2133: Fashionista

0133_001

I remember a while back hearing a lot of people being surprisingly enthusiastic about a Nintendo-published handheld game called Style Savvy, but I never really got around to looking into it. Recently, however, I downloaded the demo of the somewhat cumbersomely named Nintendo Presents New Style Boutique 2: Fashion Forward — the European name of the third Style Savvy (or, in Japanese, Girls Mode) game — and have found myself surprisingly involved with it.

For the unfamiliar, New Style Boutique 2 (as I shall refer to it hereafter) is a game in which you play a young woman on holiday in a hip, fashion-conscious town. Through a series of somewhat improbable circumstances that only happen in slice-of-life video games, you find yourself assisting a local clothes shop, hairdresser and beautician with the requests of the town’s apparently exclusively female population. In doing so, you earn money for the shop and yourself, and can subsequently afford to do yourself up better as well as your customers.

This is as far as the demo goes, but the full game has a story to follow as well as a number of different “professions” to explore, including modelling, fashion design and even interior design. Just the demo is an enjoyable enough experience, though, since it’s essentially a game in which the whole point is to piss around with the character creator in order to create various different looks, and subsequently be rewarded for it.

The exact way in which you go about creating these looks differs slightly depending on which aspect of the character’s appearance you are working on at the time. If you’re putting together an outfit, they’ll give you some vague guidelines — “I want a girly outfit, and I have about £700 to spend” — and you can put together an outfit according to those specifications, either through browsing manually or making use of the helpful search function. If you’re designing a hairstyle, meanwhile, you’re given the opportunity to ask the customer a variety of questions before beginning the styling process, which will give you a checklist of things to include in their haircut. Finally, designing makeup requires you to look at a photograph and attempt to recreate it as closely as possible, perhaps with the assistance of a memo scrawled on the back of the photograph giving you some suggestions of which colours to use in which areas.

What’s nice about the game is that unlike many “business” simulations that attempt to capture the feeling of, say, running a shop or office, New Style Boutique 2 has plenty of personality. Its characters all have names and profiles, and they all display their personalities through dialogue — though there is a bit of stock dialogue for things like them accepting outfits and suchlike. They also have distinctive, unique appearances, and it’s undeniably satisfying to see a character wandering around wearing an outfit you put together for them.

I don’t know how much the other elements of the full game add to the experience as a whole, but based on the demo, I’m actually surprisingly interested in playing it, and I understand now why so many people have had positive things to say about the Style Savvy series as a whole since it first appeared.

1765: Hours of Entertainment

One of the best things about the Japanese games I tend to play in preference to anything else is simultaneously one of the most frustrating things.

I’m referring to the question of game length.

In an age where the public are seemingly ever more likely to rate interactive entertainment in terms of a “money per hours” ratio — look at the drubbing Gone Home got from certain quarters who felt that $20 was too expensive for the 2-3 hours of gameplay it offered — it should be abundantly clear to anyone who plays them that Japanese games, for the most part, consistently offer the absolute best value in terms of bang for your buck on the market.

Take Senran Kagura Burst, for example, which I finally pummelled into submission and 100% completion over the weekend during downtime between activities. This is a game that is essentially a spiritual successor to the arcade brawlers of yore — games like Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Asterix: The Arcade Game and The Simpsons Arcade Game, to name but a few favourites from my own youth.

Unlike those brawlers, however, which typically tended to be no more than four or five levels long — they needed to theoretically be completable on a single coin credit and in a single sitting, after all — it took me in excess of 50 hours to complete all the levels in Senran Kagura Burst, and there’s plenty more I could do after completing all the levels once: try for an A-rank on all of them; try and level up all the characters to 50; try and unlock all the characters’ “balance” modes through using them in different ways; try to complete all the levels in the challenging “Frantic” mode; try to beat all the bosses with special moves; and try to see all the bosses’ special moves without dying. Were I to tackle some of those additional challenges — and I’m not ruling out the possibility, as I enjoyed Senran Kagura Burst one hell of a lot — I’m sure that could easily put a significant number of extra hours on the clock.

