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The Future of the PSP
IGN has a longish piece up looking at the possible future of Sony's handheld. They examine the upcoming success of Sony's overshadowed creation via several excellent interviews from people with SCEA, first-party developers, third-party studios, and indies. I particularly enjoyed the comments by indie homebrew dev Fanjita, who had a great outsider's view of the little black dynamo. "I suspect there are 2 factors that make them especially resistant to homebrew on the PSP - the first is that point I just made, about not wanting to dent the already shaky platform image. The second is that we already know our way around almost all the PSP internals, and so they probably feel that there's a risk that a publicly endorsed, restricted homebrew platform would soon be cracked wide open, leaving them with an officially endorsed route to piracy. I like to believe that the capable homebrew devs would be respectful of a move from Sony to open up the platform, but it's obviously impossible to have any guarantees."
I've noticed that they generally rate the quality of a videogame around it's sales/success in the marketplace. In short, a quantitative quality, which infers that if more people buy a game, it MUST be a better game. This is a general fallacy since other factors are included in determining what games people buy, for example, the influence of the games/systems one's friends and associates use and which are the most popular among their own social group - you'll buy a game just so you can play it online with your friends, people do this ALL THE TIME. Furthermore, marketing, particularly stealth viral marketing has the largest effect. Pick up a copy of PC Gamer or read any large "Gaming" magazine, you'll find it riddled with this type of shit.
Nerds aren't stupid, that's why we're nerds. And moving on, they don't make video games like they used to, in recent years it's devolved regressively into a pissing contest over stupid shit like bilinear shading and 3D Cloud effects, I play games to escape boring reality, not to relive it. Visual quality is important, but it doesn't compose the whole game.
Now, the Playstation portable? It's a farce, a manufactured farce by a grossly overweight japanese corporation that make everything from Batteries, to CD Players. Nobody cares, in fact, the original playstation was just as much a farce as well.
I wish we could go back to the old days when you had three real legit camps of video games, Sega, Nintendo and the various herds of PC/Amiga/Mac owners.
Of course, this would be impossible since everybody needs a PC today for virtually no reason at all and most of the time they reduce the productivity of any given individual and they sit on their asses and play cheap games by Real Media or some other bullshit company. But, whatever...
Ce La Vie...
Look at all those games. With some exceptions, many of those are handheld conversions of current gen games, or remakes/anthologies. Nintendo has an upper hand with first-party titles because, for example, sure Mario Kart DS is just another Mario Kart (with a bunch of the old tracks unlockable) BUT there's not a current-gen equivalent to it. Plus the karts in it and the characters are different from last time, being a mix between 64 and Double Dash. In summary, PSP has stuff that's too similar to stuff on consoles, while DS has things that are different and/or interesting.