By now you’ve probably read about the launch of the DS Lite in Japan last week. The launch coverage around the net was big on hyperbole. GameDaily screamed “The DS Lite sets Japan Ablaze”.
Admittedly quite a few people queued up to get their mits on a brand spanking Crystal White DS. Again, according to the reports doing the rounds, some of the bigger stores had up to 600 people in line for the launch. To put that in some kind of Australian perspective, we’re talking queues just slightly longer than the average lunch-time queue at your local bank. Still, it’s an impressive number all the same. But should we get carried away by the hype?
Lite in both name, and availability.
You have to remember that the Japanese love to queue. Japan didn’t invent the concept of queuing. That honour goes to the British, who’ve been standing in queues since around 1837…not the same queue obviously, but you get the picture. Japan has certainly embraced the concept of queuing though. Last year, 22 million visitors attended the World Expo in Japan. With those kinds of numbers pouring through the gates you would expect to spend some time waiting in line. The Japanese, who accounted for 95% of the visitors to the Expo, didn’t seem to mind at all; happily queuing for hours in the sun to see exhibits such as the eleven metre platypus in the Australian avilion. Now back home in Australia you’d be hard pressed to get people to queue for an hour to see a living breathing giant eleven metre Platypus. Forget trying to generate any buzz over one made out of foam, plaster and glass-reinforced concrete. And that’s the difference. While westerners avoid lines wherever possible, seeing only inconvenience, frustration and delay, the Japanese see opportunity and embrace the queue instead.
There’s also the question of the numbers of DS Lites that were available at launch. Nintendo were aiming to sell 450,000 units this month. Of course, not that many were available at launch and with a population of close to 128 million people, the odds of securing one were almost as low as Labor's chances of winning the next federal election. Put simply, supply was always going to be a bit lite (pun intended), and demand high. So high in fact, that in the days after the launch, second hand DS Lite’s were fetching twice the recommended retail price.
I take my hat off to Nintendo. Its ability to not only produce new versions of the same hardware at regular intervals, but to sell that hardware, to both a new and constantly expanding user base, and also to customers who had already purchased the previous season’s hardware, is pure genius. Nintendo’s loyal fan-base buy Nintendo handheld consoles the way some of us purchase games. Not a bad business model if you can manage it. It doesn’t happen in the mobile phone market. Competition is simply too fierce. Consumers demand and get, not only newly designed handsets, but an ever increasing feature set, as well as constantly falling prices. A mobile phone manufacturer who relied on simply releasing last year’s phone in a shinier form factor without upgrading the phone’s features would simply be unable to compete in the market.
Not Nintendo however. Despite Sony’s entry to the handheld market, Nintendo still finds itself in the enviable position of having a considerable price advantage. It really does have the lower end of the handheld market to itself. That, together with its innovative DS titles and its vast library of GBA games ensures a healthy demand for both its software and hardware. While I’m still not getting too carried away by the launch hype, that doesn’t mean I won’t be buying a DS Lite, despite already being a proud owner of the original DS. PALGN told us last week that Nintendo Australia will soon announce a launch date for the DS Lite down under. Point me to the queue.
Praising the PSP
I’m writing this column with the theme song to Syphon Filter playing in the background on my PSP; an aural reminder in the week when Nintendo successfully launched the DS Lite in Japan, of how very different Nintendo and Sony’s handhelds really are.
Before I go any further and incur my reader’s wrath (I’m still trying to remove the giant green OFLC parental guidance warning sign that some kid decided to paint on my garage door after reading last week’s column), I’d like to lay my consoles and handhelds on the table. I love them all equally. And for all of you who thought I was a little hard on Microsoft last week, I’m pretty sure I’ll even learn to love my Xbox 360 too. After all, I’ll have at least 649 good reasons. But back to the PSP. While the DS Lite has hit the streets in Japan, the PSP2 remains just an unsubstantiated rumour for now. But that’s okay. With the advantage of an upgradeable firmware, Sony can, and does, provide a regularly upgraded, tweaked, and improved set of features. Now the cynics and Nintendo fan boys among us can counter with the argument that Sony are merely patching security flaws to curtail piracy, but regardless, in my mind, the consumer still wins.
