Smart-Phones. Smart-Phones. Smart-Phones. Zzz.

Apparently it's not ok for us to be excited about a new entry in the Everybody's Golf series, because we should be playing GameLoft's Let's Golf rip-off or Flick Golf or something

We shouldn't be excited for the likes of Wipeout 2048, Sound Shapes and Street Fighter X Tekken because smart-phones are taking over the world. How dare we forget. We must start playing games more on our smart-phone because they are the future of the handheld market. But we're not going to.

It would be naive of us to deny the importance of the smart-phone market, but like there are always alternatives to Coca-Cola, so too can there be alternatives in the handheld gaming market. Sony's aiming PlayStation Vita squarely at the likes of us, and that's ok. Not everything has to be a mainstream hit to be successful. In fact, if Vita managed to match the sales of the original PSP (which seems to be a lot of analysts predictions) while maintaining a higher software attach rate — which it should achieve due to the simple integration of PlayStation Network features and hopefully a dwindling emphasis on piracy — we reckon Sony would consider the device a huge success.

But in a surprising twist, XBOX gaffer Dennis Durkin reckons Sony's got their work cut out.

"I’m not sure I would want to be launching a dedicated portable device right now into that market,” he told IndustryGamers.

“I think the DS - if you look at the 3DS, certainly versus people’s expectation's it’s not been as successful as people would have thought. So that’s a very crowded market and a very, very red ocean right now with a lot of change happening. So I’m not sure it's [a good idea].

"You only have a certain number of bets you can make as a company and you have to decide what you want to put your wood behind and I’m just not sure that that’s a place that I would put mine."

Durkin's being completely fair in his synopsis, but it's an analysis that's really starting to do our heads in. We get it: smart-phones are popular. But it doesn't house the kind of games we want to play. For the first time ever, we feel like we're being funnelled in a direction that we don't want to go. For that reason, we're grateful that the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita exist in the first place.