Yes I keep saying it, and I'm not alone. The fools at Yoyogames just keep proving their foolery. There recent competition, which they keep vague on the platform it will be for, is without a doubt for PSP. Of all the handhelds its the only one that has that wonky wide screen resolution.

That being said, why just one button? It boggles the mind and further disturbs me that Sandy would hop on the comment of the concerned GM users that was supposed to be part of the 'challenge'. If cutting off one of your hands makes things more challenging maybe its a good idea. Seriously its just another misstep and another mile down the road to destroying GM.

If the whole logo fiasco wasn't enough, and thankfully resolved with a much better designed brought by one of our own at 64d, this just seems to be another point of proof for incompetent planning on Yoyo's part. The name seems ever more fitting as the days go on.

Well that's enough yoyo bashing, lets talk about handhelds.

I mentioned before the lament of big gaming companies dislike for the indie crowd, or more so disrespect. Although developing for PSP and DS is much easier now, the marketing of indie games isn't quite in favor of the creators.

Of course there is two others out there that are sadly not as popular but far more friendly to the indie crowd.

Open Pandora is really cool but has a lot of flaws. One being its horrible design, going the route of a mini laptop that looks awkward in human hands seems kind of dumb. Tack on the 300+ dollar price tag and you just shut out a massive audience of gamers and casual games who -don't- or have no desire to create their own games.

I think this is a big problem if anyone expects indie gaming to pick up in the industry, something I'm sure big game companies are not sympathetic to.

With the DS having tons of games and great hardware to boot, its price its kind of unbeatable. But here comes another possible competitor that is about half the cost of the Pandora and near or similar cost to the DS. The GP2X Wiz. Although its pretty much a clone of the GBA(not the clamshell one), it supports a bunch of emulators(like pandora) but then I think this is actually something against it.

With emulation, you dampen the market for the indie group because, well, a lot of indie games are inspired by classics. There's 1000s out there from the last few decades from once or current gaming companies. With NES/SNES/SEGA/Arcade and so on emulated on both these devices it hurts the indie crowd and the consoles. Emulation is long been a gray area, mostly regarding to roms despite games that are off-market or the owners are long gone.

Despite this, I still got a copy of devkitARM to play around with.

Of course there's always cellphone games, but those also are severely limited and there is simply too much variation between display performance and data size limitations.

We can all hope Nintendo will see the light one day and be a little more generous to the indie crowd, but I don't really foresee Sony or Microsoft ever being so kind.

Alternatively a new portable system can be created, but it would be difficult to rival the costs of the others. Except Pandora, because its cost more than a netbook now.

Few things I found, you can get a full computer single board system for about $65 and LCD for $50-70 to create your own portable game, making use of DamnSmall Linux with its meager 50mb occupancy. This of course does not factor in casing cost, adding buttons and speakers to the device. The single board computer can support basic 2d acceleration and audio, so that part is covered. Maintaining a classic resolution of 320x240 would be best(cheapest) and be less demanding on the overall system.

That's my rant for the new year.