FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Handheld Game Machines
Handheld game machines are a hugely popular and very inexpensive form of entertainment, used in the West mainly by children. (In Japan, significant numbers of adults use them too.) Handhelds support few add-on features; the input and output devices are usually fixed. These machines have a smaller number of buttons than a console controller does and only a small LCD screen. Their CPUs are slower than their console counterparts but still have enough CPU speed to run sophisticated games. The Sony PSP represented a huge jump in the power and display quality of handheld game machines.
The cheapest handheld machines offer a fixed set of built-in games, but the more versatile handhelds accept games stored on ROM cartridges, and the PSP now supports a small optical disk. Cartridges store much less data than the CD-ROMs or DVD discs that home consoles and computers use. Designing for a cartridge machine places severe limits on the amount of video, audio, graphics, and animation you can include in the game. Because they're solid-state electronics, though, the data on a cartridge is available instantly. There's no delay in loading data, as there is with optical media devices.
The handheld game market is potentially lucrative, but creating a game for one tests your skills as a designer. With less storage space, you have to rely on gameplay rather than content to provide the entertainment. And as with home console machines, to develop for handheld game machines you must have a license from the manufacturer. (The Pocket PC and other personal digital assistants belong to a different category because they are not, strictly speaking, game machines. The later section "Other Devices" deals with them.)
