SALES AND
FAILS
Find out what's hot and what's not
with the latest UKIE sales figures.
Here's the UK top ten at time of print.
6
1
LEGO STAR WARS: THE FORCE
AWAKENS
2
UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF'S END
3
MONSTER HUNTER:
GENERATIONS
4
OVERWATCH
5 GRAND THEFT AUTO V
NINTENDO NX TO BE
CONSOLE/HANDHELD
HYBRID
Image: Tom Phillips
ROBIN WILDE
6
DOOM
7
FIFA 16
8
CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 3
9 ROCKET LEAGUE
10
FALLOUT 4
UNCHANGED
NEW ENTRY
UP ON LAST MONTH
DOWN ON LAST MONTH
D
etails
have
emerged
about
Nintendo's long-awaited new console, the
NX.
An investigation by
Eurogamer's Tom Phillips discovered the NX
will be a high-powered
portable device, with
two detachable controllers fixed to the side.
The move would be a
radical departure from
traditional console design, while building on
the
controller-heavy
focus of the Wii and
Wii U.
Other handheld features being added to
the next generation
machine may include
cartridges instead of
discs for game media.
Phillips said: "Naturally, we expect digital
game downloads will
also be available. We
were told Nintendo
considered but then decided against making a
system which support-
ed digital downloads
only."
In 2009, Sony attempted to release a
hardware
upgrade
called the PSP Go,
which ran exclusively digital downloads.
They faced a backlash
from brick and mortar
game stores, many of
which refused to stock
the device, and it is
widely considered a
failure.
One advantage of
cartridges over discs as
a form of media is that
they offer much faster
load times owing to
their solid state memory format. This comes
with the trade-off of
higher costs per gigabyte, and the Eurogamer report suggested
a standard size could
be 32GB - a little bigger than a single-layer
Blu-Ray disc.
The detachable controllers would suggest
the system is capable
of connecting to a TV
for traditional console
play, so we might expect to see at very least
an HDMI port included.
Due to the radical
hardware changes envisaged, it seems unlikely that backwards
compatibility will be a
feature. The Wii and
Wii U were, after all,
unusual in being able
to play games from
previous generations.
Where Nintendo has
long had the advantage over its rivals has
been on console price,
and a system built on
a mobile chipset (the
Nvidia Tegra has been
reported) would certainly cost less than a
traditional console.
Android-based gaming tablets are available from around the
£100 mark, though the
NX is likely to make use
of high-end hardware
and a custom operating system, adding to
the user cost.