While the DS Lite is a fine looking handheld, existing DS owners are forced to upgrade their handheld to get a sleeker sexier DS with a (significantly) brighter screen. Perhaps it’s my Scottish heritage, but in this age of built in obsolescence, there is something immensely gratifying about the PSP. Rather than feeling like I have bought a product that is soon to be superseded, today, five months after its Australian launch, I have a PSP that is actually becoming more feature rich with the passing of time. Initial criticism of the PSP centred on a lack of solid games. Critics claimed the PSP’s non-core gaming features only masked its gaming shortfalls. Such claims no longer hold any weight, with a more complete game library and some stellar titles coming on stream.
I for one think you can never have too much basketball. Whatever your preferences, PSP media can be personalised to your own unique taste.
I’m currently playing through a season of NBA Live 06. Last month I took time out from steering the Cleveland Cavaliers to the play-offs, to play the NBA All Star Game. I followed that up with a package of video highlights from this year’s All Star Weekend, encoded for the PSP courtesy of the NBA, and wrapped up my basketball fest by watching the movie Coach Carter that I’d ripped to the memory stick the previous evening. And there’s the beauty of the PSP experience. It’s infinitely customisable. Your music, your video, your wallpapers, and photographs. The Syphon Filter soundtrack I’m listening to comes courtesy of Sony’s US PlayStation site. It’s part of a free content pack featuring music, game trailers and wallpaper, all in a downloadable format that automates the transfer process so completely that the only thing for you to do is connect your PSP to your PC via the USB cable. There are still people out there struggling to get content onto their PSP’s, so it’s great to see the process being simplified for the less tech-savvy.
In search of infrastructure
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that all is perfect in video game land. I do have one beef this week. Australia is getting short changed when it comes to infrastructure mode enabled games for the PSP.
There are two types of wireless game play on the PSP. You’ve got your ad-hoc mode enabled games. These are the ones that link PSPs together directly. If your mate has a PSP, has the same ad-hoc mode enabled game that you are playing, or if one of you has a game that allows for game sharing, and your mate is within spitting distance of you, then you’re good to go. Infrastructure mode is your online network play. You connect your PSP to the wireless internet connection, and play against an opponent playing the same game. But now, your opponent can be across the street, across town or across the other side of the world.
Problem is, infrastructure mode enabled PSP games are few and far between. Take NBA Live 06. The US version featured infrastructure mode but somewhere along the line in making the transition to the PAL version, the infrastructure mode went missing in action. And it’s not the only example.
How many PAL PSP games currently feature infrastructure mode? Sony Australia’s PSP support centre weren’t much help although to their credit they did respond to my email within 24 hours. “Unfortunately we are unable to provide you a list of all Online compatible games. Network Gaming isn't available in Australia as of yet so not many Online Compatible games have been released.”
A couple of weeks back there was some noise in the US regarding EA’s decision to require punters wanting to play the PSP boxing game Fight Night Round 3 online, to either make a $2 payment or provide EA with an email address. This attracted the ire of a great many gamers who thought that EA didn’t really need to screw an extra $2 out of us, and thought that having to provide an email address was somehow akin to publicly releasing the confidential identify of organ donors. Frankly I don’t care whether I pay $2 or give them one of my infrequently used POP3 email addresses. When the game hit retail shelves last week, I was just glad to see that EA had included the infrastructure mode.
With infrastructure mode included, Fight Night 3 might deliver a knock out punch on the PSP.
We’ll soon see the launch of a couple of Sony’s own PSP big hitters, SOCOM Fire Team Bravo and Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, both which feature a rich on-line experience . It’s not imaginable that that these games would launch in Australia without an infrastructure mode. Let’s just hope, that as you read this week’s column, Sony Australia are hard at work building the infrastructure.
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