Microsoft to Introduce GBA-competitor? 289
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Nintendo will have a competition in the handheld market soon. ZDnet has an article that says Microsoft's plan to introduce a 'Media Pad' which includes among other things 'serve as a portable game player in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox video game console.' So I guess the news I heard regarding their interest in the portable industry will soon come true, the question is, can they take the crown from Nintendo?"
No real competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, it is encouraging to see renewed interest in the handheld gaming industry, which has been so long dormant.
Sony? Sega? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nintendo fought off both Sega and Sony, two big companies. Sony forced Sega to go software only, but we still see nintendoes everywhere. The GB audience is little kids. They know "Game Boy" better than anything MS puts out.
This article is just a slashdot crack at MS, though. "Lets point out the monopoly" article! The way the slashdot community fights with Microsoft is funny, and has quite a pattern. 'Do whatever it takes' is generally the big picture. It isn't about crappy software lately, because the government saw some monopoly qualities, that's what slashdot looks into heavily. The truth is, most people that use linux exclusively hasn't even tried Win2K, which has yet to crash or bluescreen on me. Netscape on linux, and mozilla on linux crashes more than anything on win2k for me. But I'm talking to closed minds here.
Its going to be funny when the monopoly talks die down and people start attacking MS's quality to find its stronger than the last time they used it, so their arguements are moot. Sure, XP has bugs (all new OS's do. Try and tell me that Linux 1.0 didn't crash or have bugs.), and X-Box has its share, but it is the first console released under MS's name. But by the time the monopoly craze goes away, I think you'll be surprised at where MS will be.
Mobile Phones the way to go (Score:4, Insightful)
I recokon this will have less and less of an impact here in Europe.
Handheld "consoles" are going out of fassion in favour of mobile phones that are incresingly having better games built in. Some already offer basic multi-player 'online' games. Unless M$ gets into the movile phone market, I won't predict too much.
Doubtful (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously doubt it. Nintendo is particularly GOOD at what they do, especially when it comes to handhelds. Just look at the staying power of the original gameboy. Even to this day, they're still selling, pretty much the original gameboy (with much improved battery life, size, screen, etc)..
Competition is always good, but MS' product will need to completely blow away the GBA (and then some) to compete -- let's not forget that the original 4 colour gameboy sompletely outsold Sega's technologically superior (at the time)Gamegear.
Wouldn't be too hard. (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember ten years ago working at a Babbages, playing California Games on an Atari Lynx. Backlit, 4096 colors, and a hell of alot of fun.
I'd be willing to pump more batteries in the damn thing if it meant I could see the screen.
Re:Hopefully with a better screen than the GBA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sick and tired of MS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Putting the nail in the coffin (Score:5, Insightful)
N64, perhaps (but keep in mind even then they were able to hold their own even with no real third-party developers). But GameCube?
"Nintendo finally learned that their core competency was in creating mediocre handheld gaming systems,"
"Finally?" Nintendo has known since at least the early N64 era that Game Boy is its bread and butter and has gone after intrusions into the market with a vengeance. Towards the end of the N64's life-cycle in Japan, we saw all sorts of accessories to connect the Game Boy Color to the N64, from the Transfer Pak that came out with Pokemon Stadium in the US to the cable that connects the game link port on the GBC to a controller port on the N64 (attatching the GBA to the GameCube isn't a new idea).
And also note that the GBA is their first backwards-compatible anything. Again, trying to tap into their bread-and-butter.
"and blaming a dearth of features on the "compromises" they needed to make in order to accomodate the handheld form factor."
It's not just the form factor they were trying to fit into, but the price factor as well. iPaqs are real nice and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but they also cost over five times as much. It's enough to make you want to play it but not so much you're afraid of breaking it.
And these "compromises" has given us a 32-bit system that does 2-D graphics better even than a Sega Saturn (let alone a PSX). It fits in the palm of my hand and it costs less than a PS One. Not too shabby in my book.
"Unfortunately, Nintendo's poor business sense and lack of R&D has finally caught up to them. They are fighting an 800-lb gorilla that has billion$ of dollars to spend on dominating every area of the market that it enters. And it looks like Microsoft is about to release a very versatile, multipurpose handheld device that will blow all of Nintendo's offerings right out of the water."