Notably, though, a lot of this “extra” stuff is optional. You can romp through the main storyline of Senran Kagura Burst, ignoring all side missions and some of the clever things you can do with the characters, in probably about 10 hours or so, if that. (Most of that time will be reading the game’s lengthy visual novel sections, which are skippable after you’ve completed that mission at least once.) And in doing so, you’ll have had a satisfyingly complete experience from start to finish — particularly as the game’s structure effectively feels like you’re getting two (rather similar) games for the price of one thanks to the story unfolding from two different, parallel perspectives that meet up at various points.

The same is true for many other Japanese games, with RPGs being the clearest example. Your average Japanese RPG these days will take anywhere between 20 and 100 hours to clear first time through, assuming you don’t just plough straight through to the ending, and that you take on a bit of side content and spend a bit of time fine-tuning your characters. After that, though, you have a choice: set it aside, satisfied that you’ve seen the conclusion to the story, or continue playing in the hope of enjoying everything else the game has to offer — often referred to as “post-game”. Many modern RPGs also offer a “New Game Plus” mode, in which you can carry across certain things from your previous playthrough into a new run — the exact things you can carry across vary according to the game, but often include things like character levels, unlocked skills, equipment, secret areas uncovered and all manner of other goodies. This tends to turn you into a satisfyingly unstoppable powerhouse at the outset of your second playthrough as your buffed-up character cuts through enemies like butter, but is often necessary to take on some of the biggest challenges the game has to offer. Some games even withhold their toughest bosses and dungeons until post-game or New Game Plus, providing you with an incentive to continue playing even after the credits have rolled.

Even seemingly “short” Japanese games have a massive amount of longevity, too; take your average “bullet hell” shooter, for example, which typically follows the arcade machine structure of theoretically allowing someone to clear it on a single credit and in a single sitting. The true challenge of these games, however, comes from perfecting your game — achieving that single-credit clear (often known as a 1CC — 1 Credit Clear), beating your last high score, topping the worldwide leaderboards. The latter aspect in particular can become enormously competitive, and in the case of many shmups, requires you to fathom out an initially Byzantine-seeming scoring system in order to take maximum advantage of it.

And this isn’t even getting into the truly, directly competitive titles such as fighting games, which have potentially limitless replayability if you’re actually any good at them. (I am not, so I tend to play through the story mode, if there is one, and then be done, perhaps with an occasional two-player local match with friends if they’re up for it.) Or driving games with ongoing online competition. Or all manner of other joyful experiences.

I’m not saying Western games don’t offer any of this longevity — anyone who’s super-into Call of Duty’s multiplayer mode is doubtless raising their hand and going “Um…” right now — but for my money, and particularly in the single-player space, Japanese games can’t be beaten for value in terms of how much entertainment you’ll get for your £40.

1757: Crimson Girls

After a while off, I’ve been revisiting Senran Kagura Burst on the 3DS. I played through the Hanzou storyline to refresh my memory, and I’m currently just starting the third chapter of the Hebijou side. And I’m reminded of just how excellent this game genuinely is.

The Hanzou side of the story, which focused on the life and times of a group of female classmates in the Hanzou academy for “good” ninjas, was a lot of enjoyable fun, helping to make the already visually distinctive characters into interesting individuals that the player would want to find out more about. There’s the leader of the group Asuka, who gradually grows in confidence and assertiveness as the story progresses; class rep Ikaruga, who is initially portrayed as the more “motherly”, sensible figure of the group, but gradually steps aside as Asuka grows in strength; Katsuragi, who is very much the “older sister” of the group — and a character unabashedly comfortable with both her own body and her seemingly somewhat fluid sexuality; Hibari, who is immature and filled with self-doubt until she goes on a significant personal journey — an important part of the overall plot; and Yagyuu, whose quiet, understated love for Hibari is extremely touching to see.

Over the course of the Hanzou story, the girls encounter the girls of the Hebijou “evil” school for ninjas on several occasions, culminating in a final conflict against them at the conclusion of the story. Initially set up to be complete antagonists for one another, the final chapters of the Hanzou storyline take steps to humanise the Hebijou, showing both the player and the Hanzou girls that despite being on “opposite” sides, it’s possible to find common ground and be friends.

This theme is explored in greater detail in Hebijou’s own story. A key concept when considering Hebijou is the idea that the concept of “good” is selective and has stringent criteria to be accepted, while the darkness of “evil” will accept anyone. Consequently, a significant part of the Hebijou story that I’ve played so far centres around a disparate group of girls from wildly different backgrounds — most of whom have some sort of difficulty or tragedy in their past that they’re trying to escape — coming together and finding this common ground; this reason to work together, even though they’re “evil”.

