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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."
About the only use for one. Just comparing the number of great games on the DS and the PSP, I'd never consider a PSP. Sure, there's the multimedia shit, but I don't give a crap- I want a gaming device.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Even those who disagree with you can get the gaming device and the multimedia shit cheaper than a PSP. Try the $40 R4DS adapter, which lets you run DS homebrew from microSD cards on all revisions of the Nintendo DS. One of these homebrew programs is called MoonShell, which lets you watch DPG video (based on MPEG-1, converted from anything that Media Player Classic will play), listen to MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and tracked music, look at pictures, and read text files on the DS.
Meanwhile, Sony releases PSP firmware updates that close more holes.
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...
1) Remove the UMD disk interface: it is slow, mechanic, and power hungry.
2) Bigger screen.
3) Thinner design, lower weight, lower power requirement, memory-card-only games, allow SD cards for user media.
4) Sell it at 99$ / 99 euro (including european VAT) price point.
5) Profit! (without user torturing, dammit!)
By the way, for the next PSP (e.g. "PSP2"): memory-card-games backward compatible, with better processors, more RAM, and enhanced 3D chip, etc.
It sure is heavy enough:D
Nuff said.
Okay, I'll be honest. I bought a PSP the day it came out. Since then, it's mainly done nothing but collect dust while my DS gets more play time beyond belief. However, I took my PSP for a day trip yesterday with Ac!d 2, and it was a complete blast. I didn't realize that the system had so much fun potential. Granted, it was only one game, but still, for the first time in awhile, I actually had a good time playing it, and all I had to do was pick it up. To be honest, I really don't think there's enough room for a legitimate competition in portable systems. Sony tried to do a good job to differentiate itself, but in reality, it was still just another unproven contender against Nintendo. It all comes down to games, and the DS beats Sony hands down. However, that doesn't mean the PSP is bad. It's just not good enough.
Apart from homebrew, the PSP has no future. Even Sony is stealing ideas from homebrew coders.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Are things really that bad for the PSP? I just bought a second hand one, plus 5 games (Wipeout, Burnout, Daxter, Worms and Tales of Eternia) and it seems like a good handheld. There are maybe 8 or 9 other games I'd like to buy at the moment, plus more on the way (GoW PSP?). I mean, I own a DS+25 games as well and think it's fantastic, but the PSP has a load of great games too.
I understand some are just looking for a gaming-only handheld, but why no love for the multimedia aspect? Man shall not live by gaming alone; sometimes it's nice to kick back with some music or movies to enjoy.
I am so sick of the fanboy "my psp collects dust and I play my DS everyday" line. Its tired everyone has heard it. My primary consoles consist of a Wii, Ps2, 3 ds's (1 phat and 2 lites for a family of 5) and 1 PSP. Im definately not a Sony fanboy and play lots of DS games but to dismiss the PSP as being no good means either the person is not looking at the games available or they were so caught up in that argument a year ago when it was true that they are blind to whats available now.
No matter what genre there are good games these are just off the top of my head:
Advenure Games: Lego Star Wars, Metal Gear Solid Portable Op's
RTS Games: Pirates!, Field Commander
RPG Games: Dungeon Seige, Marvel Ultimate Alliance,
FPS Games: Socom 2, Medal of Honor Heroes
Rythym Games: Guitaroo Man Lives!
Racing Games: Burnout Legends, Wipeout Pure
Action Games: Daxter, Rachet and Clank
Puzzle Games: Locoroco, Me & My Katamari, Lumines 1&2, Puzzle Quest, Mercury Meltdown
Fighting Games: Tekken: Dark Resurrection
Old School Classics: Ultimate Ghosts and Goblins, Metal Slug Anthology
Sports Games: Madden 07, MLB 07, Winning Eleven
As far as actual numbers of games the PSP actually has a hundred or so more than the DS. It had a slow start but the PSP has delivered more than I ever expected and to say it has no good games is delusional.
I am amazingly happy with my PSP
I play games at home and on the train
I watch films also when commuting
I can use it to check for WiFi hotspots, hit the web a few times and even check email
oh and play a bit of music and bore people with family photos
I sat next to a guy playing his DS on the subway yesterday. I was playing Ratchet & Clank on my PSP. He stopped playing to look at my screen, with obvious envy. I listen to my MP3s (screen off, locked in my pocket, long battery life), I watch movies and anime, I read E-books, do a bit of web-surfing, and play a few games, so I'm really happy with the PSP.
I've had every type of gameboys and have always been frustrated by the displays. To me, the DS was a huge mistake. Instead of giving us two crappy small displays, they should have made it with one large one.
I don't see why the PSP gets bashed so much. For what you pay you do get a nice bit of kit. Even without hacking it there is a large amount of functionality there. I have one, which yes I did hack, but I would have no problems with using it as Sony wants me to.
Honestly, this thing has about as much momentum as the Atari Lynx.
If it had TV out, and I could play PSP games on a big TV (but then carry it with me on an airplane as well), I would buy one.
All you need to do to make the PSP2 a hit is make it both a Cell Phone + VoIP! GPS would be nice... plus WiFi IMS, also 8GB of storage by default with option for additional mem-cards. Don't think they would remove the UMD, but I wouldn't mind if they got rid of it, as it kills the battery.
It is NOT different OR interesting. He was good in Donkey Kong but come on, come up with something new.
Tired and kiddie. The nintendo mantra...
Because good sales numbers do not always coincide with good games. Case in point: Burger King games for Xbox 360.
I mainly use my PSP as a 24 viewing device, and I hate the screen. Yes, it's big and bright, but that's about it. The picture quality sucks. Everything that moves has a purple shadow following it, which is really, really distracting. In fact, at first I thought Ridge Racer had motion blur. Really impressive. Until I found out that it wasn't motion blur, it was just ghosting from the crappy screen.
Also, the thing reflects light like a mirror. Fortunately, I found a screen protector which has some kind of anti-reflection pattern on it, which makes the reflections more diffuse and thus more acceptable.
Anyway, my point is: Don't buy the PSP as a movie viewing solution.
I own both. These numbers are meaningless. The PSP has more "big" A-List titles which obviously get higher ratings, but are often PS2 ports and almost always useless for short amounts "on the go" playing. Great portable games like Tetris DS or Brain Training tend to get not-so-great ratings (haven't checked though, just throwing out some examples), even though these are exactly the games you want in a portable console.
My PSP is a relatively new, white version. It's less than a year old. And yes, it does have the ghosting. Sony fixed absolutely nothing with the screen, as far as I can tell - unless the original screen was even worse.
I just installed the 3.10 oe firmware and am playing Final Fantasy 7 on my PSP. Now I can play virtually any PSX game, this adds all the value I need for this little toy.
I can also play :
N64
SNES
NES
which covers hundreds of games I enjoy playing.
They want their post back.
(and at the risk of flamebaiting/tolling myself...)
I've seen a lot of PSP's, and own one myself. No doubt you were gazing at the fellow's screen counting dead pixels, and no doubt this fascinated you, what with it being SUCH a rare occurance, seeing a PSP with dead pixels and whatnot.
Seriously, is this a common problem? I've yet to see it, and my PSP is not only over a year old now, but it's been to war. And in this harsh desert environment, I've seen about a dozen PSP's, and have yet to see even ONE dead pixel among them.
Quit hating on Sony, and their fantastic little game system/computer. It rocks.
~Hal