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PSP Devs Should Pony Up
President of development house 'Ready at Dawn' Didier Malenfant has given a short interview to GamesIndustry.biz. In the piece, he lays out his feeling that developers are to blame for the lackluster title library of Sony's handheld console. From the article: "'Everything is compromised, and it bugs the hell out of me when you hear a lot of developers saying, Well, we can't do this that way because it's a handheld game, or We can't do this because it doesn't have a second analog stick.' 'Those are all excuses,' Malenfant continued - observing that the original PSone controller didn't have any analog sticks, 'And there were great games on that.'"
are the AWFUL UMD load times! There is nothing more infuriating than the bloody load times in practically all the PSP games I have.
One of the reasons why I keep my PSP at 1.5 is to use UMD Emulator and Fastloader. Guess what? The PSP is MUCH MORE ENJOYABLE because loading off memory stick (or the hard drive accessory) is way faster. (Off memory stick, it's really quick. Hard drive is perhaps 2-4x slower, but UMD is probably 10x slower than the hard drive). Sony could make a killing if they made it possible to cache UMDs on memory sticks and have games load from there rather than the UMD itself.
Also, I do believe all the excuses are just that - excuses. Lack of buttons? Lack of analog sticks? Well, it means that one has to be a lot more intelligent in writing their games! Take Nintendo's Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time - you have 4 characters you have to control, each mapped to 1 button. That only leaves the shoulder buttons to do stuff with. It works, and is plenty fun for an RPG, and the trick to playing it is to realize that it's not what the buttons do, but combinations of characters and button pushing.