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Is There Anything Wrong With The PSP?
An anonymous reader writes "In the latest 'Analyze This' series of exclusive Gamasutra features, analysts from Screen Digest, ABI Research and DFC Intelligence look at what Sony and developers can do to improve the PSP platform, to generate more excitement for it among developers, gamers and the industry overall — or if they even need to. 'My feelings on the PSP are mixed: It has shown there is demand for a more high-end portable system. The portable market has room for two competing portable systems. We forecast that over the next five years dedicated portable systems will sell just as many units as the new console systems. However, the PSP could really use a new model. This has been the secret to Nintendo's success.'"
No touch screen. PDA's were around way before the PSP came out, it should have been the first thing they thought of. Both the PSP and GP2x suffer from the same problem. A touchscreen makes the device so much more versatile. Web browsers, calculators, calenders, console type applications, etc are much easier to do with a touch screen. It vastly opens up the possibilities for home-brew stuff.
Both the PSP and GP2x are high-powered cool machines but without a touchscreen I'm going to stick with my Nintendo DS.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
i suspect the main thing the psp needs are games and not UMD movies. All th PSP has are broken ports and the occasional remix. There is a reason why they have a ps1 emulator on it and most people use it for homebrew.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Don't cripple your product!
If the PSP had been able to play movies at full resolution from the flash-card instead of only from the craptastic UMD then I would have bought one instead of the Video Ipod that I own now.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Stop spending time, effort and money deliberately making it hard for people to develop their own software. Sony should be encouraging that, not making it harder. (They could reinstate lik-sang and pay them damages, too).
There's nothing wrong with it. It's a much better portable than the DS, supporting movies, music, and far better games. (Sorry, dragging crap around with the stylus and shouting into the microphone don't make a better experience, they just make the thing more annoying.)
But the problem is that it's owned by Sony, and Sony has managed to piss off the gaming community to the point where the mere fact that it's owned by Sony is enough to prevent people from buying it.
It's sad, really.
Sony needs to stop allowing their movie / music division to dictate to their consumer electronics division. They added UMD movies to the PSP that nobody wants. They added Blu-Ray to PS/3 and slipped their schedule out a year and added hundreds of dollars to the consoles cost. They keep putting all sorts of unwanted DRM into everything. Sell it off and get back to making well-designed consumer electronics.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I had to go through a ton of headaches just to get my PSP able to run homebrew stuff. I don't run homebrew because I want to screw Sony, but because there's so much good homebrew stuff! One of the biggest things is emulation. The PSP is great for playing NES and Sega Genesis games. The screen is a good size, controls are good, etc.. but Sony requires apps be signed unless you hack your PSP.
The PSP has had problems from day 1. I own one. I regret it. I haven't touched it in a long time. Their biggest mistake? The control scheme. NO SECOND ANALOG STICK. Considering how Sony really popularized that (during the PS1 time frame) and everyone uses it these days, not having it on the console is a huge mistake. It makes things tough for many of the games out there. Katamari got a weird control scheme, no good camera control in FPSes or 3D platformers (NOTE: I own a DS, which I love, but I think they should have put one analog stick on it). The games draught (as I see it) is the biggest problem. There is only ONE game I can think of that I am looking forward to: God of War for the PSP and I don't even think that has been officially announced.
How to improve it at this point? Better games, pure and simple. There have been so many games I've played in the past year or two on my DS compared to a tiny handful on my PSP.
Opening some kind of homebrew (even if regulated and locked down) would give me new interest because then I could make stuff and try other peoples. That wouldn't solve the games problem, but it would help some.
Interesting system, problems in design, I regret I purchased it (especially considering it's original price).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Overall, the PSP seems to have been designed for style and coolness first, with usability second. Consequently, the analog stick is pure shit and almost unusable. The D-pad is better, but not a whole lot so. With my smaller hands, the shoulder buttons are all but unusable as well.
