Skip to main content

How To Destroy the Handheld Game Dominator

I couldn't even pluralize "dominator" because Nintendo won't let Sony in the door. Nintendo has the handheld game market locked tighter than Fork Knox. This won't be the first place to call out the "Apple is entering the handheld gaming market" flag, but I do think I can lay out the steps they would (or should) take that can lend credibility to the idea. If nothing else, I hope someone there is reading.

Apple can't do this alone, but they have a very good friend in another company with a name that starts with A: Adobe. The pair would be the ultimate contender into the very tight market and the approach is amazingly simple. Flash is coming to the iPhone and iTouch, and I'll hope they make bookmarking Flash games easy and give us the option to "fullscreen" them on the devices. Explicit offline caching wouldn't hurt either. The next step is obviously to allow flash apps and games to be installed directly for quick access and immediately the devices have an interactive media platform with an amazingly rich community of developers and user support.

Do we even need a separate device? The only thing needed would be upgrades to the lines that would probably happen anyway. More memory, speed, and storage are always nice. The touch could spawn some more sensitive actuators and allow some different control types.

The only mistake they could make here is to require any physical medium.

Outside of the physical aspects the entire approach just hinges on how they market the devices in the coming years and if they can price a model competing against the DS and PSP.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
While not exactly an Apple product, there is already a handheld that is technically superior to the ipod touch (larger screen) and with support for Flash 7 and flash games, the Archos generation 5 devices. From what I understand, the cpus on archos are similar to ipod, and the flash games are barely usable (they're kind of slow). Of course, Apple might have more capabilities and power to be able to optimize the flash player for their devices.
5:25 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro
4 comments
Read more