| JGarret said:
From Nikkei, which has proven to be a reliable source of news concerning Nintendo hardware, we hear that the controller for Project Cliche (which is what Project Cafe is) will have a camera, a color screen, and a touch screen. Is this a winning strategy? What would be a winning strategy for a home console? Home consoles win by doing things only a home console can do. If this is true, then Project Cliche would be an anti-console. It is adopting handheld elements which would make it a poor home console. I am referring to the screen on the controller and the streaming. There is market data to suggest this will be the outcome. The reason why the PSP and other non-Nintendo handhelds failed was because they were anti-handhelds. They were handhelds that tried to have home console elements instead of focus on handheld elements. We haven’t seen a home console try to mimic elements of the handheld console before. But if we did, it is probable that the market reaction would be similar to the handheld console trying to adopt home console elements. It would be seen as an anti-console and would be difficult to sell. I think Nintendo is operating from the wrong premise with the design for Project Cliche. Nintendo is looking at market data that says people do not want to turn on the home console because someone is watching TV or something else. This is why the controllers have a screen so they can ‘stream’. The winning answer is a home console that adopts the elements of the home console. This would mean many people surrounding one TV playing a game. This would emphasize local multiplayer. This would mean games like Wii Sports, Mario Kart Wii, and Super Mario Brothers 5. Note that these games were most responsible for pushing Wii hardware numbers. This Project Cliche direction is going to be extremely unsatisfying to people who want a home console experience. Most of all, it will be extremely unsatisfying to the Wii Sports type players. How exactly is Nintendo going to bring the Wii Sports gamers to the Project Cliche? What´s your opinion on what he thinks?
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I think he's making a few assumptions, and that that's coloring his conclusion. For starters, I don't think we know yet just what use the touch control is, or how the streaming works. If it is true that the controllers are meant to double as, essentially, handhelds, it would mean that Cafe is breaching new territory, but it doesn't automatically follow that this defeats local multiplayer: anyone who's played Four Swords can tell you that good times can be had with friends like this, not to mention Monster Hunter on the PSP. My concern here would be the software. Developers have already demonstrated that they're mostly wedded to traditional gaming, and it sounds like delivering on Cafe's promise will require a radical rethink in how games are designed.
There's also the possibility that he's leaping to the wrong conclusions here, and that the controller is more akin to the GBA link that the Gamecube used. This WOULD mean "many people surrounding one TV," but I also think it would be the more awkward of the two choices if the games decided to utilize the touch controls in any meaningful way. Or there might be some other option that I'm not aware of, and all of this could be moot.
I'm willing to reserve judgment until next week, when we have a better grip on what the system is and how it functions, but I admit that I'm concerned. When the first details about the DS and Wii were announced, I could immediately understand what they were going for, and it was exciting. That's not the case with the 3DS or Cafe. I'm also concerned with a lot of what I've been hearing from Nintendo, and the word "tablet" in this press release is ringing a lot of bells, so I'm not optimistic.
To summarize, I don't have enough information to agree with Malstrom yet, and even if the info is correct I'm not sure he's set out a great case. He was initially wrong about the 3DS, and he's moved away from market analysis to "instinct" to explain why he's changed face there; unfortunately his reasoning seems to be getting more sloppy, disinterested, and shallow recently, (sadly, he's still better than most :-/). But it will only be four more days until we find out!