The crossbar interface, or whatever Sony's calling it this month, while lauded on the PS3 - I find to be pretty underwhelming on the PSP as well. Sony should have just thrown this out and again - spent time looking for an interface that was more usable than 'cool'.
UMD game load-times are so atrociously slow that when I still had a PSP, bothering to change games simply doesn't worth it. If I didn't want to play the game that was already in there, or if I actually turned my PSP off rather than simply putting it on standby you couldn't just pick the system up and get that 'quick game fix' that portables are supposed to be so wonderful for.
The only place the developers can help of course is in the games department... fortunately (for them,) this is another one of the PSP's huge failings. Quit with the tired, crappy ports, and come out with more new and fun games on the system. Learn it's limitations and weaknesses, especially the media limitations. Design games that are quick to load, don't rely on that crappy analog... thing, and don't make you sit looking at a loading screen for two to three minutes any time you load a save, or move to a new level, or something along those lines.
As long as the PSP still suffers from THIS, gamers are just going to keep shutting it off and picking their DS back up.
It only costs 30% more than the Nintendo DS Lite right now for more functionality out of the box.
Its load times are obnoxious for a portable.
Certain games are bad, yes, but not all. I own 14 PSP games and none of them have load times that have made me annoyed or anything like that.
It's too big to stick in your pocket.
Funny, I just put mine in my pocket with no problem and I have the Mad Catz clamshell on it which increases the size quite a bit.
The control scheme is awkward.
The joystick is weird, but personally I got used to it fairly easily. Other than that, everything is fine control-wise for me. The issue may actually be that the games you've played are ports of PS(X/2) games and therefore you're used to the PS2 controller layout.
The games suck.
Purely personal preference. I mean, like I stated above, I have 14 games and I like them all. I only own about 6 DS games in comparison.
The battery life sucks.
You know, my friend complained about his PSP's battery life, but mine's been fairly good for as long as I've owned it. It's been about as good as my NDS when both are at a full charge. I can tell you that if you leave the wireless networking on, it won't last as long. It also eats up power while sitting there dormant.
Nobody wants to buy movies again on UMD.
Agreed with that. UMD is useless, because it costs as much as a DVD and unlike a DVD, you have limited use! If the PSP had a video output feature, it may have been better, but there isn't one.
Sony makes it.
It sounds all "Anti-Sony fanboi" flamish but there are reasons. For years, dare I say decades, I was a Sony zealot. They had some of the best audio components available for a while. I loved the home theater products I purchased from them. I still have an AV receiver of theirs from the 90-92 range running in my gameroom.
I got turned off starting with the Mini-disc and moving forward. It became somewhat obvious to me that Sony was, as someone else mentioned, letting the media division push an agenda on the hardware division and hardware innovation suffered. The PS3 for instance was a shameless and unhidden push to get a format into prominence by loss selling a console. Any time you have a company selling hardware at a loss hoping to make up the money on software you no longer have an innovative hardware company. (I'm also looking at Apple somewhat with that statement as well , although on a computer hardware front they're starting to do some impressive things lately)
The fact is if you buy a PsP and use it in accordance with how Sony wants you have a crippled hand-held platform. If the only way to get real performance and value out of the platform involves hacks, that should be a big red flag.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Homebrew sites were excited as flies at a freshly-fertilized organic tomato farm before Sony repeatedly updated the firmware to get rid of them. Sony seems worried enough about protecting a market for UMD games that they're willing to lose system sales to homebrew game fans.
People who want a $200-$300 handheld homebrew-friendly system may just go the GP2X route instead. I think last time I checked you could still get a PSP to boot Linux from MS Pro Duo and play games on that. If you want a GP2X, though you'll probably just buy a GP2X. The only advantage I can see to PSP over GP2X is that it also plays UMD games, but look at the list of games for the GP2X.
Also, try getting OpenSSH, a Gameboy emulator, etc on your PSP without the latest Sony firmware updates screwing all of that over.
And that is just it. It is alright. Damned by faint praise. It is a middle of the road device, so while it doesn't actually totally suck at anything, it doesn't shine at anything either.
