New Nintendo Patent For Portable NX (?)

[Soundwave]

spemanig said:

Samus Aran said:

Tell me one game that makes decent use of the two screens with the 3DS. None of the games I own need it (although it does make Zelda games more streamlined).

They should ditch it and go for a more powerful/bigger HH, that far outweighs the benefits of having a second screen. I hope they ditch the useless 3D effect as well, does that even impress anyone? It ain't selling them HH units, that's for sure. It just increases the price and makes the graphics worse.

ALBW does. That's such a silly point to make. Just about every 3DS game makes good use of the second screen. That's like saying "name me one game that makes decent use of the right analog stick" and then rolling your eyes when someone gives an answer like "Assassin's Creed" or "Call of Duty," as if a game needs to bend space and time with some abstract analog stick gimmick in order to constitute as making "good use" of it.

And frankly, it doesn't matter if you personally don't think the games need it. It's ingrained into the dna of their hardware now. You need it for BC of two of their handhelds, on top of cross compatability with the NX. They aren't simply going to give all that up for stronger hardware. That's never been what Nintendo, as a company, was about. It doesn't matter whether they "should" ditch them or not anymore, because all signs point to them not. Getting into arguments over whether they should ditch dual screens or not at this point is moot, because they aren't ditching it.

They're ditching it :). 

You don't need two screens for backwards compatibility, this patent itself shows the screen can be reoriented vertically. In that case, all you need is a controller cradle type for the vertical config for people who want backwards compatibility (which I'm guessing is no more than 15% of NX owners anyway).

NX will change a lot of "sacred" rules Nintendo fans think can't be broken too I'd bet. Nintendo has no choice but to make changes, they can't keep going the way they are right now otherwise there will be basically a smartphone app company in 3-4 years. I think Iwata knew this too, they had to change some central tenants of their traditional hardware to become more like other companies (he specifically cited Apple), otherwise their future as a hardware maker looks fairly bleak.