22nd March 2011, 9:22 AM
Mario Clash, yes, though it was basically the original Mario Bros (not Super Mario Bros.) with some depth (pseudo 3D gameplay like Wario Land VB). F-Zero? Would Captain Falcon's car be the "Red Falcon"?
Anyway, Nintendo doesn't really need to try. They pretty much dominate the handheld market. Well, there's "smart phones" too, but with so many competing standards, plus the fact that people select their phone based on the network they want, it isn't exactly as bustling a true gaming competitor as it could be. It doesn't help that as far as truly great games go, they don't really put many on cell phones. Most games are these small throw away games you can probably get for free at Newgrounds.com , which explains why the average price is a dollar or two. I'm not saying that the hardware isn't up to it, but generally the really good ones end up on other portables like the DS anyway. All said and done though, it really comes down to controls. Touch controls on Apple stuff is great, better than the DS in fact since it's "multi touch" and all, but from personal experience I can say that it can't completely replace a good set of actual buttons. There's a serious lack of tactile feedback with touch screens that only buttons can solve. If Apple ever decides to add in a sliding control with d-pad and all, and woo developers to get really good exclusive games (allowing them to charge higher prices for games that cost more to produce is a start), then there's a pretty good threat to Nintendo right there.
That said, another big problem for Apple, Android, and the rest is their region specific popularity. Sega's systems had a similar problem. The Master System only really did decently in Europe, the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, while not a failure in Japan, only actually competed with the SNES in America, and the Saturn only did well in Japan (mainly because Segata Sanshiro was murdering anyone who didn't buy one). In this case, Japan has a nation-wide industry standard for cell phones. The standard is updated every few years or so, but the main advantage is no matter where you get your cell phone and no matter who your provider is, programs "just work" on all of them. I think this is a great thing which American cell phone companies never really bothered copying (though American cell phone companies in general are some of the worst in the world). iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone? None of those even attempted to emulate the Japanese standard, and all of them use their own mutually exclusive setup. Aside from those ones, there's still a whole garden of other "smart phones" with their own exclusive OSes and software. About the only commonality to be had in any modern US phone is Java, but that doesn't get one very far. Android, to be fair, is an open standard that multiple cell phone makers can, and are, using. A standard may yet emerge that the industry can agree upon. However, that's yet to happen and until it does, it makes things very difficult for anyone who wants to use their cell phone as their exclusive handheld gaming device, and it also makes it very difficult for developers to get their stuff on all the infinite variations out there, or for those variations to "talk" to each other online.
As an aside, this is also the reason why there's a number of big cell phone exclusive games in Japan that never get released here. The game companies making these cell phone games in Japan see a huge market there, but a very thinly divided market here and don't consider the effort of distributing it to all those variations just to make sure the net is cast wide enough to be worth it. As a result, we have to wait for them to decide to port games to a different non-cell phone system to have any chance of actually playing those games here. Examples of that are Final Fantasy IV: The After Years and Kingdom Hearts coded, which only got translated when they were ported to the Wii and the DS respectively. Final Fantasy VII Before Crisis is the only significant Squeenix cell phone game that hasn't been ported to another system, and consequently has never been translated.
Basically, the 3DS has a clean shot at dominating the handheld GAMING market if not the handheld market in general simply because American companies' poor handling of cell phone standards has left gaming markets on even modern smartphones a bit of a flea market of garbage (with a few notable exceptions that are available elsewhere anyway).
Anyway, Nintendo doesn't really need to try. They pretty much dominate the handheld market. Well, there's "smart phones" too, but with so many competing standards, plus the fact that people select their phone based on the network they want, it isn't exactly as bustling a true gaming competitor as it could be. It doesn't help that as far as truly great games go, they don't really put many on cell phones. Most games are these small throw away games you can probably get for free at Newgrounds.com , which explains why the average price is a dollar or two. I'm not saying that the hardware isn't up to it, but generally the really good ones end up on other portables like the DS anyway. All said and done though, it really comes down to controls. Touch controls on Apple stuff is great, better than the DS in fact since it's "multi touch" and all, but from personal experience I can say that it can't completely replace a good set of actual buttons. There's a serious lack of tactile feedback with touch screens that only buttons can solve. If Apple ever decides to add in a sliding control with d-pad and all, and woo developers to get really good exclusive games (allowing them to charge higher prices for games that cost more to produce is a start), then there's a pretty good threat to Nintendo right there.
That said, another big problem for Apple, Android, and the rest is their region specific popularity. Sega's systems had a similar problem. The Master System only really did decently in Europe, the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, while not a failure in Japan, only actually competed with the SNES in America, and the Saturn only did well in Japan (mainly because Segata Sanshiro was murdering anyone who didn't buy one). In this case, Japan has a nation-wide industry standard for cell phones. The standard is updated every few years or so, but the main advantage is no matter where you get your cell phone and no matter who your provider is, programs "just work" on all of them. I think this is a great thing which American cell phone companies never really bothered copying (though American cell phone companies in general are some of the worst in the world). iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone? None of those even attempted to emulate the Japanese standard, and all of them use their own mutually exclusive setup. Aside from those ones, there's still a whole garden of other "smart phones" with their own exclusive OSes and software. About the only commonality to be had in any modern US phone is Java, but that doesn't get one very far. Android, to be fair, is an open standard that multiple cell phone makers can, and are, using. A standard may yet emerge that the industry can agree upon. However, that's yet to happen and until it does, it makes things very difficult for anyone who wants to use their cell phone as their exclusive handheld gaming device, and it also makes it very difficult for developers to get their stuff on all the infinite variations out there, or for those variations to "talk" to each other online.
As an aside, this is also the reason why there's a number of big cell phone exclusive games in Japan that never get released here. The game companies making these cell phone games in Japan see a huge market there, but a very thinly divided market here and don't consider the effort of distributing it to all those variations just to make sure the net is cast wide enough to be worth it. As a result, we have to wait for them to decide to port games to a different non-cell phone system to have any chance of actually playing those games here. Examples of that are Final Fantasy IV: The After Years and Kingdom Hearts coded, which only got translated when they were ported to the Wii and the DS respectively. Final Fantasy VII Before Crisis is the only significant Squeenix cell phone game that hasn't been ported to another system, and consequently has never been translated.
Basically, the 3DS has a clean shot at dominating the handheld GAMING market if not the handheld market in general simply because American companies' poor handling of cell phone standards has left gaming markets on even modern smartphones a bit of a flea market of garbage (with a few notable exceptions that are available elsewhere anyway).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)