21 million DS sold
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DUALDISASTER
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I guess you're right with it being portable and all. I just know that the games offered on that portable are not my taste. I want 3D, not 2D. So maybe that's it.fearsomepirate said:
DUALDISASTER
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Hey, hey...relax! No need for hostility...gosh! Maybe you can't find those games on the internet. All i'm saying is that those games are so simplistic that they could be emulated on the net. And for me, simplicity does not equal quality all the time. I want an experience that can't be emulated so easily. I mean sure they're good, but not so good to push hardware like that. It's just not that good...fun, but not that good. If people want to buy them then knock yourself out...i'm not so easily swayed.Magnum PI said:
There's more to games than complexity. There's also content. Simple 2D graphics may be doable in web games, but precious few web-games put in the hours to create the varying levels+actions+soundtracks needed for a 'real' game. How many web-games come even close to something from the 16 bit era? Very few. They tend to be 8-bit era style games (asteroids, defender, platformer) with spruced up 2D visuals. I've never come across anything that I consider comparable to a true game as you get on the DS. Webgames have a lifespan of about 5 minutes before you've seen everything they have to offer, or so it seems to me.
DUALDISASTER said:
well, apparently they're that good based on sales data.
the problem with your line of argument, dual, is that you're trying to generalise based on your preferences, whereas the market data shows a considerable number of people's tastes to differ. now, guess which of those two is the better generalisation : )
Maybe if you got rid of most of the graphics and the levels. And got rid of things like "wireless multiplayer." It's one thing to say that hypothetically, you could be playing this game in a browser, and quite another to be actually playing it. As far as I know, none of the top DS games (or any future releases like Star Fox and Mechassault) are coming soon to a browser near you.DUALDISASTER said:
Comparing handheld games to PC is kind of stupid, yes? The whole point of handhelds is portability, not having the most cutting-edge shaders. I'll admit that my DS gathers dust unless I'm flying. But that's why I have it...when you're flying across the Atlantic or sitting in the DMV, the fact that a 2D game could theoretically be done in a web browser isn't nearly as good for whiling away the time as actually playing the game on a DS.
3D just for the sake of it merely turns the game into a gimmick. A good game will be a good game wether it is in 2D or 3D, and absolutely no game will become better simply because it's in 3D. There must be something else besides polygons and depth.DUALDISASTER said:
I don't know how anyone would successfully argue that 3D games are better in general than 2D, there just aren't any set milestones to compare with to make such a determination. Like you've already admitted to - though you failed to realize the full implications - people's taste differs. Though you may not enjoy the examples I mentioned, web rewiews both from gamers and sites show these titles are all pretty highly rated, as are many many others on the DS, no matter if they're in 3D or not!
Yes.
The DS is not the platform to own if you want to impress your peers or yourself. And neither is the GBA for that matter. Some of these games are not only fun but really complex and ... interesting as well. Advance Wars DS tells me that I've already played it for 175 hours
Another thing I'd like to emphasize is that it's really not the best of ideas to put 3D games on handhelds (current handhelds anyway) because there just aren't proper 3D controls (dual analog sticks) to match 3D gameplay.
There are attempts to do FPS type gameplay anyway, of course. MPH may be effective for a few minutes but it just isn't comfortable for longer sessions. Or maybe you've played Socom. There are huge compromises to be made whatever way you spin it.
OTOH if you take a look at proper home console controllers and, under the assumption that these are "optimal" input mechanisms for games, try to imagine how they could be turned into gaming handhelds. You'd find that the result would be pretty awkwardly shaped, for purposes of putting into a pocket or bag etc, and/or have far too little room for the screen(s).
What I'm trying to say is that there's little reason to expect that one day a handheld will have the same ergonomics as a home console. It's just not gonna happen. From this difference in controls I'd like to infer that the gameplay styles need to be different as well.
IOW I vastly prefer a Dual Shock 2 over a hypothetical PSP-shaped gamepad when playing ... whatever, really. Games with simplistic controls would work on both, but that's only a subset of all the games I'm interested in.
The DS is not the platform to own if you want to impress your peers or yourself. And neither is the GBA for that matter. Some of these games are not only fun but really complex and ... interesting as well. Advance Wars DS tells me that I've already played it for 175 hours
Another thing I'd like to emphasize is that it's really not the best of ideas to put 3D games on handhelds (current handhelds anyway) because there just aren't proper 3D controls (dual analog sticks) to match 3D gameplay.
