digiBLAST - Videogame History #48 - Retro Review
The world of portable consoles has always been quite striking since the launch of the great Game Boy, many companies wished to become the great competition of this video game console, the years passed and this was evolving, becoming in 2004 the Nintendo DS, 1 year then the Sony company would launch its portable PlayStation, giving a fairly close battle to the Nintendo handheld console, however, in the European continent in 2005 would be released a small multimedia device which could play video games on it, trying to enter to the great commerce of videogames, the digiBLAST.
A portable console that went largely unnoticed by many video players, produced by the company Nikko jointly with the toy company Giochi Preziosi, was aimed at a young-child audience offering different multimedia functions, to play the games you had to introduce a cartridge that It had the form very similar to the Game Boy Advance.
The operating system that controlled all the operation was based on Linux, among the multimedia tasks it had the possibility to watch videos through the Real Player, play music through MP3 format, take photos through a special camera (similar to the of the Game Boy), and to be able to connect it to the TV to be able to visualize all the content of the portable console on a large scale, as it will be possible to observe a quite complete device as far as functionality is concerned.
The digiBLAST contained a 16-bit graphics processor, as well as a 2.7-inch LCD screen, unfortunately it was of very poor quality, the gaming experience in it was a bit lousy because the vast majority of games were blurred by doing some movement of displacement of sprites, this was for the price they decided to take it to the market, to be able to acquire it at that time due to spend 90 dollars, being the most economical portable console in 2005, for this reason its components were of poor quality.
One of the great disadvantages that the user had in order to get the maximum potential out of this video game console, was that all its accessories were based on cartridges, if you wanted to watch an episode of a favorite series (for example, episodes of SpongeBob were obtained in this way ) you had to buy it in that format, to take a photograph you must necessarily buy the photographic kit separately, to play mp3 you should buy a 256 MB memory in cartridge format that allowed you to connect to the computer, this seemed a lot absurd to many users because in those times there were multimedia devices that offered all these functions without the need to buy additional items.
In addition, the level of processing was very slow, browsing between its main menu was a bit tedious, playing a video or changing from one task to another, something also important to highlight are its games, it had a very short catalog and many Developers seeing the low sales that they had in the market and their poor processing compared to their competition totally lost the interest of developing content for digiBLAST.
How they wanted to compete against the Nintendo DS and the PSP with this device? It is a big question because in those years the technology was at a good point, could have designed with a little more time and resources a portable range console a little higher, certainly wanted to compete through the price, but if you add all the accessories that you had to buy in a somewhat expensive format you preferred to save that money and buy one from the competition.
Undoubtedly the developers of the digiBLAST had an excellent initiative in creating a multitasking and multimedia device, but could not compete with those two companies that had the market fully dominated, maybe their had left a little earlier in a previous generation their history would have changed, I only spent two years in the market and never left the European continent, so it was one of the most obvious failures that happened in the great history of video games.
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Competing two years against the giants? while it might be a failure, I think it even lasting two years is something big!! How many portable devices that don't last few months? (Read: many Chinese ones)