Posts Tagged ‘3DS’

Sony’s new handheld, the PS Vita, is set to continue the company’s trend of making the most technically impressive hardware possible with a price tag to match. It a risky strategy with the huge overheads on development, but in a slumping economy and phone gaming eating into the Vita’s market, I am worried that my two hundred and thirty pound investment will all too quickly turn into little more than an attractive paper weight.

Huge screen, numerous ways to interact and diverse launch line up, the Vita is for gamers; but how many of us are there?

Even at thirty-two years old I find myself getting over excited at the prospect of a new toy. Opening a new game still fills me with delight, and a new console has me itching with anticipation. But as I have grown older I have found the come down from my joy becoming ever more severe, with the realisation of what else the money could have been used for quickly eroding my enjoyment.

It is this emotional rollercoaster that has me scared for Sony’s new handheld, the PS Vita. I can feel my anticipation building as I climb towards its release date eager to claim my pre-order. But there is an unshakable feeling somewhere at back of my mind, and I can feel myself preparing for the backlash from my elation.

Perversely I have no doubts about the Vita itself. Having now used one I can say with certainty that it certainly lives up to my expectations. It’s solid well-made form lives up to Sony’s high standards, feeling sleek and comfortable in my hands. Dual analogue sticks, while small are ergonomically placed even for my large hands, while the front and rear touch panels are easy to reach. The systems gorgeous five-inch OLED screen compliments this wonderful form factor, allowing games to be rendered with a clarity I couldn’t have imagined without seeing it. Such a display would be wasted without the graphics to back it up and the Vita doesn’t disappoint here either, its quad-core processor enabling games that are comparable with some of the best home console releases.

Wonderfully stylised, Escape Plan is just one of the titles to make use of Vita's front and rear touch functions.

What has me scared is the market the Vita is coming into. It was less than a year ago that the 3DS launched to a less than riotous response, forcing Nintendo to make a dramatic cut in the system’s price. Speculation about the 3DS’s slow start is rife, but ultimately it boils down to price, demand and competition, factors that of course the Vita is also up against.

Continuing the comparison with the 3DS, the Vita is in a stronger position. There is an intangibility in advertising 3D, a promise of something that cannot be shown. Vita is a considerably more concrete in its promises, with far better graphics, connectivity with the PS3 and a fantastic launch line up of games to name but a few.

Perversely however the majority of the handheld market isn’t currently made up of traditional gamers. It is ubiquitous devices that dominate mobile-gaming, multifunctional items that we carry with us. Sony and Nintendo are no longer tussling with each other but with the iOS and Android systems for domination of people’s thumbs when on the move. Already in peoples pockets these phone and tablet devices have a huge advantage in terms of their accessibility for people. They negate the need for players to buy a dedicated machine, providing bite-sized games for players who are only looking for a distraction rather than a more substantial experience.

Beautiful, and inventive Gravity Daze is just another of the launch titles I hope to get my hands on.

It is the implications of all this that scares me, not that the Vita wont live up to my expectations but that it wont live up to Sony’s or publishers. I was a huge proponent of the PSP, and indeed still am. But its slow decline was something of a self-fulfilling prophesy with poor sales (in the West at least) leading to poor development support of the platform… which in turn lead to poorer sales. Seeing the system sit idol as publishers turned away from it in favour of more profitable options was difficult and it gives me pause again now.

I am convinced of a place in the market for the Vita. It corrects all of the PSP’s mistakes and provides a serious mobile gaming platform that really has no rival. What I am not convinced of is that the hole it is intended to fill will be big enough for everyone who wants to make profit from it. With the system’s powerful graphic power requiring high development costs and competing against none traditional gaming devices with low overheads, Sony are going to face a struggle getting enough systems into peoples hands to ensure continued backing. But I for one hope they do because the possibilities it offers, and because I would like the high I get off this purchase to last.

Yeah I wrote this a month ago. Sorry, work Gamescom got in the way (check Playdevil for my coverage), I’ll try and be better about organising my life in the future… try.

It was recently announced last week that the Nintendo 3DS was to undergo quite a sizable price cut (and indeed has since I wrote this originally). Here in the UK the reduction equates to nearly an eighty pound for anyone wanting to pick up the system, with prices plummeting from £220 to £140 RRP.

