With games companies now targeting a much wider audience of non-typical gamers, hopefully developers will cater even further towards those who don’t have hours on end to invest in a game. Here are my thoughts and hopes on where handheld gaming heads in the future.

Make Saving More Friendly

If I can save a game at any point, I can play when I have 10 minutes free. If I’m going to have to trek for half an hour to get to a save point I have to find time to sit down and play. If not allowing a player to save is part of the challenge of the game I understand that, but surely a resume function (where you can save as you quit, and the save is deleted when you load it) wouldn’t affect that. The PSP is definitely on the right tracks with it’s ability to quit and resume games as you choose, and a lot of games get this right – but when they don’t it can get really frustrating.

All Cutscenes Should Be Skippable

Whilst I understand that a lot of work goes into creating long and beautiful cutscenes, that doesn’t mean they should be forced upon players. In general I like to watch through, but when I go back and play a game again, or am short of time I don’t want to have to sit through it. On a games console I take a break and go grab some food (or pick up my DS…), but leaving a little handheld game sitting playing to itself just seems silly.

Worse still of course are cutscenes where I have to sit and manually advance through every piece of dialog. Especially when the it is shown again whenever you die and have to attempt a mission again. I’m looking at you, Lost Magic.

Less Focus On Graphics

This is probably one of the reasons why I love handheld gaming so much. The limited hardware of handheld consoles means creating fantastic looking 3d games isn’t possible – there can be more focus on gameplay itself. That doesn’t mean games can’t look great, of course, but as Kiera at Write The Game wrote recently, realistic graphics are getting in the way of games having their own unique style.

More Openness

Hopefully open platforms such as the GP2X and upcoming Pandora consoles will continue to grow, and there will be further support for homebrew and open source games development. At worst this leaves us with a pile of poor, unfinished attempts, but from seeing how development for the GP2X is going I would hope it would lead to more innovative and unique games available.

What do you think?

So overall, I don’t want to see nothing but casual games like Brain Training and Nintendogs, I just feel a few minor changes would make all handheld games (and video games in general for that matter) more accessible.
So what changes would you like to see?
Can you see hand held games as an alternative to console and PC gaming?
Share your thoughts below.

Nintendo DS Lite by Atari, Gracinha & Marco (Mine doesn’t look as cute.)