Why Hand-held Consoles (i.e Smaller Gaming Devices) Suck…
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under General, Headshot, Technology
I know quite a few people who blow up money on vices such as smoking, drinking, drugs and a lot other booze. I also know people who play on the PSP. And this post isn’t just bashing Sony’s shitty creation, but also many others that it is competing with. Nintendo can be credited for wasting time, money and energy in the creation of several models of handhelds very very uncreatively named as GameBoy, GameBoy Advance (GBA), GBA SP, GBA DIG, GBA ACP, and quite a few more ripped off from positions offered to the police forces in India.
There are a few notable features common in all of them -
* They have really small microscopic screens which makes hyper-metropic people like me dizzy.
* They have a shitty catalog of games which fans claim that they are just as diverse as those for the PC
* The games come on proprietary storage devices that cannot be accessed by any other device made by them
* They suck bigtime
* They are friggin’ expensive costing even more than top end Graphics Cards…
They even have hypnotic effects on their users. I have actually seen that happening. I had a friend who claimed to have similar opinions about handhelds. But then, it was only until he played on a PSP owned by a PSP owner I know. In that very experience, his mind was captured, with his reasoning capacities nailed by the AI being that sits inside the small shell of plastic(, metal, glass and a whole lot of materials that could have been better used to create cellphones). From that very day, he wasn’t the same person I knew. Since then, he found NFS Underground on that screen smaller than my own mouth “just-as-good” as NFS Carbon on my PC on which I spent nearly three and a half times more! I realized then that Sony had another victim to proudly advertise, another innocent human who could have raised his voice against the hypnotic phenomenon. This post I assume is the first venture in going against those all-powerful evil beings sitting inside Sony’s HQ plotting conspiracies into dominating the entire world. Today Sony could make one guy say something that would have any sane person raising his eyebrows. It could have someone changing sides. It could reduce the love someone had towards his own PC. Tomorrow, it could influence the world peace meetings in a big way. It could cause another World War. It could cause international allies changing colors and sides. I can already imagine in chinky (read:An Indian slang for an east-Asian or a Japanese looking guy) in a tuxedo sitting on swivel chair inside a darkened conference room throwing up the evil “Muhahaha” sort of laughter the way bad bosses in Hindi movies do. Their policy goes something like this - If you can’t beat them with intelligent reasons to own, get them joining you using mind control processors embedded inside those tiny devices.
What might seem like rivals in sales of shitty devices, is actually two rival plots to take over the entire world… Wake up folks! Wake up… it’s about time a mutiny starts up. Those awful devices must go down… I know this particular post is going against sentiments of a zillion people around. I apologize, but then it’s time things change!
Oh well, perhaps several days of NOT playing GTA and NOT watching South Park is getting on me. Now for some saner reasons to not go for consoles. As I said, the experience isn’t at all as wholesome in my arrogant opinion atleast. It is obvious that handheld consoles have much lesser processing power than their towering daddies. For several reasons, any console is only powerful enough to just render graphics optimized for the tiny little screens that it comes with. Tiny in terms of resolution that is… 480*272 is 7.9 times smaller than what I play on my humble monster with a 17″ TFT. And that is as big as it gets in console gaming. Cheap (in terms of nature, not pricing) stuff like GBA (All variants!), Nintendo DS, and wannabees like Nokia N-Gage have even smaller displays, at times requiring magnification devices. It really hurts me when people spend several thousand bucks on buying games for it which only comes on devices which would never take off and never become a standard. Take UMD for instance. It just doesn’t play anywhere else other than those damned sony devices. Ditto for Memory Sticks (every possible kind of it!). These are atleast reasonable in front of those shitty cartridges that you need to buy to use the Nintendo’s offerings. Really, it takes you back to the 1990’s…
Have a sense for spending money wisely. I understand that gaming is a lovely gift technology has given to its users. Its always better to have a wholesome experience of it. With stellar graphics, heart-thomping sound, and the cinematic experience that just pumps adrenaline in your viens! PC gaming rocks!
Ideas for upcoming posts: Bash console gaming, More gibberish about handheld gaming and also bash corporations not taking out PC versions of its games a la Rockstar, Namco, Konami, THQ, and a lot more…
PS: Believing a damned rumour and then waiting all the while till October for the PC version of GTA seems worse than watching Telugu movies which are put up around the place where I currently am… I guess I can put myself into suspended animation till then, or better still - Study for the big exams which people an year older to me are currently going through… Sheesh! 
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12 Responses to “Why Hand-held Consoles (i.e Smaller Gaming Devices) Suck…”
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Anuj Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 3:11 amWell, I agree with you on the small screens and the over pricing but the thing is that this industry is still in it’s technological infancy. They may have been around for a while but it has only been a couple of years since the amount of computational power available for these devices has become respectable.
Personally I think that no matter how many swipes you take at these guys but they’re on to something over here. A few years from now personalized hand held computers will be the norms you will see things like the iPhone become serious contenders for PCs, people will prefer greater convenience and the iPhone is the perfect answer for that, the screen is gorgeous plus the zoom feature allows for really intuitive browsing, it feels like reading a newspaper after a while.
