I don't see that being the case. Pixel density, on the other hand...This is just a guess based on the fact that this method would play nicely with the slider that lets you adjust the effect:
It's been proven in multiple double blind trials that people notice changes in vertical resolution far more than horizontal resolution. And at the viewing distance you're playing a handheld at a vast majority can tell the difference between 240 lines of vertical resolution and 720 or even 480. You would have to be about 10 feet away from the console screen to not be able to perceive the difference between 240 and 480.
Sure it is. Cost control is how Nintendo prints money. It's how they still made a profit during the N64 and GCN eras and kept afloat as a company. Smart business practices are why Nintendo has had one unprofitable quarter in the history of the company.
Yet even with "cost controls" the N64 was still a revolutionary console. The GCN was a little more conservative but it also came into the game later and had the benefit of watching how badly the PS2 was doing with wonky architectures. The Wii adds nothing to the table other than waggle and is just an overclocked GCN. Even though the SNES is basically the same thing (an overclocked NES), it at least added revolutionary new 2D methods like Mode7.
You say Sony and MS make up the margin with software sales, but that's a short sighted view of things. It took Sony and Microsoft years to turn a profit, and just because they eventually started making money (as opposed to losing it) doesn't mean much when you consider how much they lost. Sony basically lost all of the money they made during the PS2 era because of the PS3 and then some, and still haven't (and probably never will) make it back. The 360 isn't much better off.
A friend of mine (and a huge finance/econ buff), explained to me pretty clearly what Sony is doing for the PS3. It knew it was going to be a painful painful transition to a new platform, especially one so markedly different than the previous gen. So it hedged its bets on this gen being a shakedown. It bought into Cell, and promoted the fuck out of it. It now owns a foundry just for producing them. And now third parties have started getting used to the PS3's architecture. The Move release seems half-assed because it is half-assed, it's literally just a trial run. They're basically just marketing it as Wii HD, to tap into the market Nintendo is intentionally leaving behind with their inferior product, the casual sector that does like shinies as well as waggle fun.
This is all just a shakedown and warmup for the PS4. The PS4 is likely to be based on Cell as well, with the major upgrade coming to the RSX unit rather than the CPU cores. They'll probably throw one or two more SPUs into the package, bump up the clock, and bump the memory up, and call it a day. Whereas Nintendo is going to have to struggle to find a new architecture (the Wii/GCN hardware is at its limits, and doesn't even have facilities such as virtualization support). And MS is completely ignoring the casual market, so Move has absolutely nothing to worry about from there. MS backed itself into a corner catering just to hardcores because it's basically already tapped out the maximum potential of the console, and there's still probably 2 or 3 more years to go.
If neither company had other divisions to prop up their gaming business they would be dead. Nintendo does gaming and only gaming. They don't sell operating systems or music players or TVs.
Erm no. Nintendo is just in it for the quick cash. Sony and MS are hedging their bets for the future. Sony is making a direct attack at Nintendo's market with Move, and MS has already all but completely consumed the hardcore market in NA/AU/EU. Nintendo will win this gen, there's no doubt about that, but their future prospects aren't exactly guaranteed at this point.
We had first-party rechargeable solutions for the original Gameboy. It was an external battery that you plugged into the power adapter slot.
No shit, I had one. I'm talking about having the console built around it.
But you say "anything over 8 hours" is unnecessary and seemingly forget how poor the PSP's battery life is. One of the early (if not launch) racing games would kill the battery within two and a half hours if were using the wireless.
No I didn't forget about it. There's no denying that the PSP had hardware design faults at launch, namely the poor UMD locking mechanism, the horrible DPAD switch placement, and the fragile screen. But those got resolved and now the PSP has a very solid following.
Sony is the first manufacturer to take on Nintendo's complete monopoly of the handheld market, and not completely fold in 3 months. That's astonishing given how much of a stranglehold Nintendo had with the Gameboy, and how much other companies have failed to introduce competitors.
Depending on the CPU needs of the game, wireless use, and UMD use, it can kill its battery pretty quickly. I know there are ways to run games off of the memory stick, but last I checked that's generally used by pirates and not an official installation method for UMD games.
Uhh the PSP Go completely ditched the UMD drive and uses flash memory exclusively for game storage. Ironically it is failing hard because it lacks the UMD drive, to the point Sony has given up promoting it and is promoting the older PSP designs. UMD is far from dead, even with the falling price of flash it is still far cheaper to press a UMD disc than to write to memstick. It also has the advantages over download-only releases in allowing people to trade and resell their old games, something that cannot be discounted.
Done "very well"? I guess you could say that "it works" for the PSP but other then cost I don't see it having any advantages over the DS/3DS cards, and the 3DS cards available for developers at launch will have more capacity than a dual-layer UMD disc.
Capacity isn't the only thing that matters. If that were the case consoles would have moved to flash drives and stuff years ago... yet they haven't. Pressing a disc is still infinitely cheaper than building a cartridge. And there is no reason we can't have multi UMD disc games, like we've had for consoles for decades.
It's market is a bit strange, because the PSP hardware is far more popular than software sales would suggest. Which is to say that piracy far outstrips software sales, and PSPs jailbroken for homebrew and emulation use seem to be more common than stock PSPs.
More like Sony marketed it as more than just a game playing unit, but as a mobile entertainment unit. I probably use my PSP for more movie watching than I do game playing, even with the huge number of emulators at my disposal. And Sony knows this, and it's why they're not too upset the market has moved towards that way, and why you hardly see PSP game promos nowadays.
Companies like Sony have the flexibility to be able to do that. Nintendo is so ingrained in YOU ONLY USE MY CONSOLE FOR GAMES, that it's frankly boring nowadays. Basically the only reason I'm interested in a 3DS is for the homebrew possibilities, as none of the DS titles ever struck me as a mustbuy.
While waggle is generally overrated, the pointer on the Wi remote is the controller's best feature. It's a far better FPS controller than dual-analog and second only to the keyboard and mouse IMO.
Err, the Wii's pointer detection is horribly inaccurate and painful to use. Holding a controller like a remote is actually not that ergonomically good of a position, and it frankly gets tiring after a while. Knock the dual-analog stick design all you want, but frankly it's the best compromise between comfort, usability, and playability. Mouse/KB may be far better in a control sense, but it's also unwieldy and impractical to use from anything except a desk.
We'll see how well that statement holds up after the 3DS comes out. People were ragging on the DS's touchscreen and waggle when the Wii came out, and both are huge successes.
Honestly, it'll probably be a commercial success, but all it's going to do is dilute the market with even more shovelware. Look at the huuuuuuuuuuuuge percentage of shovelware titles for the DS and Wii. Is that something you really want to succeed?