Prices are down everywhere, even the homeland.

It is neither an unprecedented move, nor one that should be particularly surprising with sales of the handheld dramatically failing to reach the heights Nintendo had projected. Many systems have undergone rapid unpredicted price cuts (if not as fast); it just seems like a particularly telling indicator of Nintendo’s mood in the case of the 3DS.

It begs the question of just what the company hoped for the 3D system with such high sales projections. Was the hope that Nintendogs and Cats could replicate the original’s past glories, could Nintendo really have been basing their financial forecasts on a fickle casual consumer? Or did they simply feel that the DS brand name would drive sales even with a considerably more expensive system, continuing the upgrade path established the ‘DS Lite’, ‘DSi’ and ‘DSiXL’ models?

It is almost charming to consider that this giant of gaming could be so totally blind to markets outside of the bubble they have been enjoying to see how things have changed. I myself have often thought Nintendo were out of touch with gaming trends outside of their homeland. Yet as I look at it now it would be naïve to believe that they really felt themselves so untouchable that they based the entire business model for 3DS on this premise.

Poor guy, I am sure he will survive.

I suspect Nintendo were happy to experiment with price at a time no new competition loomed. 3DS is not a cheap piece of kit, or at least it wasn’t before it went in to mass production. While the markets have their separations, utility devices such as smart phones’ slow advance into the game market could not have been overlooked (despite Iwata’s recent protestations that these markets do not overlap, an insistence made more for investors than for gamers). With this and the threat of the Playstation Vita around the corner, I suspect Nintendo wanted to test the water. They could see the flow of the tide and see just how secure their position was, while cynically getting what they could while they could.

This recent price cut indicates that maybe their worse fear was realised and ‘Operation grab what you can’ has been implemented. With the huge reduction of 3DS price even prompting Iwata to write a sincere letter of apology to loyal fans and take a 50% pay cut (don’t feel bad I am sure he has enough to survive), it does look like a desperate move by Nintendo. Maybe though it was a cut that was always on the card, just one that had to be made faster and deeper than was had hoped.

One game certain to be good, more 3DS sales mean more chance of games from developers other than Nintendo.

Personally I do not mind the cut. I picked up the 3DS at launch for just £190, and these deals and better persisted up until the official cut. Even if I were upset about the price drop the ‘Nintendo Ambassador’ program is more than enough compensation. After all these early adopting of the system inevitably like Nintendo, and while the games being offered on the program are no doubt familiar to fans, they are among the best titles the company has created that either won’t be available (or would cost significantly more) if purchased through the 3DS store.

Maybe it is my skewed view of the value of old Nintendo titles coming from Japan where such titles are still available and have retained their value. Perhaps I am simply and unwitting fan boy willing to forgive Nintendo anything. Whatever the reason the result is the same, and that is that Nintendo is just trying to make profit and I don’t feel the way they are going about it is a disservice to fans, nor unfair business. The tech in the 3DS may not be the most advanced, but the companies desire to make a profit on every unit makes absolute sense. If this cut means that they will lose money on each unit then I just hope the gamble works and sales pick up, because that will be the only way to ensure the system gets the software support I was banking on when I bought it.

Unlike my usual failure to live up to my promises of DoFuss content this time I have a legitimate reason for recent inability to produce, that is that I have a job. As of last week I have been pounding the streets to raise money for charity, not out of some sense of altruism but from a need for cash. The downside to this arrangement (for me) is that it is 100% commission based with means for the fifty-two hours I worked last week I earned a total of £17.60. With a friend visiting on top of this I had little time to study for my design course, or edit my articles.

Zelda, a game I know I can be confident in my opinion of.

That said I have still been writing (even if most of my work was done on the train) and my course has had to take a quick hiatus anyway, while they renegotiate the licence for the course software (currently I am half way through a game with no way to make things explode). So I took Sunday out to edit some articles and, hopefully, have a good chuck of content ready to go up over the next week. Fingers crossed.

Proving even more of a challenge in this equation is keeping up with my writing for other sites, but I do at least have a backlog to keep me going until I get to grips with my new employed status. The timeliest posting of one of these reserve reviews has been that of the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

When rating a game I have to check my opinion carefully and match it to the site it will appear on's scale.

