The Impact Factor

Why we need handheld consoles (for now)

Article

Abstract: Despite a handheld being the first console I owned, I moved away from handheld gaming in recent years. I rekindled my passion for, and appreciation of, handheld consoles these past few months after devoting some time to the Nintendo 3DS and the PlayStation Vita. Smartphone gaming may appear to be a replacement for gaming on portable consoles, but control limitations and problems with the mobile market have limited the kinds of titles playable on phones. No great solution to either problem has been discovered. For now, handheld consoles fill an important niche in the games space and I hope they can stick around for quite a while longer.

Long car ride companion of choice.

Over years of home console and PC gaming, I developed a perplexing antagonism towards handheld consoles. I felt like I didn’t ‘get’ them anymore. Every time I found myself with a Gameboy in hand, I would just be sitting at home. As usual. Why spend my time with small-scope small-screen games when I could just grab a controller and play Dark Cloud 2 or Ratchet and Clank? Sure, I would grab my sleek glacier Gameboy Advance from time to time to play, especially while on car trips. But the experiences tended to feel insubstantial in comparison to their home console counterparts. I ended up playing less and less handheld games. By college, my DS was used exclusively to play Pokemon. Handheld exclusive titles like The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds got pushed further and further back, arising in part from this feeling that I had ‘moved past’ handheld consoles.

This bummed me out. Want to know why? A handheld was the first gaming console I owned. That’s right. Before a Super Nintendo or PlayStation or anything else, I had the Gameboy Pocket. Boy did I love that thing. I bought into the handheld craze with full stock options: I needed to be able to play wherever I was, whatever time of day. And, of course, I needed to be able to play Pokemon Blue. The Gameboy Pocket never left my side. I played Mario and Tetris and, of course, Pokemon. Then I got the Gameboy Color, the Advance, and the DS. I was fully onboard. But like I wrote above, the time I spent with each got smaller as I got older.

My first console. Uncountably many hours went spent playing on this little thing.

Then I started this blog. I wanted to take in as many games as possible. Justine let me spend some time with her 3DS and I had a blast playing Monster Hunter Ultimate, and I loved when she handed me control of her Animal Crossing New Leaf town or Tomodachi Life island. And then she got me a Vita. Now, whenever I have a quick moment between activities or she wants to surf TV, I can grab my Vita and get a little gaming time in. Handheld consoles have afforded me omnipresent accessibility to substantial games. Handheld consoles fit a niche I didn’t know I existed until I spent some real time with them. But handheld consoles aren’t exactly in the best place right now.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is a massive, phenomenal experience.
I guess I should get around to reviewing it. 

Watching smartphone gaming take up an increasingly large percentage of the market has led me, and may others, to anticipate the impending demise of handhelds like the 3DS or Vita. Each new phone model has faster processors and better graphics cards too, rapidly shrinking the gap between the kinds of experiences you can have on phone versus console. As it stands now, games on the phone can look as great and run as smoothly as pretty much any handheld game out there. Let’s just name a couple. Infinity Blade 3 looks phenomenal—perhaps even as good as PS3 / 360 era games. We’ve gotten gorgeous artistic games like Monument Valley and Framed. Lots of console & PC games have successfully made their way to iOS / Android as well. To name a couple: Valiant Hearts, FTL, Papers Please, VVVVVV, and even newly released games like Her Story. All those games are exceptional. Essentially all were one of the top-rated games the year in which they originally released. Finally, Hearthstone. The game looks and plays great on iPhone, and got a special mention here because it was The Impact Factor's 2014 Game of the Year. So why do we need handheld consoles when smartphone gaming is huge, diverse, and has some the best games you can find anywhere?

Titan Souls is why. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is why. Let me explain.

I spent the majority of my roughly five-hour flight to Hawaii playing Titan Souls on the Vita. In Titan Souls you play as a young boy who travels around a lush vacant world to slay diverse and powerful titans with his magical bow and arrow. I spent my time dodging, running and rolling past devastating boss attacks, studying movement and attack patterns, and skillfully landing killing blows on the game’s 18 fearsome titans. Titan Souls is a game that could never be played well on a phone. I’m sure phones are powerful enough to run the game, but one thing they cannot do is create inputs that suit the game’s control scheme. By game standards, Titan Souls has remarkably simple controls. One button is used for running & dodge rolling, and another is used to shoot and recall your arrow. That’s it. Well, aside from one important thing: directional inputs. On Vita, using the directional pad or analog stick moves your character through the gorgeous 2D pixel art world. I have not played a single game on iOS that does directional movement well. Not a one. The most common ‘solution’ to the problem is to create a digital representation of a D-pad or analog stick. This is a poor alternative to its physical counterpart. Not only are the digital controls generally poorly responsive, but they require your fingers to be on the screen at all times, covering up a substantial portion of the game screen. Titan Souls is an unforgiving game: both the player, and titans, die in one hit. I cannot even imagine the frustrations that would arise if I had to rely on a cumbersome digital movement input to navigate its brutal bosses.

There's no way I would try to take on this boss using digital inputs.
He was hard enough already.

Games like Hearthstone or Paper’s Please work so well on smartphones because their control schemes are amenable to touch-based input methods. Your finger acts as a computer mouse, where clicks are taps and moving items around involves dragging your finger across the screen. Titles that are ported to smartphones only succeed when the inputs are designed with a keen focus on making them as easy and unobtrusive as possible. A lot of games can, and have been show to, work in this format. So, so, so many others cannot. Titan Souls and Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate are just two quick examples. I would say, in general, several entire genres cannot work well on phone: first-person shooter/action, third-person shooter/action, platformer (3D especially), and fighting games. Or, as I like to think of it, four of my five favorite ‘styles’ of games. I love Hearthstone as much as anyone (probably more), but I want to be able to play all kinds of experiences on the go. Not just ones in which touch based controls make sense.

An obvious solution would to be develop a sturdy, comfortable, and responsive smartphone accessory that would give access to non touch-based inputs for directional movement and button presses. People have already figured this out, albeit to disappointing results. One solution has been to create game controllers that can pair with the smartphone. An obvious solution, sure, but one that removes some of the simplicity and headache-free portability of the all-in-one handheld consoles like the N3DS or Vita. Others have designed snap on button/stick attachments for smartphones. Not only are these accessories expensive (you’re looking at around $80 minimum), many have also found them to feel flimsy, lack responsiveness, and have poor form factor (ie they’re not comfortable). These issues feel particularly egregious considering how awesome it feels to play with a Vita. My god is that one well-designed handheld.

You're looking at a $100 accessory folks. It's functional, sure, but it's
also bulky, massive, and feels cheap.

Issues arise with the mobile market, too. So many smartphone gamers are unaccustomed to paying for games, content to click around for 10-minutes at a time in one F2P game or another. I paid $15 for Titan Souls and it was $15 well spent. Getting iPhone users to spend even $1.99 is a challenge, as developers of the excellent Threes quickly discovered. So it’s no surprise many games aren’t brought to iOS/Android, again sustaining the necessity of handheld consoles in the contemporary game space.

For the time being, I love my Vita and will continue to spend time with, and appreciate, handheld consoles. The offer much more than may initially meet the eye, and fill a vital niche in my gaming time. They’re a great travel or home companion, bringing game variety that’s unmatched by the smartphone market. So stick around handheld consoles, ok? Good. Time to get Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc started up.