12th August 2003, 1:59 PM
The Gameboy has been pretty much alone because there haven't been any worthy competitors in the handheld market. Let's take a look at all of the Gameboy's competition, and why they failed.
Game Gear: Better graphics, plenty of good games, but a battery life of about fifteen minutes (slight exaggeration). It ate six AA's in a very short amount of time.
Turbo Express: A portable Turbo Grafx 16. It was too expensive, was from a company that wasn't nearly as popular as Nintendo, and sucked batteries like the Game Gear.
Atari Lynx: Crap all around. There were very few decent games available for the system, and it had a very short battery life.
Nomad: A portable Genesis which failed for the same reason the above three handhelds failed: a piss-poor battery life. Then there's the fact that there weren't really any new Genesis games coming out at the time the Nomad came out.
Game.com: Do I even need to comment on this? It was a crappy black&white portable from Tiger Electronics.
Neo Geo Pocket/Pocket Color: A good handheld with some good games, better graphics than the Gameboy, and a great battery life. Unfortunately SNK is only popular amongst "hardcore" gamers, so it died.
Do you now see why the Gameboy is still number on in the industry? Either the competiting handhelds had terrible battery lives and/or were released by unpopular companies. If the PSP has a decent battery life and is cheap enough, there is a very good chance that it could take the number one spot away from Nintendo in the handheld market.
But you know, this debate is useless until we find out more about the PSP.
Game Gear: Better graphics, plenty of good games, but a battery life of about fifteen minutes (slight exaggeration). It ate six AA's in a very short amount of time.
Turbo Express: A portable Turbo Grafx 16. It was too expensive, was from a company that wasn't nearly as popular as Nintendo, and sucked batteries like the Game Gear.
Atari Lynx: Crap all around. There were very few decent games available for the system, and it had a very short battery life.
Nomad: A portable Genesis which failed for the same reason the above three handhelds failed: a piss-poor battery life. Then there's the fact that there weren't really any new Genesis games coming out at the time the Nomad came out.
Game.com: Do I even need to comment on this? It was a crappy black&white portable from Tiger Electronics.
Neo Geo Pocket/Pocket Color: A good handheld with some good games, better graphics than the Gameboy, and a great battery life. Unfortunately SNK is only popular amongst "hardcore" gamers, so it died.
Do you now see why the Gameboy is still number on in the industry? Either the competiting handhelds had terrible battery lives and/or were released by unpopular companies. If the PSP has a decent battery life and is cheap enough, there is a very good chance that it could take the number one spot away from Nintendo in the handheld market.
But you know, this debate is useless until we find out more about the PSP.