NGP (PSP2) announced!

[DiscostewSM]

Meh, I really can't rely on IGN as of late, mainly because they seem to state having information from "trusted sources", therefore, require no link for proof of claims. This recent report of the 3DS eShop and other goodies not being available until May, when Nintendo of Europe already said such stuff with be available via update on day 1, is proof enough that something is amiss there.

 

[BlueStar]

I mentioned the pull of Pokemon (along with Nintendogs and Brain Training) in the thread that was locked and was scoffed at by our poor overworked resident PSP apologist. Whether your think these games are crap, for kids, girls or not real gamers is irrelevant, look at the combined sales for them. The fact remains they will shift consoles much more effectively than a Monster Hunter or MGS title, or any other game which is part of a series available on home consoles. And it doesn't matter if the consoles are being sold to hardcore gamers, nintendo fanboys, kids or bought as presents for your gran or girlfriend, those raw numbers of systems, each one a potential customer, are what will entice third party devs. With porting between the PSP2/PS3 so easy, are devs and Sony going to be able to resist making titles multi-platform? The sad fact is, without handheld exclusives, nothing about this generation is going to be different to the last.

And by exclusives I don't mean a sequel to a home console game like Mario Kart 3D or God of War NGC.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

I mentioned the pull of Pokemon (along with Nintendogs and Brain Training) in the thread that was locked and was scoffed at by our poor overworked resident PSP apologist. Whether your think these games are crap, for kids, girls or not real gamers is irrelevant, look at the combined sales for them. The fact remains they will shift consoles much more effectively than a Monster Hunter or MGS title, or any other game which is part of a series available on home consoles. And it doesn't matter if the consoles are being sold to hardcore gamers, nintendo fanboys, kids or bought as presents for your gran or girlfriend, those raw numbers of systems, each one a potential customer, are what will entice third party devs. With porting between the PSP2/PS3 so easy, are devs and Sony going to be able to resist making titles multi-platform? The sad fact is, without handheld exclusives, nothing about this generation is going to be different to the last.

Because everyone knows that the only thing that matters on systems are games that sell well.

Fuck the following:

- Shadow of the Colossus
- Psychonauts
- Madworld
- No More Heroes and its sequel
- Ico
- Dead Space Extraction
- A whole larger list of games that are awesome but sold poorly.

I mean, I feel your argument is boiling down to "The NGP is a bad system because it doesn't appeal to the casual crowd". Honestly, I don't care. I want games that appeal to me and my ilk, not to my grandma or my nonexistent girlfriend. Maybe the NGP will flop this generation because they decided to make games that appeal to core gamers. At least if it does, hopefully it'll go down in history as a swan song to "gamer's games". I'm not saying the 3DS doesn't have these, as it's already got SSFIV, MGS3D, etc to appeal to gamers, but seeing the PSP's "gamer's library" vs. the DS "gamer's library", I feel like the PSP was better in that aspect. Maybe the PSP library was just a lot of ports or "(insert popular series here)-to-go", but they were still excellent games. It had games that catered to rather niche audiences and didn't really care about doing much casual appeal. Maybe going casual is what makes consoles so successful and lets you tote around their statistics, but in the end I think the PSP and the NGP will go down as some of the swan songs in "gamer's gaming".

EDIT: And I'm not an apologist. There's nothing to apologize on for the PSP. It's a very formidable system. It just gets so much shit here that it definitely doesn't deserve.

 

[BlueStar]

Games like Ico and Madworld are only possible because there is a viable userbase of systems out there for it to be marketed towards. If you come up with a game that doesn't fall into the 'safe' catagory of another Call of Duty, FIFA or Imagine title and present the business case for releasing it on a system with a small userbase of elitist gamers, you will not get the funding for the project. Period.

You may have a very snobbish attitude towards games that don't fit your own niche, but without them we would get far fewer of the games you like. I've yet to see any change of strategy from Sony, other than continuing the mode of thinking which saw the PSP games sections of stores reduced to a small dusty corner at the back.

EDIT: If the PSP had a handheld exclusive system-sellers like Nintendogs, I have no doubt that games like Dragon Quest 9 would have been released on that format by the end of each console's lifespan instead of on the DS.

The Dreamcast is a case in point, as well as piracy the fact that it had little appeal outside the greasy teenage arcade freak demographic is one of the reasons that it eventually dried up, leaving us with just a small window of great quality games, while the PS2, drowning in populist stuff like movie tie ins and barbie games, continued from strength to strength.

