Comment by lukestevens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukestevens | Hacker News Reader

Slapping a Playstation controller on an Android phone is one of those weird last gen/this gen mishmashes that highlights Sony's struggle to cling to relevancy, imo.

Surely the iOS phenomenon (and Android & WP7) -- particularly the iPod touch -- shows that for handheld gaming a chunky controller isn't necessary.

As Gruber often points out, where _is_ the iPod touch competitor? This is likely to be too expensive to compete with the iPod touch, and too chunky/niche to compete with iPhones and other smartphones as a platform in its own right. And that's what Sony needs -- an iOS-like platform, not this strange bit of hardware.

It's pretty sad that for a company that has built some of the most popular consoles of all time, all they can come up with in 2010 is the mutant child of their controller and a generic smartphone.

A controller might not be necessary, but for anyone that plays slightly more involved games than iOS has, it's a godsend. Playing a platformer on an iPod touch is rather annoying.

I can imagine an interesting control scheme employing the tilt detection and accelerometers. Do they incorporate those?

Some titles have. It doesn't work out as well as you might hope; those inputs aren't exactly precise, and tilting the screen can be a bit disorienting. The result is that level layouts have to be much simpler to maintain the same degree of challenge.

Thanks. I have played the new Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. They make use of shaking and tilting the controller, but very sparingly and buttons are the main means of control.

(It's a good game. I was expecting it would follow the trend of making games ever more casual. I was wrong. Mario Bros. Wii is hard.)

A chunky controller isn't necessary for handheld gaming... but we need something better than a flat touchscreen too.

Especially if you're going to play a FPS, you need two analog sticks, and dedicated buttons that you can feel without having to look at. You don't get that with a flat touchscreen.

The PSPhone doesn't have actual analog sticks, it looks like it has a capacitive multi-touch surface. The key thing that makes it all better is that it has two little nubs so that you can feel where the center position is. This is such an important piece of feedback you can't get with a flat screen.

I also don't like giving up some of the screen real estate as controller surface either, but that's me.

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