Let me set the scene -
It's 2007.
To the chagrin of an army of loyal comic geeks the film Ghost Rider is released.
The film is terrible.
The PS2 game is terrible
The XBox game is terrible
The PSP game is terrible
The Gameboy Advance game is fantastic.
Why was the GBA game so good? Because it didn't, it couldn't, try to be the same game as on the other systems.
The limitations in the systems power meant that an entirely new game had to be devised and created (doubtless on the cheep) that would work on the GBA - and the result was brilliant.
In the same year the CGI Turtles movie came out alongside terrible game tie-ins for every system around - again they were all awful with the exception of the GBA version - an old school side scroller that could hold it's own alongside anything the 80's had to offer.
And it wasn't just tie-ins - genuine entries in popular series' such as GTA, Mario, Zelda, Tony Hawk, Metroid, Moto racer, Dave Mirra, Fifa and Tekken were all stripped back and redesigned from the ground up for the GBA and they were all the more interesting and entertaining for it.
But the underlying issue with portable systems, since the death of the GBA, is that because they CAN do parred down versions of home console games developers are content to give the consumer exactly that - and any system is only ever as good as the software you can play on it.
Furthermore, with the two upcoming machines, it's likely that portability itself will be almost entirely negated by both size (in the case of the PSP2 at least) and battery life.
So you'll end up playing a gimped port of a console game while sat on you sofa with the charger plugged in - probably feet away from a home console far better suited to the job.
It's 2007.
To the chagrin of an army of loyal comic geeks the film Ghost Rider is released.
The film is terrible.
The PS2 game is terrible
The XBox game is terrible
The PSP game is terrible
The Gameboy Advance game is fantastic.
Why was the GBA game so good? Because it didn't, it couldn't, try to be the same game as on the other systems.
The limitations in the systems power meant that an entirely new game had to be devised and created (doubtless on the cheep) that would work on the GBA - and the result was brilliant.
In the same year the CGI Turtles movie came out alongside terrible game tie-ins for every system around - again they were all awful with the exception of the GBA version - an old school side scroller that could hold it's own alongside anything the 80's had to offer.
And it wasn't just tie-ins - genuine entries in popular series' such as GTA, Mario, Zelda, Tony Hawk, Metroid, Moto racer, Dave Mirra, Fifa and Tekken were all stripped back and redesigned from the ground up for the GBA and they were all the more interesting and entertaining for it.
But the underlying issue with portable systems, since the death of the GBA, is that because they CAN do parred down versions of home console games developers are content to give the consumer exactly that - and any system is only ever as good as the software you can play on it.
Furthermore, with the two upcoming machines, it's likely that portability itself will be almost entirely negated by both size (in the case of the PSP2 at least) and battery life.
So you'll end up playing a gimped port of a console game while sat on you sofa with the charger plugged in - probably feet away from a home console far better suited to the job.