Reply With QuoteMan I would love some of the late-model click-only Sierra adventures on the DS. Can it do KQ6-style voice?
I was mucking around with my DS last night when I started thinking how cool would it be to play Xcom, Master of Orion, Curse of monkey Island, Grim Fandango or many other classic pc titles on it. Really is seems like a no brainer for a company and probably it would be a minimum cost compared to most titles to develop. You'd think with an underground devoted to hacking hand helds to play old games via Scumm VR, that it would make a company sit up and realize there is a market for this?
Man I would love some of the late-model click-only Sierra adventures on the DS. Can it do KQ6-style voice?
Jesus, there are tons of old pc games that I would buy in a heartbeat if they were ported to the DS. Can't be technical limitations can it? Maybe it comes down to who owns the IP's.
The success or failure of Myst may have some influence over whether we see more ports down the road.
I don't think Myst is going to hold up well. Shame that anyone would base a new business venture on that.
How big's the market though? We're talking DS, so the publisher has to fund the carts ahead of release. We're talking PC-CD to DS in some cases, which means relatively large carts (for the DS) which are expensive to manufacture. I think that's the hold up to be honest - cost of investment vs size of the market.Originally Posted by Rob_Merritt
I don't disagree, but it is one of the best-selling PC games of all time.
Is it unreasonable to think that the relative success of a DS version of Myst might indicate to some degree how other PC ports might do?
The installed base for DS hardware is huge. I've seen numbers that have it well over 50 million units.
I was wondering if dogbert meant the market for PC ports on DS. That is to say, how large a group of DS owners is it that would be interested in something like this?
What I meant to say is that I don't think people will enjoy Myst in 2008. I'd rather play Bionic Commando :D
How well/badly did Myst do on the PSP in Japan?
With an attach rate of 1.2 titles per DS.
And 1.1 of those titles are first party Nintendo.
The review of Myst in NP wasn't too kind, main problem from what I remember were screen limitations made it very hard to see what was clickable.
I'm always for more classic games on the DS, I would love to see classic nintendo games on it, but at this point that's what the virtual console is for I guess.
That's exactly what I meant.
A: Because it's really hard to make money on a title that is going to sell 10-20K units and have no shelf presence at any major retailer?
ELITE DS. For fuck's sake, Braben, you lazy arse.
Oh hell, yes.
Elite was fun on the GBA.
The New Kind
The DS could probably drive something closer to Frontier, graphically. I'd be all over an official DS-specific Elite/Frontier mashup. It would definitely need the dogfighting from Elite, rather than the relativistic-speed jousting of Frontier. Pretty much everything else could be from the second game.
Failing that, some kind of Space Rangers port could be fun. I've got high hopes for the new Scifi Puzzle Quest game.
Januari 2008
* Nintendo DS Consoles sold Japan: 19,710,000
* The Americas: 16,060,000
* Other: 17,880,000
* Total: 53,640,000
* Nintendo DS Software Sold Japan: 95,130,000
* The Americas: 82,420,000
* Other: 81,930,000
* Total: 259,480,000
* Nintendo DS attachment ratio Japan: 4.8
* The Americas: 5.1
* Other: 4.6
* Average: 4.8
Ok, so 5.0 of the 5.1 is Nintendo first party stuff.
Everyone seems to feel "the DS prints money," like you can release anything for it and make a profit. If that was the case, everyone would just produce DS games; the potential market is bigger than the 360/PS3/Wii combined, and production costs are lower.
But it's a tough market. Nintendo games sell huge. Licensed stuff sells, mostly kids games. Everything else? Not so much.
And your projections need to be spot-on, otherwise you'll produce too many expensive cartridges, killing any chance of profitability, or too few (like Puzzle Quest). And if it's the latter, you miss your retail window because they're not going to wait 2-5 months for you to get back in Nintendo's production queue.
In other words, we need to get -Nintendo- to publish some classic PC games.
Then the lemmings would all march out and buy a million.
Or the small market size? I don't think the average DS owner wants to play X-Com.
upfront costs on the card form-factor i would imagine.
I loved X-Com and I probably wouldn't pick it up on the DS. There are very few games on my PC over 5 years old, and having them available on DS probably wouldn't make me any more interested in playing them. And if I am interested, I've played them to death on the PC. Classic console games work out a bit better since everyone has a PC available, but not everyone wants to mess around with ROMs and Emulation. I just don't think the market for classic PC games on the DS is that big.
As another aside, we got The Settlers on DS, which I was looking forward to for around two years.
It was a complete shitpile. It ran between 2-5 FPS and actually hard-locked the DS several times.
Populous has been released in Japan, and it's actually quite fun. It's also published by EA, which is a bit odd.
Finally, if you want some seriously awesome classic PC-style gaming, get Anno1701. It's not only a great old-school PC game, but it's wonderfully programmed and designed. One of the finest DS games I've played to date.
I think you're more likely to see old SNES games remade for the DS. (Witness, e.g., Front Mission, Shiren.) For myself, if I want to play old PC games, I'll do so with DOSBox on my PC.
Empire Deluxe is going to go DS at the end of this year. It will be interesting to see how the market makes out with it.
http://www.navarre.com/prodhome.aspx...rod=videogames
You hear all sorts of things, like "the market is saturated with DS games" and such, but I think classics will have at least a niche in the DS arena, if not more.
Regarding DS sales:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_ds
Wikipedia marks 64.79 million DS units sold worldwide as of Dec 2007. I think that number is growing steady per quarter at somethign like 6 million.
They also show Nintendogs as best seller with almost 18 million units.
Nintendo could unlock a nice little market if you could buy something like a blank cart with some sort of encryption chip on it, and you could then download niche games onto it, ala Xbox Live
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