru]

I was under the impression that the lack of abandoning the cartridge format is what lead to the licensing troubles.

Yup, it was all tied together. There wasn't really any greater difficulty in creating a game for cartridge versus CD, per se. The issue was that cartridges were much more limited in storage capacity and only Nintendo could manufacture them. So not only were third-party developers required to get a license from Nintendo, they had to get Nintendo to manufacture their game and respond to Nintendo's content control policies, which were much stricter than Sony's policies. The largest cartridge available for the N64 was 64MB. CDs could hold more than 10 times that amount of data, allowing games with FMV and actual recorded dialogue (consider games like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy). CDs were cheaper and faster to produce, and many companies, like Square, finished their commitments and left for Sony, instead. That meant that there were few 3rd-party games and licenses. Capcom wasn't releasing Resident Evil 2 on the N64...it was practically impossible under the limitations of the cartridge format.

Truth to tell, I'm still unsure why the Game Gear lost to the Game Boy; can you explain why it wasn't the GB-killer people thought it would be? Especially since, as I recall, Sega always had a stronger advertising presence (at least on television) than Nintendo.

Btw Dru, nice avatar. Everyone loves Magical Trevor.

Heh. The moment I saw Trevor, I knew I'd found my new Avatar.

The Gamegear had several fatal flaws that doomed it in the handheld market. First, it was bigger and heavier than the gameboy. The gameboy's success was a big suprise to everyone, including Nintendo, who underestimated how popular the device would turn out to be. It's portability cannot be understated. Worse, one of the GG's best features was also it's biggest liability: it's screen. Ahead of its time, the screen featured backlighting, something the gameboy didn't get for years. However, the reason the gameboy didn't have the backlighting was simple: power. The gamegear used 6 AA batteries, for a playtime of about 6 hours...the gameboy only used 4 AA batteries, and could go up to 35 hours. Gamegear was also late to market, being the third of the handhelds. By the time it came out in June 1991, the gameboy had been out for two years, and sold 3.2 million units or so. The GG only sold 140,000 or so by the end of 1992, while the GB had sold nearly 5 million. Being more expensive didn't help it, either. Sega's attempt to remedy the situation, by releasing a rechargable power pack that was essentially a heavy belt (weighing more than the gg itself) not only looked silly, but only gave two more hours of game time. Add into that the fact the form factor for the gg was just bulky...unlike the GB, it didn't slide into a pants pocket that well.

Essentially, the game gear was doomed by being a portable game system that really wasn't terribly portable, due to power restrictions, weight and size. Some folks claim it didn't have a good game selection, but I couldn't say either way, honestly.

 

[John Crichton]

For whatever reason, I always loved the Game Gear (probably because of the screen). But then again I've always been a huge supporter of Sega.

Nintendo has done great things with their portable line. I do think Sony will be it's first real competition. We shall see.