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Nintendo Death Watch |
Sep 12, 2005, 22:30 |
VT Hoodlum |
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I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with that article. I'm an acknowledged Nintendo fan(not a fanatic, though), so I may be a little biased, but I really don't think they're going away anytime soon. I also doubt they'll ever reclaim their dominant market share, but they have a big thing going for them that GM (and Microsoft and Sony, to some extent) doesn't have: profitability. Nintendo has carved itself a sizable niche with inexpensive hardware and unique, innovative games. Even their 'failed' systems, the N64, and to a lesser extent, the GameCube, made them money. The handheld arena brings them all the cash they need all by itself. I especially disagree with the author's comparison of the PSP and the DS. The 'gimmicky' DS is steadily developing a solid library of games that simply weren't possible to do before. The 3d effects of the Virtual Boy were a gimmick, but the touch screen is a complete departure from how we've played games before. I'll put out a quick example for those of you that havn't messed around with the DS at all.
I don't have one yet, (will probably change that soon) but I was playing a demo machine in a local EB. It was playing a Pac-Man concept demo. In this demo, you had a blank screen with the Pac-Man ghosts floating around. In order to play, you didn't use the d-pad or buttons. You drew a Pac-Man on the screen, and it came to life and started moving around the screen and eating ghosts, guided by walls you'd quickly erect by drawing a line with the stylus. Ok, this is neat so far, I think. After a few minutes of eating ghosts, I'm confronted by an extra large Boss ghost. I try running into him with my Pac-Man, only to be swatted off the screen. This happens a couple more times, and I start thinking of what I'm not doing right. Then, it hits me. I draw a SUPER BIG Pac-Man that takes up most of the screen. I direct him towards that extra large ghost, now small by comparison, and eat him right up. This sold me on the system. It lets you interact with the world on a level not previously possible. The options for this are wide open. There's a freaking surgeon game coming out where you play a doctor and 'operate' on patients using the stylus as a scalpal and other medical tools. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but really, tell me if you've ever heard of anything like that before. The PSP, by comparison, is, just like author said, a shrunken down PS2, complete with shrunken down PS2 games. It doesn't really offer anything we havn't seen before. Its a sexy looking system, no doubt, but its high cost, mostly mediocre game library, and overly expensive movies don't really move me to throw down my money.
We havn't seen what this new controller for the Revolution is yet, but given what Nintendo has made possible with the DS, I have faith that this system will make people take notice. Probably not enough to recapture the market from the XBox and Playstation, but certainly enough to keep Nintendo off life support and making games for a long time.
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