Take its size, no it is NOT huge. The biggest is the Nintendo DS. That one is larger then the PSP in all dimensions. The DS Lite is exactly the same size as the PSP if you cut of the rounded sides of the PSP. But it is huge compared to the Gameboy advance mini.
So it ain't the biggest, and it ain't the smallest. I wouldn't want a DS in my pocket, I can't slip the PSP in as easy as a GBA mini.
Its screen is amazing scratch proof compared to other devices (say the GBA), but I won't be as easy going with it as my DS.
It doesn't have to play "lesser" games because of its hardware like the GBA/DS series BUT its hardware while similar to the PS2 is NOT close enough to actually be able to just play PS2 games. If for no other reason then that is lacks the controls for those games. This is perhaps the most damning (is that a word) aspect of the PSP. The GBA and DS are NOT capable of running the "big" games and so they don't. They have their own unique games, made entirely for the handheld. Quite a few of the PSP games are clones of "full" games, wich just don't fit on the console.
Not that Sony/PSP is alone in this. I remember a GBA game that for its save system required you to note down a 16 character code. Yeah that is userfriendly, especially on the go.
But simply put, I at least do not play handhelds as fullblown consoles, I play them on the move. That requires a certain style of gaming, for instance, don't make the game impossible to see in bright daylight.
Other middle of the road stuff that damns it. It is an mp3 player. But Memory sticks are smallish and expensive. Plus the player itself is a bit limited. It is like carrying an old style HD player with you with the storage space of a flash player.
It plays video, and fairly reaosonable, except that its storage space is barely big enough to hold a complete movie (and all your other crap). The dead pixels everyone seem to have don't help. No sony, dead pixels are not acceptable, they are the signs of a broken product and people can't look past them on a screen this small.
So it is bigger then an video iPod, and indeed most portable video players, but its storage space sucks and its screen has defects.
A nice thing about the PSP is that it has speakers. You can therefore do a thing with it that an iPod cannot do. Use it as a jukebox. Nice, except that its speakers lack power. Some people use their phones this way and their music is far louder. So you can use it as a jukebox, but only if everyone is really quiet.
Its screen is bigger then the Nintendo handhelds BUT it has less real estate compared to the DS.
Simply put, what is the PSP trying to be. If it was a handheld PS2 it would be a console on the go. But it ain't. If it had more storage it could be a media player. But it ain't. If it had stronger speakers, it could be a jukebox like system. But it ain't. If it games were more made for being on the move. It could be fun like the Nintendo games. But it ain't.
The sad fact is that I play GTA on my PSP and that is it. I also use it to play movies and such but mostly I use it for as a jukebox for when I am in a hotel or something, while I play games on my DS.
Frankly, with all its faults, perhaps the second biggest mistake by Sony (apart from making few "on the move" games) is that PSP games are just so fucking expensive. I rather buy a DS game then for 10-20 euros less.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think what might curb this would be when/if the PS2 ceases to be - but by that time Sony will have unveiled the PSP2 or bailed out of the market entirely.
Schnapple
They stand to suffer a lot. Currently, their reputation is built on the image of making "fun, innocent game machines", "toys" if you will (although not just for kids). The moment "work" starts to crop up when thinking about one of their gadgets, the overall image isn't as joyful and innocent as it once was. It's one of the major reasons they're doing so much better than Sony right now, on both fronts... Sony's lost their way in trying to market their devices as "more than just toys". As it turns out, "toys" is exactly what the majority of people who buy the systems want. They don't want the hastle of dealing with various media, they don't want the added complexities that a sophisticated OS brings (Nintendo has caved on this, but with a very intuitive and simple OS). Adding business related material to a device can be a slippery slope, and before you know it, the image of the device changes from "gaming machine", to "multi-functional device".
Just look, the two most popular handheld devices on the market today are the iPod and the Nintendo DS. I don't think it's just a coincidence that the companies both have made it their mission to only do one entertainment related thing, and do it well.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.