BTW, I don't think apologist means quite what you think it does,.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

Games like Ico and Madworld are only possible because there is a viable userbase of systems out there for it to be marketed towards. If you come up with a game that doesn't fall into the 'safe' catagory of another Call of Duty, FIFA or Imagine title and present the business case for releasing it on a system with a small userbase of elitist gamers, you will not get the funding for the project. Period.

You may have a very snobbish attitude towards games that don't fit your own niche, but without them we would get far fewer of the games you like. I've yet to see any change of strategy from Sony, other than continuing the mode of thinking which saw the PSP games sections of stores reduced to a small dusty corner at the back.

Thing is, with more games out of the "niche", people realize that there's no reason to develop games that cater to gamers when you can get more money from games that are worse (Brain Training, Nintendogs) but will sell 15+ million copies. It's not like this money gets poured into giving gamers real treats, it gets dumped into more Brain Trainings and Nintendogs to make more money, and the cycle continues. Games that sell well are slowly becoming games that don't appeal to gamers. MadWorld is an excellent game. Almost any gamer whose picked it up will say it's fantastic. Even if it sold poorly, people will acknowledge it's better than a shit load of a lot of other games that came out this generation, and it is. Same goes with Ico, SotC, etc. They're not niche games unless you consider real gamers a niche (which I guess they are becoming). It's just games that appeal to gamers are becoming phased out to those Nintendogs and Brain Trainings.

Maybe I'm an "elitist gamer", but without being elitist about your games, you just fall into the "anything goes" category. And if gamers just went that way, then true gamer's games would just be replaced by mediocrity.

 

[BlueStar]

I don't see 'gamers games' (although at 30 I'm old enough to remember the first wave of 'casual gamers' being brought into gaming by stuff like Need for Speed, sports games, Wipeout, the kind of games that came on the back of the effort to make games trendy and mainsteam in the early 90s) as being in decline. inf act I'd say there are more gamers games now than at any time in the entire history of gaming. They simply don't take up as big a percentage of all the games that are being produced now.

You seem to consider the PSP a success, in which case I can see why you aren't worried about how the PSP2 will fare in terms of it performing exactly the same with exactly the same strategy.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

You seem to consider the PSP a success, in which case I can see why you aren't worried about how the PSP2 will fare in terms of it performing exactly the same with exactly the same strategy.

I'm saying the PSP is a success as a gaming console. Maybe not in sales but it's a good system backed by a good library. Maybe it didn't sell as much as the DS in terms of hardware or software, but considering Nintendo's dominance in the handheld department since the original Gameboy, it did pretty well. 50+ million hardware units isn't bad. Software is a different story but at least it had great games.

I don't expect the NGP to outsell the 3DS by any means, odds are it'll be about the same as the DS vs. PSP race, but I'm certainly not worried about the quality of games or content.

 

[BlueStar]

As long as it makes its users happy, I suppose. I just think that the 'gamers games' that we'll see on the 3DS will be more unique than the ones we'll see on the PSP2, and that a Sony/Microsoft home console and a Nintendo handheld is the ultimate having your cake and eating it for a gamer.

 

[stinkoman]

It's like 7 inches, people. Not THAT massive.

 

[dinofan01]

It's like 7 inches, people. Not THAT massive.

You just discouraged a lot of men with that sentence...

 

[DigitalDeviant]

It's like 7 inches, people. Not THAT massive.

that's what she said.

 

[stinkoman]

It's like 7 inches, people. Not THAT massive.

You just discouraged a lot of men with that sentence...

:3
Also, this sounds WAY better than the 3DS. I'm sold.

 

[DigitalDeviant]

It's like 7 inches, people. Not THAT massive.

You just discouraged a lot of men with that sentence...

:3
Also, this sounds WAY better than the 3DS. I'm sold.

Lets hope they can deliver with innovative software to match..

 

[MelodieOctavia]

Take note though....I also worked at Gamecrazy. And that WAS a gaming paradise. It was such a lax job, I almost felt bad for being paid for it.

 

[n8vosburgh]

On man there is a red NGP on stage... so sexy!

 

[machomuu]

It's like 7 inches, people. Not THAT massive.

You just discouraged a lot of men with that sentence...

:3
Also, this sounds WAY better than the 3DS. I'm sold.

Lets hope they can deliver with innovative software to match..

Well software wise, the 3DS seems like a beast; the same can be said about the hardware of the NGP. What I'm really worried about is the NGP's gaming library, I was pretty disappointed with the PSP's library, though when the games were good, they were great (too bad I sold my PSP so early).