If Microsoft is an 800# gorilla, then when it comes to handhelds Nintendo must me a man with a machine gun. This isn't the console market, where the dominant player rotates every generation. We're talking about Game Boy, the Ali of the gaming world. I can think of no less than seven handheld systems offered by six different companies with all sorts of advantages (both real an imagined) that got smacked down by Game Boy and smacked down HARD! The closest thing to a second place I've seen in the field is Sega's Game Gear, and half the people that have posted here don't even remember its name.
And even before anybody thought of a hand-held video game system (where "anybody" means Gumpei Yokoi), guess who dominated the hand-held electronic games market? That's right, still Nintendo and their Game & Watch line. They've been around so long that the associated patent on a plus-shaped directional pad terminated only shortly before Sega made their Dreacast controller.
In today's world, when was the last time you saw a dominant anything that's been on the throne for over a decade? If you ask me, Microsoft would have a better chance of breaking into the CPU business. At least we've seen that there's room for competition there.
Secure windows? user-friendly linux? (Score:2, Insightful)
Second, win2000 does crash. My wife crashed it last night with just a single instance of realplayer running. Granted it didn't 'blue screen' but accepting no input and just plain freezing is not quite the advancement in stability you talk about. I will concede that MS has done better with 2000 and I assume with XP as well. But guess what? So has linux. Linux bashers used it 1-2 years ago and they still cry 'no-user-friendly-apps'. Guess what? Linux has evolved faster than anything out there including windows. You talked about Netscape and Mozilla... Ever tried Galeon? Konqueror (in it's new incarnation) ? Just as windows has evolved to be more 'stable' (as you say), Linux has just gotten better. Try evolution..., galeon..., staroffice...
And yes I dual boot to win2000. Actually, I have it on my laptop. The last time I used it was quite a while ago. Why? well, I can't get a lot of features in IE that i get in galeon. Tabbed-view. Bookmark-management..
You are right, Linux proponents can't always use "it's more stable" arguement to the same affect as before. But Linux is still a lot more stable. Windows is just catching up. And on the flip side, Windows-proponents can't use the "It's non use-friendly" arguement anymore. In fact, everytime i boot to windows, i feel boxed-in with the lack of tools and options that i boot right back to linux. you should give a recent distribution a try. you'll be surprized.
Will Never Happen (Score:2, Insightful)
1) GBA is $90
Microsoft can't produce anything decent at the price.
2) GBA batteries last a _long_ time.
MS's will most likely be backlit and that will eat the batteries.
3) What does MS know about portable gaming? Nintendo's got the track record.
4) Who doesn't know what a game boy is?
Its got name recognition equal to nintendo. Both are sysnonimous with gaming.
5) Nintendo's got way to far a head start, as there will be a sequel to GBA and it will also be revolutionary.
Care to disagree/agree?
Re:Putting the nail in the coffin (Score:1, Insightful)
The Sega Saturn is unrivalled still as far as 2D tile map/sprite-based hardware goes.
The PSX didn't really have much "2D capability." AFAIK, you could just peek/poke the frame buffer (which was internal to the GPU), or draw sprites with polygons. But the Saturn on the other hand, had support for 4 background layers, tons of sprites, sprite effects (warping with vertices, rotation, scaling), rotating backgrounds, various interesting palette effects, several color modes (including 8-bit palettized, and a 2048-color palettized mode [or some number similar to that, maybe 1024], 16, and 24-bit), etc., etc.
Technical shortcomings of the Saturn were its relatively poor 3D capability compared to the PSX, insane complexity, lack of hardware sound compression (the Saturn's sound unit was very nice, but the lack of hardware compression meant developers chose low sampling rates for sound effects), and perhaps too little RAM (1 or 1.5MB.)
The dual CPU set up isn't all that great either. AFAIK, both CPUs cannot share memory well, and the only way to get both CPUs running at full speed is to have one of them executing only from 4KB of cache RAM.
But despite all these faults, the system excels at 2D. The only way to outdo it nowadays is either with a frame buffer (thanks to CPU power nowadays -- the Saturn had linear frame buffer support, but a 25MHz SH-2 isn't adequate for tons of drawing) or polygons set up to function as 2D sprites.