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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a 1.7GB game for my Android phone (Modern Combat 3), that you can optionally connect to a HD monitor using a HDMI out cable.

Quad core mobile chips are already in production and PS3 capable mobile GPUs are 6 months away (ARM Mali T-658).

Why is a console, a console and not simply a power/cooling/connectivity dock for a suitably powerful mobile device ? Id's flagship game, RAGE, has been supremely playable on an iphone for ages now.

Consoles like PS3 and Xbox already lag desktop-grade video hardware by 5-6 years, yet have a large market - so why cant the same be true for mobile hardware ?

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Rage on iPhone is a rail shooter, it's not the same game as the PC/console version. It's been stripped down to the exact minimum it needs to support that predefined path through the game, and while that's great fun on a mobile, I don't think everyone would be totally impressed if that was the direction the next generation of consoles took.

It's a rail shooter because of control issues, not power. Drop your phone in a dock attached to a gamepad, and those issues disappear.

According to Carmack, it's on rails to reduce file size (texture LOD):http://toucharcade.com/2010/11/19/john-carmack-on-rage/

And then some. On the 360 Rage comes on 3 8GB DVDs. The megatexturing method that Carmack favours is intensely data-heavy.

Look at screenshots of both, the iphone version looks great for a portable game but there are differences in the level of detail.

Most iphone/android fps games look like PC games did ~2003

The cost of a quad-core SoC isn't so high that it's worth only having one of them, and like you say, you can just connect via HDMI anyway - although that leaves you with a controller problem. Separating people from their phones - docking over by the TV and playing on the couch - is a big hassle, especially if you get a phone call mid-way.

IIRC the mobile RAGE is essentially an dumb on-rails shooter. The PC version is significantly more vast, complicated, and graphically impressive.

the fact that its a dumb shooter has nothing to do with its rendering ability. It's a dumb shooter because people have not learnt to buy $49 mobile games.

A mobile phone already exposes a touch-screen interface/proximity sensor/accelerometer/gps/bluetooth/etc The interface is richer, but different - in the same a dualshock is different from a keyboard. You do not need to separate a user from a phone if they have a power cord trailing to their phone. But actually, you dont even need to do that. Your phone can remain docked and your joystick can have a mic to answer calls.

I do understand that a mobile chipset may trail PC chipsets - but I'm comparing mobiles to consoles, which already trail and are still accepted.

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