Concept Gaming Tablet

High end tablets are now being used for much, much more than just web browsing. You can pretty much do everything on your tablet these days; whether its read your textbooks, VNC into your PC at home, type up work (that’s what I’m doing). Basically tablets are becoming more centralized in our lives every day. And with the advent of dual core tablets and high end graphics ported over to these devices, what’s stopping them from doing more? That’s right, let’s play games on these tablets. And I don’t mean lets open up Angry Birds and have a round at that, I mean real games.

Now I’m not saying current tablets can compete with the PS3 or the high end Alienware in terms of playing Battlefield 3, but I do think casual gamers looking for something more than just a game of Fruit Ninja have some alternatives to look towards.

First off, Android as a platform is great at playing emulators; especially when you’re rocking a dual core processor. N64, Nes, Snes, Genesis, and even Ps1 titles can be played all on emulators on your tablet. Then there are the high-end platform games such as ShadowGun that possibly show the greatest extent that graphics on our portable devices can run. And of course you have the teasers like Grand Theft Auto 3, that show us to what extent developers can port over titles from even the Ps2 days on over. Think you’re hindered with just the touch screen? Wrong, Gamestop has you covered with a $40 wireless bluetooth controller that’s made specifically to run on Android tablets. Now you can play GTA, Megaman X, Crash Bandicoot, and Street Fighter 2 with your controller. There are even apps available that let you connect a PS3 controller, and you can even connect an XBOX 360 usb controller as well.

But maybe you want something a bit more recent, something like Batman Arkham Asylum maybe? Onlive has you covered there as well. You pay for the game through their service and you can stream the game over WiFi as if you were playing a video online. You combine this with the Onlive wireless controller and you’re good to go, gaming as if you were on a console.

Recently Steam (the awesome online game distributing service for PC’s) released a mobile app for Android and iOS. They made it streamlined, so the design of using the app is the same whether you’re on an iOS device or Android device. The app is designed so you can even browse the Steam catalog of games and buy them from your device. Honestly I didn’t see why they would do this, but with looking at the recent interest in tablet gaming, would it be so surprising that maybe they’re interested themselves in distributing games for android and iOS through their service? Plants vs Zombies did come on Steam before it hit Android marketplace.

If you look at the data, it’s there. Services like Onlive and Steam are making themselves more readily available for consumers with tablets. Gamestop, possibly the largest brick and mortar retailer for games in the U.S is putting more and more emphasis on selling tablets with games and making accessories for them to match. It’s even easier now to get your hands on a copy of a rom you want to play with an emulator. Your tablet is waiting for you casual gamer. So get your game face on and let’s play some Super Mario!