Forget consoles — it's all about the handhelds

Winda Benedetti Citizen Gamer • E-mail

Everyone likes a good fight: video game players, wonks and fanboys, especially so.

We’ve certainly gotten our jollies watching the PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Wii prizefight over the last few years. But that dust-up is old news. The big gaming brouhaha brewing these days comes to us from a smaller-weight class.

Forget the console wars. Welcome to the handheld wars.

Nintendo’s pint-sized DS machine and Sony’s PlayStation Portable have been socking each other in the noses for five years now. But the grudge match went kaboom last summer when Apple leapt into the ring and karate-chopped both Sony and Nintendo in the necks, launching the App Store and promoting the iPhone and iPod touch as major gaming contenders.

Things have been heating up ever since and the coming months promise even feistier fisticuffs.

Last week, Nintendo released the DSi — a revamped version of their massively popular DS. Meanwhile Sony is vowing that 2009 is going to be the year the powerful-yet-pummeled PSP finally picks itself up off the mat and offers the best lineup of games yet … all this while the rumor mill says a new version of the PSP will surface sometime later this year.

As for the newest contender, Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone around the time the iPhone 3.0 operating system launches in June. There’s also speculation that Apple’s App Store will soon add a “premium games section,” putting the heat and the hurt on Sony and Nintendo for good.

All in all it’s a great time to be a fan of portable gaming (and juicy corporate rivalries). But which gadget is going to scrap its way to the top, and more importantly, which one is right for you? Here’s a look at how the three competitors stack up.

Everyone wants a piece of Apple’s pie
There’s no doubt, all eyes are on Apple. The super-sexy iPhone and the only-slightly-less-sexy iPod touch are the gadgets that every company wishes they’d dreamed up. (A whopping 30 million of these devices had been sold worldwide as of December).

While Apple’s portable gadgets have been best known for playing music and video, the company recently made one thing very clear: It wants a piece of the gaming pie, too. But how do the iPhone and Touch stack up as gaming machines?

Secret Exit "Zen Bound" is a great example the kind of innovative games that can be played on the iPhone and iPod touch. In this puzzle game, players are challenged to wrap lengths of rope around various statues by touching and tilting their device.

On the positive side, Apple’s devices boast beautiful multi-touch displays, motion-sensing accelerometers and breezy Web access — features that have allowed for some truly unique gameplay innovations.

But it’s the App Store that has been the big game changer. This easy-to-access and easy-to-develop-for online store has given developers of all sizes a channel through which to create software applications and distribute them to consumers for reasonable prices (somewhere between free and a few bucks). Consequently, in the nine months since the store opened, more than 25,000 apps have been posted for the iPhone and Touch … 6,000 of which are games. And of the top 20 most downloaded paid apps to date, 14 are games.

“Anybody and everybody wants to make games for the iPhone,” says Steve Palley, founder of game-review site SlideToPlay.com. “They’ve got the entire gaming industry’s attention.”

And that developer support is crucial, says analyst Michael Cai, vice president of video game research at Interpret LLC.  “Some of the large publishers that used to focus on developing for the DS and PSP are shifting a lot of their development resources toward Apple’s devices.”

On the negative side, the iPhone comes with a monthly service fee of at least $70 (though the phone-free iPod touch does not). And both devices lack traditional gaming controls. No buttons to mash, no sticks to twiddle … it’s the kind of thing that leaves hard-core gamers less-than-impressed. Meanwhile, the App Store is so crowded with game options it’s often hard to find the gems among the dreck.

But Cai expects the iPhone to get a refresh this year with possible improvements to its processing power, graphics capabilities and memory management — all of which will make it an even more formidable gaming machine.  And Palley believes a premium games section is on the way as well, one that will allow top-tier developers to more easily deliver high-production value games to players for higher price points.

In the end, Cai says, “If you want one device that does everything for you, the iPhone is it … as long as you can afford the monthly service fee.” And if you can’t afford the fee, there’s always the iPod touch, a pricey choice that starts at $229, but a good one for people who want a gadget that does games and much more.

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