$=Online Multiplayer

Okay, so here is my rant for the morning. I was reading on another blog toady about the new Bomberman Land game that is coming out for the Wii and the PSP. Reading through the info about some of what each platform will offer, I see that Konami has, to their detriment, left online multiplayer out of the PSP offering.

This is from a tried and true gamer to the company that makes the games I love:

"YOU WILL MAKE OODLES OF MONEY IF YOU MAKE BOMBERMAN LAND ONLINE MULTIPLAYER ON PSP!!!"


When I heard that XLBA had bomberman online multiplayer the first thing I thought was "that would be sick on a portable!!" I have been looking at the gaming industry over the past few years and one thing that I see personally as a fairly untapped area of gaming is the arcade feel. Now XLBA hit it out of the park on their offering. THEY GET IT!!! People want that random competition between each other. It's that sense of community that is built in an arcade that people love. I think that SF2T and Bomberman on XLBA proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt. And LAN parties are a common occurrence these days. What better way to LAN than on a portable. You don't have to lug your huge box around.

SONY YOU NEED AN ONLINE ARCADE NOW!!!! You have a huge market that you could be making a killing off of with the PSP and online play.

I hate to say this, but Microsoft executed this to a T. They understood that the online arcade had never been done before. That it was all experimental at best. So they figured "something is better than nothing", and that they could always improve on it as time went on. But they just needed to get it up and running. That people are more forgiving of cutting edge tech, because they are able to do something that wasn't possible before. Once you have the customer that is used to a certain arcade interface, they are going to think long and hard before they switch to another system. So getting there first is key.

Sony you have an amazing portable. You need to leverage that. You can do things online that the DS only dreams of. I think that MGS PO+ will prove that in time.

So, the moral of the story is: ONLINE MULTIPLAYER... GOTTA HAVE IT NOW!!