My love for the handheld system has been reignited (and some of my faith in Square-Enix at the same time):
The World Ends With You...

Well, reignited is probably too strong of a term in my case. I never had much interest in handheld systems until now. I'd just assumed that they were used exclusively for Pokemon games and that everything else was just an afterthought. Heck, the whole reason I bought a DS in the first place was for Pokemon.

(By the way, you should probably know now before you hear it from someone else and get the wrong idea: I own a pink DS... it's a long story, don't ask)

TWEWY is a damn near perfect game. I've spent weeks playing it so far and have been really struggling to find a fault... but this isn't about TWEWY.

The handheld market seems to be growing stronger and stronger by the day. The DS and the PSP have all but revolutionised portable gaming forever. Such amazing games are being released on these systems now that portable gaming is becoming harder to ignore. These things are not out of the ordinary though, this is just the natural way any gaming system/platform evolves. No, it's the new possibilities that got me thinking.

Which new doors open with next-gen portable gaming that aren't available any other way? A few ideas have been tried across multiple DS games but the wireless DS-to-DS connectivity has far too short a range to be fully realised for what it is. Right now I'm staring at my wireless broadband modem-thing connected to the side of the laptop I'm writing from. It's small enough to fit in my pocket (the modem-thing, not the laptop) and I could easily tape it to my DS or PSP without much trouble at all. Then it hit me: This is where portable games are going. Outside.

Until handhelds, games were confined to their lonely television/pc prison. Handhelds made them portable but still only on restricted to the one world contained in the cartridge (stay with me). MMO's have been developed to push gaming horizons even further, with millions of people being able to all play the same game together, but this still leaves them confined to their desks...

Portable MMO's... leaves a funny taste in your mouth doesn't it. First you think "Hey, great idea! I could play MMO's anywhere!", but then you think "Oh wait... Being able to play an MMO anywhere might actually destroy what's left of my social life..." and I thought the same thing too. I'm not interested in a bog standard kind of MMO or game; what's caught my attention is the new possibilities of portable + wireless information gaming.

Everyone has seen some sort of anime where people travel the world to do battle in some sort of outrageous format (eg. Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, etc.), so with this new age of gaming comes prospects like your actual location factoring into the game. An MMO that could represent a dark-twin of our world (ala Link to the Past) entered from wherever you are. Gamers from Victoria would be playing in Victoria-Noir with other players and get a quest to visit Sydney-Noir requiring the player to actually enter the Noir world from physically within Sydney. A game that relies on reality and blurs the line distinguishing the two... and that's just the beginning.

Every time new technology is created for games somebody comes up with an innovative way to utilise it and then changes the face of gaming forever. So if you happen to be like me and are ignoring handhelds, try to at least keep an eye on them... they could be the key to an entirely new world.

-Tob