Been playing a fair bit of my GBA lately, mainly Doom, Streetfigher Alpha 3, and Mario Kart. All which I love. Saw that Super Ghouls and Ghosts was on sale on play.com so I ordered a copy today along with the headphone converter which I have been trying to get hold of for a while. Nintendo’s GBAis without a doubt the best portable gaming platform.
As far as the portable gaming arena is concerned Nintendo has enjoyed the most sucess, however this year might actually be the year of the portable, both Nintendo and Sony will be launching new systems. Sony’s PSP on paper sounds amazing, and with Sony’s past track record I think Nintendo may actually have a rival. The GBA SP is almost a year old as well, and surprisingly Nintendo made public a couple of patent applications concerning a dual-screen portable last month showing that they are clearly working on something special.
Another suprise from Nintendo has been the confirmation that a Gamecube followup is planned. Now I like the sound of this but it does worry me. I can’t help but think that Nintendo would fair better by becoming a software only company. It was strange though that in a press release they stated they will not be commiting any resources into new platform technology like Sony is, they want to concentrate on gameplay.
Sony have signed a very big deal with IBM. to use their 90nm process for fabricating their next generation of silicon being used in the PS3. Likewise Nintendo already use IBM’s Power4 for the Gamecube, now that Microsoft have also confirmed that IBM will be making a G5 based chipset for X-Box 2. This could mean that all 3 platforms have some commonality. What I would love to see is some level of standardisation, be it hardware of at the API level. My main concern being time to market for titles, as complexity of hardware grows software development time leaps by a larger factor. The general adoption of open API’s would definately help, though it is probably just a developer’s dream.
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