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鈥檚 PlayStation 2 usurped Nintendo鈥檚 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鈥檚 offering is a portable games machine that also plays back movies and music 鈥� so it will compete with systems like Apple鈥檚 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. 鈥淭he PSP will appeal to a mainstream audience because of the movie and audio functions,鈥� 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鈥檚 music playing capabilities could also lead to 鈥渁 whole new style of gaming鈥� 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. 鈥淚 would enjoy that. It鈥檚 a great idea,鈥� says Kathleen Maher, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon, California.
Nintendo鈥檚 new offering, meanwhile, is called the Nintendo DS 鈥� 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. 鈥淲e are excited about the DS but haven鈥檛 quite got our head around what it means,鈥� 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鈥檚 virtual world while the top screen features the close-up of players or characters.
Nintendo鈥檚 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 鈥渕ore than $250鈥�. Paul Marino, a games animation expert from New York, who saw both prototypes at last week鈥檚 trade show, says: 鈥淢y portable dollar will end up in Sony鈥檚 pocket because of its movie and video capability.鈥�
