Question of the Week: What's Important For Portable Gaming?
Amos Ngai on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 5:30AM Fellow Twitter-er, Ryan Morris (@hackmods http://zxcv.us) asked a very interesting question a few weeks back. He wanted to know which is the better portable gaming platform, iPhone, DS, or PSP. GamerWok has previously compared the iPhone to the DS, PSP, and the Dreamcast. At the time, only the iPhone 3G was available and now, with the updated hardware of the iPhone 3GS, the announcement of the PSPGo, and the refreshed DSi, things are looking slightly different. We will be covering this topic in an upcoming article and on the next GamerWok Hour but until then, what say you, our readers? What is the most important feature for a portable gaming machine? If there's something other than the options listed, sound off in the comments or the forums and let us know!
Kind of defeats the purpose...
Reader Comments (2)
Well I answered the poll above with "Library" but at the same time hardware is important too. Sure a good addicting game doesn't need a lot of graphics, but some times a great game with great game play would require this. So I'm at a toss up with this. Depending on what we play determines what we need. I can't see SOCOM running on the DS. With the iPhone, I don't see it being as fun as holding down a button + direction to gun down your enemy while running circles around them. Then again a game like "Marble Madness" which was made popular on the original Nintendo system would be even more fun to play on a iPhone rather than the DS. The DS having a Stylus to play games adds a feature that makes RTS games cool. Playing an RTS on a computer is made simple by having a mouse to select units, with the DS it's the same concept with a stylus. So it's really hard to figure out what's important since there are so many features available today. Could you imagine having all of those features on one portable though? I think it would be a bit impractical don't you think? LOL
Those are all very valid points which we've all taken into consideration as well. I think each console has its strengths in terms of user satisfaction but I think we can all agree that without physical buttons, a serious gamer won't be considering the iPhone as a portable console.
As for playing things like RTS on the DS, sure you can do that but the question is do you really want to? The best strategy types of games thus far has been turn based. I think the real estate on the screen is just to limited to serve a decent RTS. Even Simcity on the iPhone was barely passable.
Do you have an opinion on the modability/hackability of the consoles? Not so much to play pirated games but, in the case of the PSP, to play PS1 games or in the DS, run a PDA program or music player? Is that something you would find important?