E3 Hands-On: The GP2X Wiz Handheld
While wandering the show floor, I was pleasantly surprised to see homebrew favorite Gamepark Holdings demonstrating their newest console, the GP2X Wiz, at their booth. The Wiz is the successor to the GP2X and GP32 handhelds, both open-source handhelds with literally hundreds of active independent developers coding original games, ports and emulators for them.
I’ve owned a GP2X in the past, which I quickly sold due to a couple of nagging issues: the D-pad was a nightmare, the build quality wasn’t that great, and development on the handheld was kind of slowing down due to a lot of coders moving on to Sony’s PlayStation Portable. Externally, the Wiz seemed to be built a lot more solidly than its predecessor — it still feels kind of light and chintzy to me, but flexing it a bit, it didn’t feel as creaky as the original GP2X. The buttons are much-improved: I had my doubts about the face buttons being shaped like the D-pad, but they have a nice feel to them overall, though there was a bit too much feedback on the demo unit I got to play with. The buttons just sank in too much, which could be a problem for faster-paced games (i.e., shooters and brawlers).
As far as developer support goes, it looks like most of the major applications and emulators from previous Gamepark handhelds have already been ported over. There was a big issue with screen tearing (apparently the LCD display Gamepark used was meant for vertically-oriented devices) that turned off a lot of would-be purchasers, but I’ve been assured that a firmware update will fix that soon enough.
Gamepark’s display units only had the preloaded, inoffensive software titles running — as far as I can see they had a Zookeeper clone, a port of the flash game Boomshine, and demos of upcoming titles on the system. Being a bit savvy to the handheld’s real selling point, I asked one of the Gamepark representatives if they had any homebrew software running on their kiosk units, and he handed me one with a couple of emulators already loaded. As far as I can see MAME and CPS-2 emulation runs real smooth already, and I suppose some of the more low-fi consoles already have decently-ported stuff up and running.
Again, Gamepark is selling the handheld to a rather niche audience: it’s not meant to compete with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP as far as original games and third-party support goes. Rather, it’s a great little handheld for retro-gaming enthusiasts and even developers to tinker around with. We hope to have a full review in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, you can grab the Wiz over at Play-Asia for $179.90. Gamepark’s apparently landed a US distributor for the device, but right now they have no plans of selling the handheld on store shelves.
UPDATE: Gamepark’s PR folks have been kind enough to share more photos of their E3 presence. They have also issued a press release on their global website. Gamepark writes on the Wiz’ open-source possibilities, “Gamepark Holdings believes that the GP2X Wiz is a great option in the market of handhelds, especially with the open source possibility in mind and the upcoming free of charge SDK. The SDK will allow developers to create games and applications of any kind. The brand new Gamepark Holdings webpage adds the ability to upload your program and share it with the entire world. The GP2X Wiz will always remain open source and Gamepark Holdings encourages third party and home developers to make use of this possibility.” Sounds good. In the meantime, check out the gallery below!
GP2X Wiz Gallery:
[...] Holdings, furthering its bid to take over the world/get the word out on its own handheld, the GP2x Wiz, just sent us word about their trip to Leipzig at Games Convention Online. Tony Han, Overseas Sales [...]