Is the handheld console still relevant?

Uncharted and Zelda are great, but are people happy enough with Angry Birds in their pocket?

PS Vita looks great. Sony's new handheld has twin analogue sticks (for COD on the go) and graphical power to match PS3, all for only £280 - which is very cheap considering the technology involved is right on the cutting edge.

PS Vita smashes iPad, iPhone and 3DS in terms of graphical power, and gameplay experience. A full set of buttons is always going to be more useful than just a touchscreen - and Vita's got one of those, too.

But PS Vita could be a huge failure. The handheld market has changed so much in the last five years since the original PSP release, and PS Vita may just represent an outdated business model.

The 3DS, Nintendo's newest handheld, has had a stuttering launch, and while the lack of games must be partly to blame, it's tempting to see the rise of the smartphone as the real culprit.

Do people still want to play on a dedicated handheld? Do the masses want to lug around a hefty handheld console when they already carry a smartphone everywhere they go?

That smartphone, too, already has games. Nothing on the scale of Uncharted, like PS Vita, or Zelda 3D, like 3DS. But thousands of games ranging from free to a few pounds/dollars. Why spend £40 on a new 3DS game when you've got Angry Birds expansion packs at no extra cost?

The smartphone, whether iPhone or Android, is clearly a huge threat to the handheld gaming market - and threatens to destroy the market entirely.

There is one thing that can save PS Vita and 3DS though: Differentiation.

What Sony and Nintendo must do is show people that these consoles offer a rich enough, a different enough experience to warrant the extra expense; the extra pocket weight, the dedicated games machine.

Sony need to show that having a PS Vita means having a PS3 in your pocket. Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Pictured, right) is basically a full-fledged version of the blockbuster franchise, and it looks every inch as beautiful as its bigger brother, but it's portable. The iPhone will never have that - and even if one day smartphone graphics caught up, the iPhone lacks the twin analogue sticks, face buttons and Trophies.

Will it be enough? Not for some. But there will always be a crowd looking for a deeper experience and I think Sony still has a market to aim for; a market who want Smartphone + 'proper' games machine.

Nintendo has a bigger task on its hands. Aiming mostly at casual gamers, Nintendo has a tough time persuading the people who bought a DS with Brain Training, or Professor Layton, or Sudoku, that the 3DS is what they need next.

The 3D is the key differentiation for Nintendo, but even that will not last - Glassesless 3D capable smartphones are coming, and they're going to be here by Christmas.

The only thing Nintendo have left are their big franchises: Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, etc. These games will never appear on an iPhone, and the company now more than ever needs to rely on these games' appeal to push the 3DS into peoples' hands.

But it all seems a little desperate. In reality, both companies' business models are beginning to look a little dated.

Differentiation may save them for now - but one day, iPhones or other Smartphones will figure out a way to close down these differences, too - and both game makers will have to try to stay one step ahead or risk falling behind.

Looking at the 3DS sales, I fear it may have already happened.

Hackers? Do us a favour

Is it right to punish hackers for exposing security flaws which put our personal details at risk?
 
Today a British teenager was arrested over the recent spate of hacking which has seen the likes of the NHS, the CIA and a range of companies like Sony and Nintendo's websites hacked open.

The arrest, co-ordinated by Essex Police and the FBI, saw a 19-year-old who is the supposed ringleader of notorious internet hacking group LulzSec taken into custody.

Yes, he broke the law. But is it fair to punish someone for exposing the security flaws which could have put us all at risk?

Hacking, you see, has become all the rage. Everybody who's anybody (read: a bedroom shut-in nobody) has been hacking into bigwigs' websites for a laugh, leaving messages inside their 'secure' servers and boasting on Twitter about how they could get access to all these companies' personal details. Aka, your personal details.

These are not simple little Norton firewalls. These are, in some cases, multi-million pound security software systems which have been compromised by groups of internet anarchists seemingly intent on watching the world burn, one web hack at a time.

LulzSec's now-notorious logo

But have hackers, like the infamous 'LulzSec' and 'Anonymous' groups, become demonised unfairly? After all, these sites are supposed to be secure websites housing, in some cases, very sensitive data and have been hacked open as if it were as easy as shouting 'open sesame' at the NHS database.

Yes, some of the hacking has been silliness. The news site PBS posted a story stating that legendary, deceased rapper Tupac Shakur was actually alive and living in New Zealand. This was obviously useless, borderline dangerous joking by hackers at the expense of PBS.

But a lot of the hacks have actually served a beneficial purpose - they have exposed serious, some might say criminal, flaws in the supposedly secure systems of these websites.

