14 DAY TRIAL // The Nintendo 3DS made quite the impact when it was released, with quite a number of gamers picking up the consoles in order to see how it can deliver a three-dimensional gaming experience without requiring the use of glasses as home consoles do at the moment.
But the momentum of the launch seems to have stalled and, on the Japanese market, the PlayStation Portable from Sony has managed to sell better than the Nintendo 3DS for the week that ended on April 3.
Speaking about the handheld experience that Nintendo is delivering, Jack Tretton, who is the chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, has said, “Our view of the ‘Game Boy experience’ is that it’s a great babysitting tool, something young kids do on airplanes, but no self-respecting twenty-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those. He’s too old for that.”
The Nintendo 3DS was launched in the middle of February in Japan and arrived at the end of March in both North America and in Europe.
Nintendo has said that its new handheld has managed to sell better initially than the DS line of hardware.
One of the problems of the 3DS launch is the relative lack of actual video games that target the more hardcore gaming crowd, but Nintendo promises that publisher will deliver more content for the handheld soon.
Sony has officially announced that it is working on a new handheld, which it calls the Next Generation Portable and the rumors billed as the PlayStation Portable 2, and plans to launch it before the end of the year on major markets.
The new Sony device is said to deliver the same computing power as the PS3, limited only by the battery included, and will also have an OLED screen and a touch pad on the back of the device.