Next gen Portable war. 3DS Vs. NGP

[The King Of Magikarps]

Which do you think will win this gen of handhelds? Personally I think the 3DS will put Nintendo again on top of the Handheld market. Its the first time that 3D will be viewable without glasses. Sony isn't really bringing anything new to handhelds and the NGP will more than likely be plagued by the same issues that the PSP had and one such issue was the lack of quality games. Most of the must buy games were JPN only. The second stick though makes FPSs more viable and games that suffered from the lack of a right stick may be given a second chance. The touch screen IMO is a waste. It seems that they are trying to make it more appealing to smart phone users. The 3DS will also have some issues with the main issue being the amount of shovel ware which is most pf what you see on the Wii and DS. Hopefully Namco will make Katamari games for both systems as a 3d Katamari game would be epic and on the NGP it would actually be playable as the one on the PSP used the shape buttons as the second stick.

 

[gallade]

imo the only good katamari games were the first 2, they need to stick to the basics, those games rocked.

 

[bullados]

As usual, Nintendo and Sony have very different strategies, and they generally fit into their historical norms for consoles.

Sony is going for raw, unadulterated power, basically trying to corner the core market of video games by using a very familiar control scheme to what core gamers are used to. The success of their handheld will depend on how closely developers can recreate a console experience on a portable device. The rear-mounted touch screen and the other "extras" are interesting, but will ultimately not be utilized by developers to the extent to which Sony would like.

Nintendo is trying to develop yet another new way of gaming, this time emphasizing depth of field and a control scheme that many developers still haven't managed to tap to its full potential. The success of this handheld will depend on how creative and innovative developers can be with their control schemes and game design choices from a graphical perspective. There will also be a small segment of "core" games that look much better than their DS brethren (such as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy remakes), but those games will ultimately be few, far between, and less impressive from both a visual and control standpoint as their Sony counterparts.

tl;dr: same old, same old.

 

[Tagrineth]

Nintendo hasn't failed to dominate the handheld market when put up against much more powerful hardware for 20 years now. They still won't.

NGP might finally give Nintendo some remotely viable competition, but it'll NEED a decent flow of strong titles to keep up. 3DS already has a ridiculous lineup scheduled and it'll only get better. Even if a lot of early 3DS blockbusters end up being N64 remakes, they'll get the system into peoples' homes and peoples' hands like crazy. Ocarina of Time alone will move systems, count on it.

 

[bullados]

To be fair, each time an opponent tried to pawn off a more powerful piece of hardware, it also came with extreme limitations.

Sega's GameGear required 6 batteries, and had a battery life in the single digit hours range. (GBP was well into double digits on 2 batteries)

The original PSP was fairly buggy, even to the point where the game disks would eject if you put pressure on the wrong parts of the system. Plus, y'know, battery life.

What were the other direct competitors to Nintendo's GameBoy and DS series? Those are the only two that I can think of right now...

 

[vaporeon]

Sony is working on a new PSP that's just as powerful as the PS3, acts as a cell phone with 3 or 4G services. Its going to cost around 1000 bucks. I do see people putting out that kind of money for a gaming system.

 

[Regis_Neo]

Honestly, I'm actually gonna go out on a limb here and say that, very likely, the Ipod is going to end up with the better percentage of the market by the time this all ends; sure it's technically not a game console primarily, but even I find myself taking it along more and more on road trips and playing games on it instead of lugging around a larger DS system.

Otherwise, if we're just talking NGP/3DS, 3DS hands down; Nintendo has dominated in their "rivalry" and isn't going to let up anytime soon. To many people (except the diehards), I would think the PSP was largely irrelevant and imo carries a rather bad name association with it due to all the problems that plagued it; the worst you can fling at Nintendo are the shovelware titles, but even then you only get mass shovelware titles when your console is popular, not to mention it's easy enough to ignore them.

 

[bullados]

Interestingly enough, according to VGChartz, the PSP has outsold both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. In fact, in terms of raw number of purchases, it is the #7 ranking system of all time, behind only the DS, PS2, original Gameboy, PSX, Wii, and GBA.

Of course, the Xbox and Microsoft systems in general will likely never reach that level of domination b/c it has such a weak presence in Japan, which in general makes up between 1/5 and 1/4 of all other system's sales totals...