In fact, throughout the Hebijou storyline, it’s easy to forget that these girls are supposed to be “evil” at all, and that’s entirely the point the game as a whole is making: regardless of what “side” you’re on, it’s important to surround yourself with people that you trust and love. People that are true friends; people that can help you through your problems; people that, in some cases, know you better than you know yourself.

Hebijou’s cast are an interesting bunch — perhaps even more so than the Hanzou girls. Leader-type Homura — a rough analogue to Hanzou’s Asuka — is a girl of relatively few words who is good at being serious but tends to try way too hard when attempting to be “fun”. Hikage, meanwhile, is a mysterious young woman who claims to have no emotions — so, as you might expect, cue plenty of scenes with the other girls trying to make her feel things. Mirai, on the other hand, is a young, painfully insecure girl who believes herself to be inferior both physically and in terms of ability to her peers. Next is Yomi, who uses the mannerisms of a privileged rich girl, but actually grew up in poverty, tends to have little to no money even now and who refuses all but the most very basic of charity. And finally Haruka, who is one of the most overtly sexual characters I think I’ve come across in any game in recent memory, aptly demonstrates that being “sexy” doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sacrifice the elements of your personality that make you into a normal human being. You can embrace your sexuality and your own particular tastes without letting them define you, in other words.

I’ve been really enjoying the Hebijou story so far and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. Rather than simply presenting the events of the Hanzou side from an alternative perspective, it’s an enjoyably distinct story in its own right, and, like its Hanzou counterpart, gives us an enormous amount of insight into some of the most well-defined characters I’ve come across in recent memory. I’m glad there’s plenty more adventures of the Senran Kagura girls to come in future — in the immediate future, there’s Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus for Vita, Senran Kagura 2 for 3DS and rhythm game spinoff Senran Kagura Bon Appetit. And you can bet your life and hometown I’ll be playing them all.

1526: Skirting Shadows

I “finished” Senran Kagura Burst last night. Well, more accurately, I finished Senran Kagura: Skirting Shadows, also known as the Hanzou Academy side of the game’s two-part story. On that side of things, there’s still a bunch of bonus levels to complete, plus attempting to A-Rank everything and complete everything in Frantic mode, and then there’s the same for the Hebijo girls, too, so optimistically I should be looking at at least 40 hours of gameplay in total. Not bad at all.

I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played so far, and I’m a particular fan of how well the package as a whole caters to different play styles. If you have a few minutes, you can pick up and play a level or two without worrying about plot; each level takes no more than a minute or two to play, and is a lot of fun, particularly with how different all the characters play from one another. If you have a longer period of time available, however, you can play through the story levels you haven’t touched (with accompanying, lengthy visual novel sequences), or concentrate on trying to perfect a particular level for an A Rank, or levelling up a favourite character until you have her best moves.

I was impressed with the story, which was enjoyably mundane throughout despite being about two clans of warring ninjas. The most interesting moments were the ones where the characters were just hanging out eating sushi or chatting among themselves; the most meaningful moments as the “good” shinobi of the Hanzou Academy come to realise that their “evil” counterparts from Hebijo perhaps aren’t as different from them as they all once thought.

Perhaps most notable, though, and I’m aware I’ve touched on this before, is the fact that throughout the story, the characters are treated with the utmost respect by the scenario writers. The game may be notorious for its gelatinous breasts and panty shots and it may be true that beating the story allows you to blow into the 3DS microphone in an attempt to peek up the girls’ skirts, but as characters, Asuka, Katsuragi, Ikaruga, Yagyuu and Hibari are well-defined individuals, each in possession of a decent character arc (particularly so in the case of Hibari) and each designed to “feel” very much like a real person. There’s a few recognisable tropes in there — Ikaruga’s class president and Katsuragi’s perverted older sister nature spring immediately to mind — but the game is set up in such a way that they all feel like much more than just eye candy or pure fanservice. I have no doubt that the Hebijo story path will be much the same when I come to it.

