SONY and Nintendo last week outlined their plans for luring in a new generation of mobile-computer gamers with the demonstration of two very different hand-held gaming machines.
There is much at stake for both firms. Sony’s PlayStation 2 usurped Nintendo’s GameCube to become the dominant home games console, and Sony wishes to replicate this success in the mobile gaming arena. The field is currently dominated by Nintendo, with its Gameboy and Gameboy Advance machines.
With their new devices, shown in prototype form last week, both companies are exploiting the growing popularity of wireless networking, the plummeting prices of colour LCD displays, and higher-capacity batteries to produce powerful new portables. Both will allow gamers to play each other over Wi-Fi networks but in other respects the two are strikingly different.
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Sony’s offering is a portable games machine that also plays back movies and music – so it will compete with systems like Apple’s iPod, while Nintendo is betting on a revolutionary games-only device with dual screens which are designed to enrich game play with two views of the action.
Sony demonstrated a prototype of its PlayStation Portable (PSP) at the E3 computer games convention in Los Angeles, California. For games and movie storage, the PSP uses a proprietary read-only disc format called Universal Media Disc (UMD). It is a 6-centimetre, 1.8-gigabyte disc that will store a 2-hour DVD-quality movie. For digital music playback, users can download tracks from a PC onto memory cards and plug these into the PSP.
The ability to watch full-length movies on its 11-centimetre widescreen-format screen could be a major selling point. “The PSP will appeal to a mainstream audience because of the movie and audio functions,” says analyst Colin Sebastian of SoundView Technology in San Francisco.
Sony has signed up 100 software houses to write games for the PSP, with many expected to be PS2 conversions. But the PSP’s music playing capabilities could also lead to “a whole new style of gaming” according to Ian Baverstock of UK-based game developer Kuju Entertainment. Kuju is writing PSP games that exploit the music gamers play on it: one idea is that the pace of game play will be governed by the beat of the music rather than a rhythm chosen by the game developer. “I would enjoy that. It’s a great idea,” says Kathleen Maher, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon, California.
Nintendo’s new offering, meanwhile, is called the Nintendo DS – short for Dual Screen. It also has 100 software houses writing code for it. But some developers have yet to decide what to make of its novel ability to use two 8-cm screens. “We are excited about the DS but haven’t quite got our head around what it means,” says Baverstock.
One possibility, he says, is that the lower, touch-sensitive screen could act as a control pad. Another idea is to use it to display a map of a game’s virtual world while the top screen features the close-up of players or characters.
Nintendo’s DS will go on sale for under $200 in the autumn while the PSP, on sale in Japan from the end of the year, will cost “more than $250”. Paul Marino, a games animation expert from New York, who saw both prototypes at last week’s trade show, says: “My portable dollar will end up in Sony’s pocket because of its movie and video capability.”