Hacking group LulzSec allegedly left this message inside the NHS database which holds the names, addresses and other personal details of millions of people:

"While you aren't considered an enemy - your work is of course brilliant - we did stumble upon several of your admin passwords".

"We mean you no harm and only want to help you fix your tech issues".

If these apparently harmless hackers can hack in so easily, though, what's to stop a more malicious group from gaining access to the details of anyone on that NHS database?

Similarly, the group has highlighted serious flaws in the security of the government's 2011 census database; which surely holds enough information about each and every one of us to put all of us at risk of identity theft.

Whilst I would never condone what these hackers have done - after all, Anonymous put the PlayStation Network down for a month, at the estimated cost of some $100million to Sony - which could have repercussions for their employees.

And whatever their stated intentions, we should always be wary of any group which is openly admitting to accessing databases of personal information. It only takes one rogue, less noble member of LulzSec to sell on these personal details to someone unscrupulous to put everyone at risk.

But these hackers have shown us just how fragile these 'secure' databases really are. Sony held PS3 users' credit card details in its records, yet secured them so poorly that some bedroom-dwelling teen might have made off with the lot. Government bodies like the NHS, too, must be secure enough to stop any intrusion.

If they are going to force us to hand over our personal information, the least they could do is look after it properly.

Hacking is obviously illegal, and the arrest made today shows how seriously the authorities are taking it. But some blame must lay at the companies' cyber-doors.

If this spate of web attacks results in more secure databases for all our personal info, they may just have done us all a favour.

I'm not trying to argue that this teenage hacker is some modern day martyr. But this is one area in which the law clashes with ethics - we must all question whether it is really right to punish him when his actions may have helped get us all better protected.

Why Ocarina is 3DS' Time to Shine

3DS has had a rough launch. For almost 4 months, its 15 mostly mediocre games sat lonely on store shelves while DS Lite and even PSP outsold the 3DS. As launch periods go, it was barren to say the least.

Today, though, the Legend of Zelda returns. Widely heralded as the best game of all time, the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D is looking to do for 3DS what the title did for Nintendo 64 all those years ago (1998, for the record). Does it succeed, or is it time to move on?

Not only is Link's greatest adventure still as magical as it is epic, it's actually matured with age thanks to the abilities of the 3DS system - and not just the graphical ones.

It's not really about the graphics - even though they are luscious in eye-popping 3D and more bright and beautiful than they ever were on N64 (and you really will worry about your eyes popping when arrows soar straight at your face). No, what's most startling about OOT 3D is just how well it shows off what 3DS can really do.

There's nothing worse for ruining a game than getting stuck. With any other game on any other console, the solution would be to slam the console or controller down and scurry off to the laptop to look up the solution. Not any more.

Thanks to the recent 3DS online update, you can suspend Ocarina of Time 3D with a quick press of the Home button, then launch the Web Browser. In seconds, you can go from traversing the wild plains of Hyrule to trawling the depths Gamefaqs.com for the answer to the next puzzle. Once you've found the solution, another couple of clicks and it's as if the game was never paused. Just like every good idea, it suddenly amazes you that no-one's thought of it before.

Sure, you might have a laptop or a smartphone you could have used. But then you'd probably get distracted and check your facebook or get sucked into Twitter, never to return. The beauty of the 3DS, as Zelda so brilliantly outlines, is how it integrates everything you need for gaming - and gaming alone.

Sure, Sony's PSP, or upcoming PS Vita, both offer millions of multimedia bells and whistles; music, movies, apps, you name it. But 3DS is a Nintendo machine. A games machine. It exists only to make gaming as perfect as possible. The mid-game Web Browser is just one small (inspired) step towards that goal.

See those icons? You can suspend your game and hit those

Not content with running to the internet for the solution? Well, you can use the Game Notes feature instead. This works the same way - suspend the game and hit the icon in the menu - and allows you to draw Pictochat style notes about the game and save them for later. The real beauty of this, though, is that it keeps a photo of your current game on the top screen. Handy if you need to write down a number, name, a clue or a certain order. It's ingenious.

Yes, these features work with other games, too, but with Zelda, the various bright ideas packed into the 3DS just seem to click into place. It's like the 3DS grew up in the space of one title release. Gone is the DS with a prettier screen - in its place is a smart, innovative and much more sophisticated system geared towards delivering a first-rate, painless gaming experience.

In short, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is just the game to experience how Nintendo's handhelds have matured.

For Nintendo, it may have been 13 years, but it seems Link's still working his magic.