I’m looking forward to the possibility of the other games in the series making it to Western territories, and very much hope that they do. There’s a strong cast of loveable characters here, and it would be great to see them explored further. Whether or not that happens will presumably depend on sales of the first, but the fact that Xseed localised it in the first place (and Marvelous AQL Europe brought it to Europe in physical format) gives me a considerable degree of hope. As “niche interest” as games like Senran Kagura Burst are, they fulfil an important role in the industry and give people like me that pleasant feeling of “yes, this is a game for me” rather than the dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator nature of a lot of mainstream titles.

Now I’m feeling a bit shitty (yes, still) so I’m off to bed to snuggle up with the ample bosoms of Hanzou Academy, and there isn’t a thing you can do to stop me!

1427: RPG With a Stupid Name

Nearly forgot to write something today. But here I am at 2 in the morning having just finished a lengthy session of Bravely Default in bed.

(Yes, as promised, I finished Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory earlier, and it was awesome. But I’ll save further discussion of that for another day.)

Bravely Default, meanwhile, has been a very pleasant surprise so far — though at least part of this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, I knew very little about this game going into it.

Bravely Default, then, is a new Final Fantasy game. I don’t just mean that in the “it’s a bit like Final Fantasy” sense, I mean that it is Final Fantasy — right down to the item names, abilities and Job system. Quite why it doesn’t carry the Final Fantasy name is anyone’s guess — perhaps Square Enix wants to continue to take the Final Fantasy brand in a different direction, while Bravely Default will pick up where the more old-school installments in the series left off? I can’t say I’d object to that situation all that much; I like the new Final Fantasies for sure, but playing Bravely Default has reminded me somewhat that the older entries had their charms, too.

It’s closest in execution to Final Fantasy V, in that you have a four-character party, each of whom has a character level and a Job level for each of the available Jobs in the game. Both level up independently; levelling up your character improves your base stats, while levelling up your Job gives you access to better abilities and passive skills. You can also make use of the abilities or passive skills from Jobs you’re not currently equipped with, but there are limitations and the stat changes that come with a Job change may make some abilities impractical — while it’s cool to have a heavily-armoured knight that can fling black magic spells around, for example, he’ll never be as good at magic damage as a dedicated black mage.

There’s some interesting modern systems at play amid the traditional RPG mechanics, too. The game’s use of the 3DS StreetPass system allows you to summon other players’ characters and make use of them, and to “link” with your 3DS friends to borrow their abilities — particularly useful if they’ve levelled up a Job you haven’t and unlocked access to a useful special ability.

Less thrilling is the “Bravely Second” system, whereby you can tap the Start button in mid-battle to interrupt whatever’s going on and sneak in an extra turn, with actions in this bonus turn costing “SP” rather than the usual “BP” to perform. You can only “carry” up to three SP at once, and they’re acquired at the rate of one every eight hours you have the 3DS asleep and running Bravely Default — or, alternatively, you can pay for them. Ugh. Fortunately, so far I haven’t seen any need to make use of this system; it mostly seems to be a “panic button” system whereby you can get yourself out of a sticky situation should the worst happen. If you play well, you shouldn’t need to use it at all, I hope.

There’s also a strange real-time building minigame where you reconstruct a village, and the more players you StreetPassed with, the more workers you have to devote to projects and, consequently, the quicker they can complete their work. Working on the village unlocks shops, special abilities and new items; it’s a neat use of real-time mechanics without it feeling like a means of extracting money from you, because there’s mercifully no monetisation option to speed things along. What it does mean is that you can make some sort of “progress” on the game even if you don’t have a lot of time to play; simply flip open your 3DS, start your workers on a project, then put it to sleep and come back later — when you do have time to play the game proper, you’ll have some handy extras.

Mostly, though, the emphasis is on a beautifully presented old-school role-playing game with some excellent mechanics, some stunning music and a pretty cool augmented reality opening cutscene. I’m looking forward to playing more, and I anticipate it stealing a significant proportion of my time from hereon.

Lucky I finished Neptunia Victory, then, huh?

1368: Confessions of a Failed Mayor

I played it for a good few weeks on its original release in the name of understanding what the hell everyone was so excited about, but I have to admit defeat and confess that I didn’t really like Animal Crossing all that much.

I’m not saying it’s bad, per se, more that I just don’t really understand the appeal of it. For sure, it does what social gaming companies like to call “invest and express” gameplay far better than any of the shite churned out by Zynga ever will — and without continually begging the player for money, more to the point — but the trouble is that what Animal Crossing offered just wasn’t enough to hold my attention.