There are attempts to do FPS type gameplay anyway, of course. MPH may be effective for a few minutes but it just isn't comfortable for longer sessions. Or maybe you've played Socom. There are huge compromises to be made whatever way you spin it.
OTOH if you take a look at proper home console controllers and, under the assumption that these are "optimal" input mechanisms for games, try to imagine how they could be turned into gaming handhelds. You'd find that the result would be pretty awkwardly shaped, for purposes of putting into a pocket or bag etc, and/or have far too little room for the screen(s).
What I'm trying to say is that there's little reason to expect that one day a handheld will have the same ergonomics as a home console. It's just not gonna happen. From this difference in controls I'd like to infer that the gameplay styles need to be different as well.
IOW I vastly prefer a Dual Shock 2 over a hypothetical PSP-shaped gamepad when playing ... whatever, really. Games with simplistic controls would work on both, but that's only a subset of all the games I'm interested in.
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DUALDISASTER
Newcomer
There has been games controlled by single analog controllers before PSP.zeckensack said:Yes.
The DS is not the platform to own if you want to impress your peers or yourself. And neither is the GBA for that matter. Some of these games are not only fun but really complex and ... interesting as well. Advance Wars DS tells me that I've already played it for 175 hours
Another thing I'd like to emphasize is that it's really not the best of ideas to put 3D games on handhelds (current handhelds anyway) because there just aren't proper 3D controls (dual analog sticks) to match 3D gameplay.
There are attempts to do FPS type gameplay anyway, of course. MPH may be effective for a few minutes but it just isn't comfortable for longer sessions. Or maybe you've played Socom. There are huge compromises to be made whatever way you spin it.
OTOH if you take a look at proper home console controllers and, under the assumption that these are "optimal" input mechanisms for games, try to imagine how they could be turned into gaming handhelds. You'd find that the result would be pretty awkwardly shaped, for purposes of putting into a pocket or bag etc, and/or have far too little room for the screen(s).
What I'm trying to say is that there's little reason to expect that one day a handheld will have the same ergonomics as a home console. It's just not gonna happen. From this difference in controls I'd like to infer that the gameplay styles need to be different as well.
IOW I vastly prefer a Dual Shock 2 over a hypothetical PSP-shaped gamepad when playing ... whatever, really. Games with simplistic controls would work on both, but that's only a subset of all the games I'm interested in.
While it's obvious DS isn't my pick on handhelds, my opinion still counts regardless what the numbers say. But i will say this, DS has much more quality games than PSP. The games i was referring to were the big sellers like brain age and nintendogs, which put fire under DS'es sells.DUALDISASTER said:
they only can be played on the DS..
most of DS games are low-tech, it doesn't annoy me at all, especially because it is an handheld.
it don't prevent a game to be brilliant: level design, gameplay, graphics, fun factor..
you don't play technology, you play games.
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DUALDISASTER said:There has been games controlled by single analog controllers before PSP.
I'll defend the DS against anyone who says that it has no added value over Flash games on PC, but I disagree on the number of quality games available. Where the DS wins over the PSP is on the number of original games available. This the DS simply has more of, and for people who spend a lot of time playing games on consoles as well, the DS is a good buy because of it. The PSP has far fewer games that are 'only on PSP', like the DS has. You have Loco Roco, basically, but very few others.
But on average, the PSP has more quality games. They're just very often not unique to the platform. Fortunately, they are starting to be great and unique games in their own right, and also starting to show that 3D is in fact viable as a platform. You cannot say, for instance, that a game like Daxter doesn't work. It's great, and it's 3D. Even Prince of Persia, though it was marred by a few bugs and loading times could have been better, controlled just fine. Nothing in that game that made me feel I was heavily compromised in terms of controls, at all. Syphon Filter got great reviews too, no big compromises there either. And I recently played Virtua Tennis, which plays great too, and Wipeout, Burnout Legens and Ridge Racers are also each and every one great games, and they're all in 3D.
I applaud the DS for what it does, and the DS Lite makes good on a lot of serious flaws of the original DS too. But it nevertheless has surprisingly little appeal to me, and I feel it offers me a lot of gaming experiences that I've seen 10 years ago. The PSP offers me games of a quality and depth of the current console generation, and that is awesome.
I think both systems are a great win for us consumers. I happen to be someone who prefers what the PSP offers me (I couldn't stand the whole GameBoy line, there were literally no type of games there that I hadn't already played to death 10 years before with similarly dated graphics), but the DS (especially the Lite) offers a quality experience too as well as novel, quality games, and it has to be respected for it.
