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The PSP's Birthday Party
Joystiq and EnGadget were there for the PSP Launch party, and have plenty of photos to prove it. Looks like it was a great opportunity to enjoy another uncomfortable marketing event. Hats off to the folks who endured it to bring us back the photos. From the article: "The weather outside is awful, but that didn't stop us, a few hundred Sony fanboys, and lots of B-list celebs (who clearly needed to collect the appearance fee) from hitting Sony's official launch party for the PlayStation Portable this evening."
I had dropped my old cell phone tons of times over the course of a few years, and nothing ever happened to the screen. Then one time it fell, and hit at just the right angle to nearly shatter the screen.
It's possible that the PSP was just dropped, and it just happened to land at that angle to break the screen.
Still, it makes me wary for people throwing it in backpacks or pockets full of stuff. No screen cover is just a bad design decision by Sony. And we all know there's no way in hell they'll replace a broken screen for free because it isn't covered under their warranty (hell, dead pixels in Japan, not the fault of the consumer, are not covered by the warranty, it says so in the Japanese manual).
MP3 playback? I could get an iPod for a little more, and save thousands of dollars in memory sticks to get the capacity I'd want. If I want something to play music on, I'll get something with that purpose designed into it, and not one where I need to buy hundreds of Sony Memory Stick Duos at their outrageous prices to fit all my music on. 40 GB of Memory Stick Duos is over $10K... no thanks, I'll spend $400-$500 on an iPod first.
Movie playback? I don't feel like buying my movies AGAIN on another proprietary format just to be able to watch them on the go. I can get a portable DVD player, and have all my DVD extras (because I'm fairly certain all the bonus features I buy DVDs for won't be on UMDs), and not have to buy my movies all over again.
So, yeah, it's a gaming device, with other things thrown on top to try and justify the price and the hype. It's also how Sony really hopes that they can sell tons and tons of Memory Sticks.
I'd purchase the PSP in that situation. Not that I want one but a GF that wants to leave you for buying a fucking game system deserves to get pissed off.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The level of bitterness and resentment in some of the comments here (and also in the initial news post) is a bit scary. Anybody would think Sony had been killing babies for fun rather than releasing a serious competitor to Nintendo's long-running monopoly on the handheld market.
What monopoly? Nintendo's got the market cornered because they make better products than their competitors. You want a list of all the companies that have tried to de-throne them? Off the top of my head:
Atari
Sega (twice)
SNK
Tiger
NEC
Bandai
Just to name a few. Atari at the time was owned by Warner Communications, and was signigicantly larger than Nintendo. Ditto for NEC, which dwarfs Nintendo even today.
Almost all of these systems were more powerful than the Game Boy, and some of them had extra features that the GB didn't have. Why did they fail?
Poor battery life and price. Sound familiar?
Sony is making the same mistakes everybody else has. There are a few differences in the philosophy of the PSP vs., say, the Atari Lynx, but the basic template is the same - you've got an expensive, battery-hungry, big and powerful system going up against a small, cheap system with long battery life (the GBA SP). Why do you think the PSP is going to be any more "serious" of a competitor than any of these other failures were?
Note that I'm not even counting the DS in the equation. The GBA SP is the real PSP competition. At the SP's price, it's practically an impulse buy, whereas the PSP is a major purchase. People may be more excited over the PSP right now but they will continue to buy the GBA SP just because it's cheap and there are a lot of games available for it. You almost don't even need to think about buying one, especially if you're a parent buying something for your kids (which is a huge market in handhelds, and one the PSP ignores).
If somebody else ever figures out what Nintendo has about the handheld market, then I would expect market forces to determine a new winner. But Nintendo has no monopoly; they simply understand the market better than anybody else.
Quick clarification to my post - The Neo Geo Pocket actually failed just due to a lack of marketing clout, not any technical issues with the system itself. Same is basically true of the Wonderswan. I think SNK and Bandai are the only two companies who really "got" the handheld market like Nintendo did, but they did not have the resources to market their products against Nintendo. Atari, NEC and Sega did, though; they just had poor products in comparison to the GB (despite their extra horsepower, which doesn't matter much in handheld gaming).
The reason why...
a) Won't play popular movie formats such as quicktime, windows media, divx, etc without transcoding.
b) Need to store movies on a sony memory stick with lots of memory.
Players that support popular movie formats and have built in hard drives exist now. But to become popular, I guess they need to be manufactured by a big brand and be able to run graphic intense games.
My other sig is a Porsche.
I think it's a mistake to assume that the PSP will fail to compete with the gameboy just because nobody else has managed it.
Sony isn't aiming for the same market as the SP, certainly at launch anyway. It's a no-brainer for a parent to buy the cheaper SP for their 10 year old who may play for many hours at a go, but for the twentysomething with more disposable income who wants to play great games on his daily commute, the PSP is much more desirable. I don't think battery life is going to be as important for the modern adult gamer as it was for kids playing on their Lynxes thirteen years ago.
Sony also has an incredibly powerful brand in the Playstation, and that will carry over to the PSP. In many circles, PS2 is practically synonymous with gaming, and now you can get pretty much the same thing in your pocket.
Now, I don't think you'll find the PSP wiping out the SP, but I do think you'll find it being very successful and also expanding the market for handhelds.
This is not a once in lifetime opportunity here folks! Why in the hell would you want to stand outside for 13+ hours in the freezing cold to get a video game system that you could pick up at your local WalMart in about a week with no problems! Wait until these things come out on Ebay for $50 because of some fatal flaw gamers are bound to find. They don't play any "real" movies at this point, the battery life is average at best and before Christmas Sony will come out with the PSP 2 Special U2 Edition with Kung-Fu grip! Wait and it will become available.
Why is this being called the PSP's birthday party? My first birthday wasn't when I was born. It happened exactly one year after that. Oh right, I'm using logic on Slashdot...
http://www.bynarystudio.com
Metal Gear Acid are lots of fun
I just played Metal Gear Acid on a co-worker's PSP (he went to best buy this morning just to look at the PSP, and ended up buying one. No preorder necessary.. aparently there are tons in stock)
I have to say the game totally sucks. I didn't so much as play the game as hit "O" over a hundred times as it went through a slideshow story.
Anyway, I'm not buying a PSP at the moment, but its game selection right out of the gate (in the US at least) easily matches that of the DS even 4 months after its release.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri