It's been a rather telling week in the battle between the DS and PSP. While Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO of Sony Corp has been at CES</>, talking up PSP's compatibility with the new Location Free TV technology, and boasting about the re-launch of the company's Connect service, DS has been dominating the game charts in Japan, occupying eight places in the top ten.
It's clear both companies are expanding their remit, courting the massmarket - y'know the modern obessions - but they're going about it in very different ways. Sony is being Microsoft, picturing a future of connected entertainment streams, of digital hubs and downloadable content. Nintendo is producing games like DS Training For Adults: Work Your Brain, Brain Training 2 and Gentle Brain Exercises - simple IQ games that are selling in their hundreds of thousands.
Here, in convenient minature form, we have a preview of the coming battle, perhaps the deciding battle for the industry. It will be a battle of emphasis between creating games that people want to play and creating sexy technologies that people want to own. Between developing interesting content and delivering content in an interesting way. In the end, I don't think it'll be much of a scrap - the digital hub vision will win out because a lot of big companies want it to win out - they'll seduce us into thinking that living room servers are cool, and that mobile extensions of those servers are even cooler. And it is an enticing vision - our whole lives turned into iTunes.
But for now, DS with its funny little puzzle games, has caught the imagination of the world's most techno-jaded culture. Content is holding out. It feels like the Rorke's Drift of videogaming.