But man, am I happy with games like Tekken on PSP.
Finally there is hope of ever mastering some characters completely - I could just never justify spending all that time learning a character's 130 moves and combos at home, but I travel by train a full hour each day, so I can start to get intimate with at least a few of the 36 characters ...
As quality used in this sense is a totally subjective term, the point of which platform has more quality titles cannot be effectively argued. If anyone wants to argue quality, they need to define the parameters they're measuring by.Corwin_B said:
Corwin_B said:
More wrong, as, say,
DUALDISASTER said:
?
Anyway, I don't want to turn this DS thread into a flame thread. To objectively determine whether or not the DS or the PSP has more quality titles, we'd first have to agree on objective criteria on what makes a quality game.
So far, I've used Gamespot, because that gives out its data in a way that I can easily work with in Excel, and I have a fair amount of trust in their reviews.
Looking at the last 50 games reviewed on that site, the DS has 50 games since December 14th, but the PSP has 50 games reviewed since March 1st. The DS games score an average of 5.9, but the PSP games score an average of 7.2.
But in that low average there are more The DS scores 3 games 8 or higher, the PSP 14 (!). The DS scores 1 game 9 or higher, the PSP scores 2.
From that, you could easily conclude that:
1 - the PSP is getting more games than the DS (50 games since 1 March vs 50 games since 14 December)
2 - the PSP is getting a higher average game score (7.2 vs 5.9)
3 - the PSP is getting more games ranking 8 or higher (14 vs 3)
4 - the PSP is getting more games ranking 9 or higher (2 vs 1).
Of course, we are talking about Gamespot, and I've limited this to the last 50 games now. But I've done this kind of thing before, and even when you take all the games reviewed for both systems since launch, and even ignoring that the DS had a slight head-start in the U.S., the PSP clearly comes out ahead. If you don't believe me, I'll gladly give you a full Excel sheet rundown, but somehow I suspect you're not going to go with Gamespot as any kind of reliable source for this discussion anyway.
Notice that where you say 'completely wrong', and DUALDISASTER says 'MUCH MORE', I'm going with the more temporate 'more quality games', and have already given the DS the advantage when it comes to original games. Also, the DS is currently clearly winning in terms of game titles sold, and is clearly winning in Japan also in terms of hardware sold. It may also well be that in Japan, the DS gets a lot of quality software that we don't get in the West.
But I'm trying to be subjective here, and if you have a better suggestion for comparing the two systems in terms of quality games available, I'm listening.
I think I'll open a new thread for this, as I don't want to spoil the DS party celebrations here.
(on preview, Shifty seems to agree with the subjectivity problem)
Sure, let's limit ourselves to Gamespot, and 50 reviews. Looking at IGN, you can see that they gave 10 DS games scores of 9+, but only 6 PSP games (including the import review of Tekken). For scores between 8 and 9, they list 25 DS games and 26 PSP games (fairly even here).
We already had this discussion once, and in order to avoid specific site bias I pointed you to Gamerankings, where both platforms have a similar amount of 80%+ titles, with the DS having a slight edge at 85%+...
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31943&page=4
That would somewhat help your point if it was true, but sadly it isn't. The DS has currently 4 games listed 9+ (New SMB, Mario Kart, Nintendogs, Advance Wars) on Gamespot, same number as the PSP (Tekken, Daxter, Burnout, Lumines) :
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.htm...&mode=all&sort=score&dlx_type=all&sortdir=asc
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.htm...&mode=all&sort=score&dlx_type=all&sortdir=asc
I'm not sure what kind of query you ran into Gamespot...
We already had this discussion once, and in order to avoid specific site bias I pointed you to Gamerankings, where both platforms have a similar amount of 80%+ titles, with the DS having a slight edge at 85%+...
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31943&page=4
That would somewhat help your point if it was true, but sadly it isn't. The DS has currently 4 games listed 9+ (New SMB, Mario Kart, Nintendogs, Advance Wars) on Gamespot, same number as the PSP (Tekken, Daxter, Burnout, Lumines) :
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.htm...&mode=all&sort=score&dlx_type=all&sortdir=asc
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.htm...&mode=all&sort=score&dlx_type=all&sortdir=asc
I'm not sure what kind of query you ran into Gamespot...
Corwin_B said:
I was still talking about the last 50 games, in which case it is most definitely true.
I made a new, up-to-date Excel sheet with all GameSpot scores and some totals:
http://www.niwra.nl/tmp/DSvsPSPGamespot.htm
I will try to see if I can collect data from different sites in a similar way. Right now, gamerankings.com seems offline, but I've put some work in getting all data from IGN in there too.