There’s lots to do in Animal Crossing, for sure, and the game drip-feeds you new things happening in your town every few real-time days to keep you coming back. MMO-style special events allow you to compete against your friends at catching bugs or whatever, and the game world expands a little over time — though not by much.

Trouble is, most of the stuff to do in Animal Crossing wasn’t very interesting or enjoyable to me. By my last few days playing, I had settled into a tedious routine of picking fruit, going to the island, catching as many bugs as I could put in the box, selling them all, then paying off part of my loan. I’d then close the game because I’d found the experience so mind-numbing that I didn’t really want to play any more. It was feeling more like a job than a game; I was feeling obliged to earn money just to give to Tom Nook, and it just wasn’t enjoyable. By the time I’d done my daily “chores” I just wanted to turn the game off and do something else — usually go to sleep, since I inevitably put off said chores until last thing in the evening.

This is, of course, arguably the whole point of Animal Crossing. It’s a reflection on modern life and the joyless things we do to get ourselves through the day with enough money to put food on the table. Of course, in Animal Crossing you can’t actually starve to death or be turfed out of your house for being unable to keep up repayments on your mortgage, but the feeling of guilt is there — that feeling that you should be doing something more, that feeling that you should be pursuing your ambitions but instead you’re trapped in a rut barely scraping by unless you make some sacrifices in the name of being more profitable. (In Animal Crossing’s case, the sacrifices I was having to make included “playing games that I found more fun,” which was ultimately not something I was willing to give up.)

Multiplayer, too, was confusing. While it was neat to be able to invite friends over, ultimately all I found myself doing when I visited a friend’s town was admire how their trees and houses were in slightly different places to my own trees and houses, and nod knowingly if they had discovered how to make “paths” using designs printed on the floor. I never knew what I was supposed to do when I was in someone else’s town; there was no structure to it, and no real incentive to actually play together beyond pinching each other’s fruit and planting it, or occasionally doing that hilarious thing you can do with Pitfall Seeds. The only multiplayer stuff I found enjoyable were the structured “tours” on the island, and even those weren’t all that interesting or competitive to me.

I certainly don’t begrudge people their enjoyment of Animal Crossing. I just… don’t get it. And I’m cool with that; time to move on.

Pokémon, on the other hand, that I’m starting to come around to. But that’s a story for another day.

1203: Back to the Mansion Again

I played a bit more Luigi’s Mansion 2 earlier. Haven’t played it a lot yet, but I’m really liking it for a number of different reasons.

Firstly, the single-player mode has a very strong “adventure game” feel about it. Specifically, it features frequent occurrences of getting “stuck” — something which is not altogether common in modern games that hold your hand quite a lot. Luigi’s Mansion, though, despite appearing quite tutorial-heavy in the first couple of levels, very quickly turns into a game where you’re expected to work things out for yourself, to remember things from earlier and to explore thoroughly rather than just following the handy glowing trail of breadcrumbs on the map.

Secondly, the multiplayer mode is awesome. It hadn’t occurred to me that multiplayer in Luigi’s Mansion 2 might actually be good, but by golly, it really, really is. I’ve only tried the “Hunters” mode in Download Play so far — this apparently means it’s a “limited” form of the full multiplayer experience — but it was a blast by itself.

Essentially, the multiplayer mode is a cooperative ghost hunt for up to four players at once. Before starting the game, the players choose how many floors of a mansion they want to tackle and must then clear each of them against a strict time limit. Each level is randomly generated, requiring methodical exploration to locate where all the ghosts are and then to take them down. Communication between players is also helpful, but for those who don’t want to actually talk to each other — or those who are unable to due to playing online, for example — there’s a handy little “quick chat” thingy on the D-pad, allowing you to make Luigi say various things, but more importantly, display a callout on the map indicating that the other players’ attention is required in a specific location.

It’s a really interesting mode because it’s simple but extremely flexible. If you want a short game, you can play just 5 floors. If you want a longer game, you can play up to 25 floors, and successfully clearing this opens up an “Endless” mode, which sounds like a lot of fun. Within the individual play session, players earn points towards upgrades that are valid just for their single play session, making a single multiplayer game feel like a microcosm of the main game’s upgrade and reward structure. It’s really, really neat and I can actually see myself playing it quite a bit.