Now, this will have an impact on gaming, this’s when things get really interesting. When the amount of computational power available to programmers increases and tools like an accelerometer built into systems like the iPhone with a respectable screen become norms for the industry; you will see a boom in this market. Everyone will be playing something from their pockets, there’s a lot of money to be made here. What I am trying to say here is that gaming will be a useful feature, the device won’t revolve around gaming. No, instead you will have general purpose devices performing most of the tasks which PCs do well today.
So laugh all you can right now, you will have a really different view a few years from now.
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Prashanth Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 4:26 amThat’s exactly what I want to stress. Things would become small for utilitarian reasons. No way people can have a wholesome gaming platform in these small gadgets…
iPhone is pure genius, but PSP isn’t. PSP is any day more powerful than the iPhone, but then it is about the utility that you should see… Portability is going to go a long way, but then I don’t see the same future for Portable Gaming, which is just another expensive avenue to spend money. Honestly, PSP costs nearly half as much as an Xbox360!
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Anuj Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 7:44 am” No way people can have a wholesome gaming platform in these small gadgets…”
Time and moores law changes everything.
What I was trying to stress is that gaming will become a major application for these devices, and consumers will like to know that their device can do something like that but it won’t sell as a stand alone. Which is pretty much what you are saying, so all in all we agree, sweet.
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Raymo Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 11:55 amTBH I don’t see the point in handhelds at all. Do you have to be playing video games in the 10 mins it takes to get to your main console? Buy a laptop?
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Prashanth Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 12:41 pm@Raymo: Totally agreed, all the money could be better used in modding your PC a bit more to play the better games…
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Maneel Says:
May 24th, 2008 at 1:06 pmHey PrKa! Got this post’s link from the comment you left.
Thankfully, I am still sensible. I didn’t blew up my bucks on the PSP. I got it as a rent for a month for a link that I put up in my blogroll, since I had some issues with Paypal in that particular month and couldn’t accept $$$.
I’ve never been a gaming freak, infact, I own no UMDs for my PSP at all except the one which I got with it (GTA LCS). I use it as a PMP, as a gadget for surfing (hëll! wifi has taken over Delhi) and storing Delhi DareDevil’s match innings’ videos.
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Shantanu Goel Says:
May 24th, 2008 at 2:57 pmPrashanth: u r quite correct in your observations, but it’s not that bad. As far as portable gaming is concerned, I’m more inclined towards “converged” devices that do a lot of things and then let u play a game or 2 as well. Gizmondo is a good approach towards “un-proprietary-ness”. And just wait a bit and even better things are in the offing. I know because I’m “in-the-loop”
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Prashanth Says:
May 27th, 2008 at 2:36 pm@Shantanu: Convergent devices would sell, say things like the iPhone. But then, people won’t buy it especially for gaming. But then, i guess PSP sells for the cool-ness factor it comes with. There are portables which are far more utilitarian, but then, the same way there are medial players with more features than an iPod, it still outsells other stuff…
Portable gaming, the concept itself really doesn’t even stand a chance to come as a mainstream hobby for people.
@Maneel: Google Page Rank - 0, someone pays you a 200$ PSP for a rent to put a link on the blog roll? Interesting. Who is this guy anyway? I wish I could get a chance like that…
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Shantanu Goel Says:
May 27th, 2008 at 9:14 pm@Prashanth: I won’t call iPhone a “converged” device at all. It is the worst product I’ve seen from Apple’s stable seconded only by the iPod. And yes, they sell because of their “perceived” coolness factor.
But, coming to the topic, portable gaming as a concept has actually already become a mainstream hobby, not so much in India as of now though. I’m saying this because without it actually selling, companies won’t pour in huge sums of money for development of games and devices in this field. Agreed, the amount is still small as compared to what is spent on traditional gaming, but it is large enough to be considered.
Over the period of next couple of years, you’ll see devices launched that are capable of playing current gen full blown games as well (I’ve a teeny-weeny role to play in one such device) -
Maneel Says:
May 28th, 2008 at 10:07 pmIt was a PR4 last year and even a PR6 for a quarter (look at my traffic for Jan-Mar).
That was gone once some DigitalPoint fool reported my site for selling links and Google banned me, but I am trying to get it back.
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Samar Singla Says:
July 1st, 2008 at 9:29 amI LOVE PSP!!!
there is no point comparing a psp with a desktop!!
but because you have, let me give you some reasons why PSP rules..
you can’t carry your ‘humble monster’ to a 12 hour journey in a bus and watch half season of HIMYM!
just hook a psp to a tv screen and let the resolution dazzle you!
read blogs dude! who buys UMD anymore?? i have more than 20 gb of psp games all from the trusty old rapidsahre!
so PSP rules! -
Prashanth Says:
July 5th, 2008 at 1:09 pm@Samar: More than being against PSPs, I am against the concept of handheld gaming. And well, to do that, you really have better gadgets for the price. Its just that the handheld gaming market is getting more attention than it should…
I am not against the PSP being a lovely media device, but against the fact that it came out as something to promote Sony’s closed standards, and pointlessly wasting development time for the programmers. They are making money of course, but well, I really don’t like the way they are doing it, with the kind of market that they have. People who are actual PSP fanatics are actually hooked to that tiny screen there…
