Every so often, a small news topic comes up that I want to talk about, but isn’t enough for an article, or a small development happens on something I talked about.  Rather than keeping everything bottled up forever, we’ve hit a critical mass.  So here’s Behind the Line, grab bag edition

Coleco Wants Back in the Console Wars

Anyone remember Coleco?  Probably not.  I actually had one of their old, old, OLD handhelds in my childhood.  They’re one of the names that Atari more or less drove out of the industry, and by the time of the NES they were already a fading memory.  Now, they want to make a new console, and bring back cartridge media.  They call it the Coleco Chameleon.

This looks a little too much like an Atari Jaguar for my comfort.

This is an odd move, an old name bringing back old tech, but it’s not as crazy as it might sound at first.  The reason game consoles switched from cartridges to discs in the first place was both cost, and space.  Obviously, discs can provide far more raw data storage than a cartridge could.  This was made sometimes painfully apparent during the N64 vs Playstation era.  Less well known, though, was the cost.  When working on a cartridge, every new build of the game has to be printed to a blank cartridge.  These get passed around for testing and verification for every new update during development.  There will be hundreds, maybe thousands of these cartridges during development, and this is a cost that adds up.  They are far more expensive than a blank CD, DVD, or Blu Ray.  Or, at least they were.

Flash drive storage has been increasing significantly, costs falling, and the audience does not always expect games to be getting bigger across the board.  So, with cheaper hardware, and hopefully some good retro deals on the back end, there’s an opening for an old cartridge style system out there, but that still doesn’t answer why.

Ideally, the advantage cartridges have is that the memory is built in, already loaded into the system.  This is why your old NES wouldn’t need any time at all to jump into Mario.  No loading/unloading, or other significant memory management was needed.  With flash data, that may not be the case.  It’s likely that the data would need to be loaded onto the console’s ram, which may or may not be a quick process.  It should be possible, the Game Boy/DS/3DS series never really moved away from cartridges, and they run well.  But that brings up the final problem, why wouldn’t you just get one of those instead of this Coleco console?  Hope they really do have good software support deals.  We’ll see if it makes it to the Toy Fair in New York in a few days.

Though seriously they should look into changing their name.  It was originally Connecticut Leather Company.

Forget the Ouya, Here’s a Chinese Micro Console

The Ouya is dead, but there are still other micro console ideas out there.  Android TV, Apple TV, Roku, and in China, Tencent is releasing an Android based mini console.  This is supposed to run all of the available Android games in the market, connected to the TV, and with the phone as a controller.  Why not just stream the game to the TV?  If you have a dedicated device for this, theoretically it could perform better.  Problem is, these aren’t ports to adjust for the new user interaction.  These are the exact same games that are designed to have the screen be the control surface.  I have no idea how someone could effectively play most mobile games while not looking at the screen.  Yeah, there are some out there, but not most of them.

Seriously, your eyes are going to be on the damn phone!

Speaking of Micro Consoles, here’s some Mad Catz news

Did you know Mad Catz has an Android micro console canned M.O.J.O.?  Neither did I, and I work in the Android market.  It even came out 3 years ago, and is still available!  The micro console movement is a curious beast.  There are people who can’t wait for it to die, and others who think that such a sentiment is ridiculous because disruption can always happen.  I for one think that searching for disruptive markets is always a good thing, but I don’t see a path for micro-consoles to succeed as dedicated gaming devices.  This would require something that has its own niche, and manages to have an acceptable gaming experience on the side, more like a Roku.  A small, inexpensive device that streams to a high fidelity television output, with easy access to streaming services like YouTube and Netflix is something that works for some consumers who want the television experience, without needing a cable subscription.  It looks like this is what the M.O.J.O. has become, and that’s probably why it’s still around.

That doesn’t really matter for Mad Catz, though.  Their business is hurting, and they have a heavy investment in Rock Band 4, as they co-published it with Harmonix.  They traditionally have made peripherals, and Rock Band always focused on peripherals, so that makes sense.  On the other hand, I’ve never trusted third party controllers.  On the other-other hand, Harmonix always understood the necessity for their peripherals to be able to stand up to wear and tear, so I doubt they’d allow substandard equipment to go out.  In any case, the CEO, Darren Richardson, resigned.  Not a good sign for their business.  This may be a sign that the games industry is on a downturn, but I doubt it.  It seems more like the industry is developing to the point where weaknesses in business management can make the difference in the success or failure of a company.  One can only hope that this will spread to game developers soon.  Speaking of…

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