| Soundwave said: The GameCube didn't have that many droughts, unless you are one of those people who are in the "well I will only buy Nintendo games on a Nintendo system and never touch 3rd party games". It had a library of about 652 games I think, which is not that terrible, the N64 was the one that was really crippled by software droughts. N64 should have been Nintendo's greatest system overtaking the SNES, they had it right there for the taking and sadly shot the poor machine in the foot before it was even on storeshelves to gift Playstation market dominance in the traditional console market. Nintendo's internal development is actually a lot more choatic and random than people think it is too. Like people think they designed the DS with this grand vision, but really it wasn't like that at all. The designer of the Game Boy was working on a slider Game Boy Advance successor, like the popular slide out phones that preceded smartphones that were popular circa 2003 or so (the ones Paris Hilton would carry around). The screen would slide out to reveval controls underneath. That guy simply liked a touchscreen, they had been experimenting with touchscreens since forever so that was part of the design already. Then Sony announced the PSP at E3 2003 and Yamauchi in a panic basically canned work on that GBA successor and said if the PSP has one screen well ... he wants two screens for a new portable because two is better than one and that had to be ready within like a year, lol. And even Iwata thought the idea was stupid as did most of Nintendo's designers, but Iwata wanting to be diplomatic to Yamauchi said they should at least explore the idea, and so the touchscreen concept was just merged from the GBA successor project that was supposed to just be more of a standard game portable really. The other thing is touchscreens while quite novel for the Western market, weren't quite as exotic in Japan, resistive touch screen PDAs were a common staple device for Japanese businessmen/women in the early 2000s. |
Of that 652 which were the worth while games to get the platform for though? The vast majority of notable third party titles it got were on PS2 so if a consumer was looking to buy a console it put the bulk of GCNs games on a rival platform that far outstripped it in regards to exclusives as well this also meant if you had a PS2 as well which was a likely case the GC hardly had anything for you to buy for long periods as most games outside of exclusives had little differences between them across platforms unless it was the Xbox version, we're not talking about the what ifs we're talking about the platforms as they are so the whole what N64 could have been talk is meaningless.
DS had been in development since 2002, Nintendo had been experimenting with two screens for a while with the GBA/GC link up as well as G&W as far back as 1980 had two screens this isn't some panic concept like you claim it's something they had been experimenting with for a while with the DS touch feature being the next experiment.
Resistive PDAs never had the software execution of the DS or all of the same features, for example games and software on the DS are akin to apps on Smart phones today as the were numerous non gaming software that utilized the platform features that PDAS could never replicate for example one software on the DS allowed someone to perform a rock concert using the DS as a stand in guitar. PDAs were essentially no different from standard mobile phones DS on the other hand unexpectedly laid the ground work for the iPhone and the smart phone era.