It is true that IGN seems to have more balanced figures. For year-to-date, the PSP still has the edge, but only slightly. It has 12 more games (60 vs 48), more 8+ games (14 vs 11), and the same number of 9+ games (3 vs 3). Also, the average ranking of these games is over a point higher (7.11 vs 6.07).
In the overall totals, with 126 (PSP) vs 132 (DS) games ranked, the PSP games still score a higher average ranking (7.23 vs 6.43), but the DS has more 8+ games (37 vs 32) and more 9+ games (10 vs 6).
Taking these two sites together, the two systems seem to be fairly equal in terms of over 8+ scores. If we assume your Gamerankings findings are more reliable than the average of these two, then it seems that the PSP is behind in the 80% category overall , but still, as you say, not by a large margin. And even then, the trend for 2006 seems to be that the PSP may be catching up and is certainly doing well so far this year.
Of course, that leaves in the middle whether scores on different platforms can actually be compared at all. Is a game that gets an 8 on the DS comparable to a game on the PSP? Ah, questions, questions.
But it's still interesting to ponder over. Maybe it is also interesting to do some kind of 'best of category' (cf Ace Magazine's A-list, which was great) for each platform and compare the games again there.DUALDISASTER
Newcomer
To me, although gameplay has changed since gameboy, content Nintendo offers for the most part has the same feeling. The feeling of simple, fun, played in short burst, games it always had. I wanted for a very long time a (current) console caliber game on the go. I get that on my PSP. I want fun but deep and nintendo doesn't offer this on there handheld anymore.Arwin said:I was still talking about the last 50 games, in which case it is most definitely true.
I made a new, up-to-date Excel sheet with all GameSpot scores and some totals:
http://www.niwra.nl/tmp/DSvsPSPGamespot.htm
I will try to see if I can collect data from different sites in a similar way. Right now, gamerankings.com seems offline, but I've put some work in getting all data from IGN in there too.
It is true that IGN seems to have more balanced figures. For year-to-date, the PSP still has the edge, but only slightly. It has 12 more games (60 vs 48), more 8+ games (14 vs 11), and the same number of 9+ games (3 vs 3). Also, the average ranking of these games is over a point higher (7.11 vs 6.07).
In the overall totals, with 126 (PSP) vs 132 (DS) games ranked, the PSP games still score a higher average ranking (7.23 vs 6.43), but the DS has more 8+ games (37 vs 32) and more 9+ games (10 vs 6).
Taking these two sites together, the two systems seem to be fairly equal in terms of over 8+ scores. If we assume your Gamerankings findings are more reliable than the average of these two, then it seems that the PSP is behind in the 80% category overall , but still, as you say, not by a large margin. And even then, the trend for 2006 seems to be that the PSP may be catching up and is certainly doing well so far this year.
Of course, that leaves in the middle whether scores on different platforms can actually be compared at all. Is a game that gets an 8 on the DS comparable to a game on the PSP? Ah, questions, questions.
Please people, this thread - and in fact the entire forum - is NOT a PSP vs. DS duel to the death arena. There are enough other places on teh intarwebs to do that.
Thanks.
Thanks.
IIRC, not a lot of people outside the Nintendo fanbois expected the DS to succeed (even I didn't expect it to do this well). Developers seemed to be expecting a massive PSP phenomenon as well. Look at all the 3rd-party PSP games that were announced compared to DS. Now a couple years later, DS is just gaining steam and PSP game sales remain stagnant. Some of the biggest 3rd-party projects were only announced within the last 9 months...think Final Fantasy III, Mechassault DS, Tales of the Tempest, etc. Development's only been recently heating up, despite strong sales. I think they were waiting to see if it would be a flash in the pan or not.
And Nintendo's been playing it smart with DS. They didn't immediately saturate us with Fire Emblem, Golden Sun, Zelda, etc. They've been portioning out the big games one at a time. But now the industry's heavy hitters are saying "Hey, there are 21 million of these things in people's hands, and the games are continually selling in the top 10! We can't afford to ignore this thing."
And Nintendo's been playing it smart with DS. They didn't immediately saturate us with Fire Emblem, Golden Sun, Zelda, etc. They've been portioning out the big games one at a time. But now the industry's heavy hitters are saying "Hey, there are 21 million of these things in people's hands, and the games are continually selling in the top 10! We can't afford to ignore this thing."
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