The Download Play functionality also reminds me of one of the great unsung features of Nintendo’s handhelds. It is absolutely awesome to be able to wirelessly beam a limited version of a game over to your friends and play them without them having to own the game. Wireless multiplayer on its own is great — remember the awkwardness of hooking up link cables? — but when your friends don’t have to have their own copy of the game? Brilliant. The only thing about this that I hate is the fact that the 3DS’ stupid region locking prevents handhelds from different regions downloading these multiplayer-specific packages. Sometimes. (If it was consistent, I might not be quite so mad about it, but still.)

Anyway. Luigi’s Mansion continues to be an entertaining experience, and I’m looking forward to investigating it further. For now, however, I bid you good night!

1198: ThreeDeeEss

After some hesitation — and despite owning several games for it — I finally got my own 3DS today. We’ve actually had one in the household since Andie’s last birthday — it belongs to her — but with the combination of Fire Emblem: Awakening and the copy of Luigi’s Mansion 2 my brother got me for my birthday (thanks!) I figured it was probably about time I got my own rather than depriving Andie of the opportunity to play Harvest Moon whenever she pleased.

And, as predicted, just a short period of time with the 3DS has reminded me once again that people who claim traditional handhelds are on the way out and that mobile phone/tablet gaming is the future are talking out of their arse. Yes indeed.

The quality of the experiences on the 3DS and Vita is just in a completely different league to that you get on a smartphone. Completely. It also makes the rapidly-widening schism between free-to-play/”freemium” and traditionally-sold “pay once, play forever” games extremely apparent.

Today, for work (last day! Woo!) I reviewed the new Transformers game for iOS and Android. Said game is the latest in the interminable string of “card battle” games that are available for those two platforms, which means it’s a monotonous, tedious, strategy-and-gameplay-free experience that has only the most tenuous link to its source material. It is, in short, designed as little more than a means of getting people addicted enough to the sight of little bars filling up to want to pay money to “collect” virtual cards that don’t actually exist. “This is a super rare card!” they’ll say, failing to point out that it is data rather than a physical object and is thus only as “rare” as they decide it should be at any given point in time. There’s no joy in playing that game; it’s mindless busywork — something to do for the sake of having something to fiddle with rather than something that actually engages your brain and makes you interested in what’s going on.

The phrase “mindless busywork” describes probably 90% of the new mobile and social games that are released every day. Which is why I have no desire whatsoever to play them in my free time.

Compare and contrast the crap that is Transformers Legends to Fire Emblem: Awakening on 3DS, then. Ostensibly, the two games are of the same genre: RPG. And yet the difference in quality is apparent from the moment you fire up the game. And it only gets more painful to even contemplate this difference as you go on.

Fire Emblem is a game designed to entertain you and challenge you. It’s not designed to massage your ego through giving you tasks to do that are completely free of any sort of challenge, and then extract money from you while you’re feeling good. It has the means of extracting money from you through its paid (optional) downloadable content, but the experience in and of itself is complete, and it doesn’t nag you at any point to do something that will cost you money. It doesn’t tell you how long you can play before you have to either stop or pay, it doesn’t tease you with “if you pay $5 you might get this awesome hero” nonsense — note, “might” — and it doesn’t thrust gigantic screen-filling adverts in your fucking face every five minutes like most modern mobile games do. Nothing breaks immersion for me more quickly than happily playing a game then suddenly everything stopping and the device on which I’m playing said game asking me if I want to download another, completely unrelated free game. The answer is, without exception, “no, fuck off.”

And if the adverts don’t break immersion, the “user retention” strategies certainly do. “Play the Daily Spin now!” announces a game that is attempting to be a gritty depiction of medieval life, failing to see how completely inappropriate a slot machine is in this context. “Spin the wheel for prizes!” barks Gollum in the official mobile game of The Hobbit. “Get free coins every day!” bellows whatever shitty puzzle game has ripped off Bejeweled and monetized it out the arse this week.

No. So long as mobile phone gaming is the preserve of sleazy chancers who prey on the weak and stupid, traditional handhelds have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Were you an advocate of mobile and tablet gaming, you may well point to the disparity in price between mobile games and 3DS/Vita games and make some sort of non-specific sneering noise at this point. My response to that is very simply “you get what you pay for.”