A-Grade gamers

Nintendo is turning out to be quite the darling of the gaming industry, and to think that only a few years back the majority of the media wee signalling that the end was neigh with poor sales of the GameCube.

But, just like the ugly and unpopular kid at school that turns into the most successful, good looking person from your class – there’s a bit of “In your face!” about what Nintendo has achieved. Granted, they started off battling the likes of SEGA for the gaming crown way back when, but up against the PS1, PS2 and the original Xbox, the brand struggled a bit and lost a fair bit of ground.

But, just as Gloria Gaynor once sang, “and now I’m back”, and they are, in a huge, huge way. The point of this post is not to muse upon the achievements of Nintendo the brand, but to talk about an interesting bit of news about the company’s handheld, the DS. Just as the Wii is making huge inroads away from traditional gaming audiences, so is the DS.

Over the past few weeks I have been reading more and more reports about the DS being used in education. There have been a couple of cases here in Australia where whole classes have been given DS handhelds to help them “warm-up” their brains ahead of the day’s lessons and it’s had some startling results with grades improving across the class. In another report a Junior high school teacher in Japan has used the DS in weekly lessons to teach English.

MyTake – I must have said this a hundred times – gaming is good. The more fun you have, the more you learn and remember. There are also scientific benefits associated with gaming, such as increased hand-eye coordination, faster reactions and so on. Technology is becoming a bigger part of out day-to-day lives and the more we embrace it the better we will become, the more we ignore it the more we are missing out. Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s boring

Game on for Apple?

It looks like Apple could be about to step into the highly competitive video games console market after the company filed a trademark extension with the US Patent and Trademark Office. It could all be speculation and some experts have dismissed it as being related to the current iPod games on offer, but the extension included: "handheld units for playing electronic games", "handheld units for playing videogames", "stand-alone video game machines", "LCD game machines" and "electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only".

Having worked in the games industry as a consultant, I know first hand how brutal it can be – so, can Apple crack it? Well, some might remember that they’ve been there before with the ill-fated PipPin consoles that struggled against strong competition from Sony, Nintendo and SEGA before being consigned to history as an ugly footnote on the company’s otherwise brilliant record in the product space.

MyTake – tough one this, on one hand Apple has an awesome record in the product space, rewriting the rules and even creating new markets. On the other hand the gaming market is a hard place to succeed. But, if they do enter the gaming market the other boys had better watch-out, gaming is about fun, listening to the consumer and giving them want they want – and that epitomises what Apple is all about.