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Roy and GM

GM, San Francisco
likes: fighting games, 2D, big breasted video game characters, podcasts, coffee, Star Trek, getting into fist fights
dislikes: Sony, HALO, organic food, iPods, EB Games, macs

Roy, Los Angeles
likes: meat, polyester twill pants, cuddling, Pride FC, sweaters, PDAs, Tekken
dislikes: Itagaki's face, RPG players, HALO/HALO players, The Beatles, "brahs", winter, Xbox controllers, crooked titties, Star Wars fans

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017 :: Placing the Gizmondo

filed:10/24/2005 by GM


Tiger Telematics' Gizmondo went on sale in the United States this past Saturday. Chances of people actually buying it? Haha!

Companies see how "successful" the PSP has been since its launch and think, "hey, I can do that." But due to the fact they don't have enough game makers behind them, they end up making predominately portable media devices instead.. Devices that play video, music, and take pictures. It seems that portables that do all these things are flooding the market.

And it doesn't matter how old you are. They have these sorts of things for children and adults.

So what makes the Gizmondo so great? It has a dumb name first off. It happens to play games but the screen is smaller than the PSP. Gizmondo hopes to fix this when they release a newer version with a wider screen. Currently there are only fourteen titles out for it now, ranging in price from 20$ to 40$. The graphics for most of the games don't look too great. Looking at screen shots I'm reminded of the Game Gear, honestly. I hate nothing more than coarsely textured models.

Gizmondo plays music (mp3s & WMA). It plays videos and movies. It has Bluetooth, instant messaging, and GPS. They don't mention the quality of the camera that Gizmondo has, so I'm assuming it's webcam-quality.

The tricky thing about Gizmondo is its Smart Adds, intensely targeted advertisements on your portable. Why would anyone want this, besides for promotions/"free" stuff? Who wants to look at three ads a day on their portable? The company says the ads are unobtrusive and only show when you're not playing a video or a game. Just the idea that these people know my personal information in addition to the information of where the hell I am all the time (via Gizmondo's GPS) freaks me out. I'm just curious as to wither or not you can choose to NOT be "subscribed" to Smart Adds. I haven't found anything on the net about being given the choice.

Even though I don't believe in Sony that much anymore, I would rather purchse a PSP instead. At least I can watch my porn on a nice big screen and play Splatterhouse on my emulator. I don't need advertisers chilling out in my pocket all the time, knowing my location, offering me food stuffs from 7-11. And quite frankly, I wouldn't want to buy something that could do everything. I have a cellphone, Hi-MD player, and a laptop for a reason goddamnit.

The question still remains, is anyone going to buy a Gizmondo? Probably not. That's just me though. While the GPS feature is charming and at the same time, liable to make people (me) paranoid, I'd rather just buy TomTom GPS for my PDA. You can have John Cleese tell you where to go too. Sweet.

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