Following on from my opinion piece here on DoFuss, the review’s posting could not have been planned better. It obviously echoes the piece here, and adds review scores that I feel truly confident about. My usual lack of confidence in my scores does not come from uncertainty in myself, instead they stem from the scale I find myself rating on.

It is a truth that I have become depressingly aware of on a number of sites I have written for, sometime the PR gods have to be sated. This is not the case on every site, but on some fan driven sites that thrive on hand outs, it can be an issue. It creates a false economy, games have to exist on a scale between 6-10 and remarkably few manage to muster anything above 9. There is nothing wrong with this in some respects, it’s a scale after all… and one I guess most gamers are aware half exists, but it relies on our audience knowing the specific metric of the site, and one which is wasteful of the accuracy that could be present in the scale.

To be fair it is rare that an editor has changed a score on my behalf. Knowing the scale most publications work to I adopted a similar scale (not my own crazy idea that 5 is an ‘average’ title). When ratings have been changed however it throws my scale in to question. Were the games I only gave a 7.5 really worth an 8 if the 5 I gave became a 6? There is no answer to this in truth, but I do know that I have no doubt in my score for Ocarina of Time because once I get over 9, things get a lot more certain.

I admit I had my worries going revisiting such an iconic moment of my past. While it doesn’t sit as my favourite Zelda title The Ocarina of Time was none the less hugely significant to me. It opened up new opportunities of what the new third dimension of gaming could do and, perhaps more importantly, it was a magical adventure. Now, as a jaded adult, I feared that a rehash of the classic title would lose what made it so special.

How could a fifteen year old game remain relevant today?

Truthfully part of me hoped that playing The Ocarina of Time would inspire bile in me, that it would draw from me some hateful vitriol of how Nintendo lazily rehash their old titles, and how this one didn’t even have the decency to pretend to be a new game. I wanted my years of tolerance at re-buying the Kyoto based giant’s classic titles to finally reach breaking point, to snap with an amusing display of anger that this was a shameless cash in on the nostalgia of the weak willed. And I could, I could find all the reasons here to justify the rant, to completely tear this remake asunder but I don’t want to, because it is still wonderful.

It is just the right mix of old and new. Updates to the game’s visuals are clear for anyone to see, and to be clear the system’s 3D capability is the least of these improvements. Graphically the game manages to look almost exactly as I remember it, which is to say it manages the truly remarkable trick of looking like something that never existed. Years have coloured my memories, making the game seem far more than it ever was. I project my emotions on to the characters, stretch and morph their blank faces in my mind in to something that was never there, breathing more life in to them than the N64 ever could. But on the 3DS it exists, the expression and emotions that were in my head (along with details to the environment) bloom in to life, erasing the possible disappointment of reality clashing with memory.

Every second felt as fresh as the first time I experienced it.

Improvements to the controls and the navigation are also present, adding just enough convenience to the old system of constantly switching inventory items to prevent menu navigation feeling clunky. Originally the Zelda The Ocarina of Time achieved a lot with its control, camera and lock-on systems. It is testament to the quality of the games original design that still the camera controls still hold up well and that many titles continue to crib from the games lock-on. If there were to have been any Achilles heel it would be the menu navigation, due to the many advances that have been made in the last fifteen years by so many other titles. Ocarina of Time manages to dodge this issue though by making use of 3DS’s second screen. By adding bindable ‘soft buttons’ to the lower screen short cuts can be created allowing fast access to more items, alleviating limitations that may have existed and allowing the game a contemporary (if not cutting edge) feel.

It was the music that really touched me and caused the memories and emotions to come rushing back.

But it is not really what has improved that plucked at my heartstrings (or I more accurate blew through my heart’s holes) it was the music. My lack of musical aptitude is well noted within the contents of DoFuss, I couldn’t even tell you if changes have been made to Ocarina’s audio, what I do know is that it is how I remember it. Heart warming, evocative and beautiful, just hearing the Bolero of Fire sent me back to the first time I heard it and to the feeling of excitement and joy it inspired. Sound is primitive, instinctive, and in this case perfect.

It is hard for me not to lavish praise and love on Zelda The Ocarina of Time 3DS. It isn’t because of its history or it’s importance to gaming, but because every second I play this game, even now at thirty-one years old, feels as incredible as when I played it at sixteen years old.