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Advanced Portable Gaming?
by Jeremy Horwitz for Gamers Today
Millions of people own Game Boys but few critics will complement the machine for anything but its sheer longevity. Having emerged as the lowest tech of several competing portable gaming devices in the late 1980's, the Game Boy managed to eke out a market niche and expand it into the major reason that Nintendo remains respectable in the year 2000.
Atari's color handheld, the Lynx, was instantly more impressive than the Game Boy - more comfortable to hold, displaying a beautiful color screen with back-lighting, and possessing all sorts of great special effects that in some ways exceeded the capabilities of full-sized game consoles of that era. It was also far more expensive than the Game Boy, and carried the weight of the Atari name, even though the company did perhaps its best job since the 2600 of pulling together hot arcade and original titles to support the machine. The Lynx died a sad death when Atari closed its doors.
Sega's Game Gear, also a backlit color handheld, had fewer special effects than the Lynx and less cutting-edge games, but benefited from Sega's then-popular name and decent software support. Like the Lynx, the Game Gear walked all over the Game Boy's technology, and like the Lynx, it died with a whimper when Sega determined that the Game Boy was going to own the portable gaming market. More expensive portable consoles came and went much faster; NEC's portable TurboExpress and Sega's Nomad played cartridges from the TurboGrafx and Genesis, respectively, on high-quality backlit screens. Even when they selling for close-out prices, these units sold for more than a brand-new Game Boy.
With continued success of its black-and-white hardware, Nintendo was hardly pressured to release a color handheld. Ten years after the Game Boy came the Game Boy Color, a modestly improved upgrade that preserved the pixel count of the original and added a less than dramatic splash of color to the screen. In August, Nintendo finally rolled out the true sequel to the Game Boy - a somewhat more impressive device that's still not as powerful as the Super NES, dubbed only half cynically the Game Boy Advance.
Though Advance is a big step for Nintendo - a company with no real portable competition and a very strong 12-year old Game Boy platform -- it's a very small step for gaming in general. In terms of innovations, it's subtle: it boasts twice the battery life of the Game Boy Color (20 versus 10 hours) with the same set of 2 AA batteries, plus has a palette twice the size of the SNES and the ability to display 512 colors at once during gameplay. Unlike most of the other color portables released over the last 10 years, it has no backlight, and it is stuck at a less impressive screen resolution of 240*160 - less than, say, the Nomad's 320*240 screen. It's perhaps the best example of what happens when competition disappears and one company is left to set the standards for an entire industry on its own - it's a step above nothing in particular except its much older brother.
Beyond the limitations of the graphics hardware, Nintendo's plans for the Advance are somewhat more exciting. Frankly, software is the only thing that has kept the Game Boy alive this long, and no Nintendo console yet has lost with the company's big-named titles. A sequel to Mario Kart (looking much like the first SNES game) is Nintendo's big launch title for the machine, complemented by a Napoleon strategy game, a RPG called Golden Sun, and a simplistic action game called Kuru Kuru Kuruin in Japan. Surprisingly, Konami's first GBA title is a racing game that looks nearly identical to Mario Kart Advance, save the inclusion of Konami characters, and Capcom has shown a not-too-incredible new Mega Man game that seems sapped of the concepts that worked so well earlier in the series. Regardless of the level of innovation (or lack thereof) in these titles, it's hard to imagine gamers - at least in Japan - turning away from a device that plays Mario Kart, has strategy and RPG titles ready up front, and delivers a couple of respectable new action titles besides. Whether the Pokemon craze will last long enough to keep people waiting for a GBA Pokemon title is another question altogether.
Nintendo also promises Internet connectivity will be a major selling point of Advance - it will link into the Net and allow online gameplay, game and E-mail information transfers, and the broadcast of low-quality video images when attached to a video camera. Cellular telephone connectivity will also be on tap at some point in the future. Finally, like the Game Boy, the new GB Advance will also connect with a full-sized game console - in this case, the next-generation Nintendo machine -- to enable all sorts of other intriguing game tie-ins.
What's missing from Advance? It's not a polygon pusher at all, leaving Sony ample room to walk in and take a hold of the market if it could only put together a cheap and truly portable PlayStation handheld. There's only so much that can be done with 2-D games at this point in time, especially on a screen this small. Advance is also not especially sophisticated in terms of screen quality or color display, though it looks markedly better than the old Game Boy and GB Color - low-water marks for handheld graphics. And, of course, the music quality will necessarily only be impressive to people used to the blips of Nintendo hardware - this isn't a hi-fi portable unit. Finally, it doesn't have software at the moment that will compel people outside of Japan to rush out and make a purchase. But that issue, of course, will change soon enough.
If Advance succeeds, it will do so for the same reasons the Game Boy did so well - a low price, poor competition and continued software support. Given that Sony appears to have played its hand with the PS-One - a not-truly-portable device - and no one else is stepping up to challenge the Nintendo juggernaut, can Advance really fail? Probably not. The only device that could take away from the Advance is continued sales of the Game Boy itself, and the prospect of selling every Game Boy owner a brand new toy has far too much appeal to Nintendo for that to ever happen.
