Food for Thought: 4th Gen Parallels in American Market

[Final-Fan]

I've heard other sources that would say you're spot-on in your judgement of DS hardware power, and maybe you're overestimating the PSP but it's pretty close to that I think. The big difference from N64 to DS is that the cartridge storage size is much less restrictive (I think) on the DS.

The fact that Game Gear had color is just the most obvious target to illustrate its superiority to the Game Boy. It's been a very long time since I fired mine up, but I remember a Shinobi game well and if I recall correctly its graphics were WAY beyond anything the Game Boy could put out, regardless of color/grayscale (or rather color/greenscreen).

The Game Gear sucked down 6 AA batteries in even less time than the PSP IIRC. Obviously the PSP's battery life could be better but it's not nearly the barrier it was due to the ability to recharge at any time, and lack of replacement cost.

The difference in number of games is absolutely true, but it must be remembered that the Game Boy had a big lead on the Game Gear to begin with and it only got bigger over time. 11 million GGs versus -- total guess -- 80 million GBs by the GG's death in 1997. That's much greater than the PS and PS2 leads over their competitors and we all saw how much 3rd parties gravitated towards them.

I'm not trying at all to say that comparisons can't be drawn between the GB/GG and DS/PSP; there are many similarities, but I think that there are even more differences. I just don't think it's a very close match, but there are still valuable analogies that can be made.

(I only pointed out the homebrew as one of several things that are major secondary functions on the PSP and are marginal or (in other cases) nonexistant on the DS.)

It was my pleasure to contribute my thoughts.

[edit:  Oh yeah, and the Game Gear had a TV tuner attachment.  Clearly this makes it 999x better than Game Boy! ]