I often post on HN from somewhat of a devils advocate position (and assume others do the same), since that's more interesting than the sort of "+1 I love this!" type posts I see on other forums.
In reality of course I would love this console to succeed and in principle would prefer something like this to a closed console such as the XboX.
Regards the point about controls: The fact remains that the most popular games for android currently are designed around touch screen controls since the overwhelming majority of android devices out there are phones or tablets.
Sure , there are a few Android games that seemed to be designed for gamepads and were somehow shoehorned onto a touchscreen (the series of COD clone games who's name escaped me springs to mind). Sure, some of these could be salvaged into something playable on this console but I would think the difficulty would still need adjustment since people now have a proper gamepad rather than a touchscreen pad. Also I would doubt many of these games are particularly competitive with equivalent games for the XboX etc even with the controls fixed.
Historically having some impressive launch titles has been an important precursor to success for consoles. The combination of the release timescale combined with the lack of concrete information for developers means that it seems unlikely that such titles will appear in time.
In other words, whilst I personally love this idea, I have no idea how I would encourage less geeky friends to get one, saying "you can play the games that you can already play on your mobile phone" doesn't seem like it would cut it.
I often post on HN from somewhat of a devils advocate position (and assume others do the same), since that's more interesting than the sort of "+1 I love this!" type posts I see on other forums.
In reality of course I would love this console to succeed and in principle would prefer something like this to a closed console such as the XboX.
Regards the point about controls: The fact remains that the most popular games for android currently are designed around touch screen controls since the overwhelming majority of android devices out there are phones or tablets.
Sure , there are a few Android games that seemed to be designed for gamepads and were somehow shoehorned onto a touchscreen (the series of COD clone games who's name escaped me springs to mind). Sure, some of these could be salvaged into something playable on this console but I would think the difficulty would still need adjustment since people now have a proper gamepad rather than a touchscreen pad. Also I would doubt many of these games are particularly competitive with equivalent games for the XboX etc even with the controls fixed.
Historically having some impressive launch titles has been an important precursor to success for consoles. The combination of the release timescale combined with the lack of concrete information for developers means that it seems unlikely that such titles will appear in time.
In other words, whilst I personally love this idea, I have no idea how I would encourage less geeky friends to get one, saying "you can play the games that you can already play on your mobile phone" doesn't seem like it would cut it.