I had to get an anti-glare screen protector too. It also hides some of my scratches, so that's good. On the other hand, it makes the screen visibly less bright, so that's not so good. And watching movies outside in a train when the sun's shining is still not possible.
Actually, my screen pretty much looks like one of these old passive-matrix color LCDs. I guess it might actually be a passive-matrix color LCD, although I haven't looked it up. It's a fairly new PSP, only a few months old, so if they've switched suppliers, it wasn't for the better.
And yeah, 4 hours of battery life isn't really what I would describe as "great." For example, my GBA micro gets way more than 10 hours of battery life. In fact, I always take it with me in my pocket to play games when waiting for a bus or sitting in a train, and I simply plug it in on sunday evenings. It has never run out of battery power.
I wish that Sony would let you watch your own videos at the native UMD resolution.
Hell yeah, I agree 100%.
And yes, even so, the PSP is probably better for watching movies than an iPod/Zen/GP2X/DS is - not because the PSP is doing such a great job, but simply because the other devices' screens are so small and not wide-screen.
I actually bought Pac Man World 2 (which isn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be:-) since you can unlock the old Pac Man games. I got no Pac Man Vs with it... I guess it was never released in Europe then. Gotta get the US version... Fortunately I do have a US Cube.
The only time I've seen Pac Man Vs was as a demo from Shigeru Miyamoto. Did they actually release it? Is it a bonus on some Pac Man game? Where did you get it?
No, it's not. Sony went after two properties when choosing a screen: Big and Bright. They got those two, but they messed up the rest. First of all, it's blurry as hell. When I first played Ridge Racer on my PSP, I thought they had actually managed to implement motion blur on the PSP. "Wow, didn't think it could do that", I thought. Until I played some other games. All of them had motion blur. It's not the games, it's the sucky screen. It's especially visible in games like Lumines, Loco Roco or Puzzle Block Party. Watching dark or high-contrast movies becomes pretty much impossible. In some scenes in Advent Children, all characters have purple shadows following them. It's not the movie, it's the screen.
Second problem: It sucks batteries like, well, I was going to make a porn reference, but then I changed my mind since that would be a positive association. The screen, together with the disk drive, simply kill batteries. And since you have your own fricken hand over the battery light while playing, you usually don't notice it until the PSP simply suddenly goes to sleep. Great design there, Sony.
Third problem: Glare. You can't play PSP games in a Train or anywhere where any kind of sun is involved. It reflects like a mirror. What the heck were they thinking? Shiny looks nice when on display in a shop? Well, thank you, but did you actually think of the people who want to do crazy stuff like using your product? Guess not.
Also, the screen scratches very easily. I was very careful, but I got a scratch on my screen simply from accidentially dragging the little wrist band over it. Gah.
So, in conclusion: They managed to hit "bright" and "big", but they missed pretty much everything else. This makes the screen average to sucky for a portable.
Wipeout is slow? There is a steady speed increase in the game.
Yeah. I probably never played it long enough to get to that point.
I'll look into Every Extend Extra. First time I've heard of it, sounds interesting from what I found on Google. Can't rent games, though. Nobody over here rents them out.
My PSP isn't downgradeable. New ones aren't (yet), I think. And if you actually do want to download demos or buy games, you can't do that with a "fixed" PSP, either.
It's a launch title. I can play games for a long time, but years? Also, Puzzle Block Party plays similarly, so I can't really go back to Lumines. I always want to turn the blocks in Lumines now that I'm tuned to Puzzle Block Party.
Wipeout Pure is sensational - I love it.
I own it. It's probably a good game, but I'm more an F-Zero person, myself. Wipeout Pure simply feels slow and sluggish. F-Zero cars are fast, accelerate fast and turn quickly, and it's kind of hard for me to adjust to Wipeout Pure. I'll probably give it another chance, though.
I also play the Colin McRae 2005 rally game a lot - again, ideal for travelling - although I admit that it took a larger learning curve than usual to get to grips with some of the (ahem) "features".
Haven't played that one. I'm reluctant to buy Rally games because I prefer games where you race other cars.
As for others, both LocoRoco and Mercury are simple but addictive.
I've played through Loco Roco (it's been out for some time in Europe). It's too short. Mercury may be nice. I tried to download the Mercury 2 demo, but my PSP crapped out on me and Sony won't answer support mails.
Anyway, those are probably all good or okay games, but it's a bit telling that people are still naming mostly launch or near-launch titles when talking about good PSP games.
And from the feedbacks I gathered, friends found two interresting (and original) games on the PSP, namely Loco Roco and Lumines. Have you tried them?
Yeah. Loco Roco has been out for a month or something in Europe. It's fun, but short. I played through it in a few days. Didn't get every last Mui Mui, but probably not going to play it anymore. Lumines is a launch title. It's way, way old. I've been playing it for months, but eventually, I did get bored. And now that I play the other puzzle game, I can't go back to Lumines. The concepts clash too much. I've become terrible at Lumines since I always want to turn the blocks.
You're right, though. Lumines is a good game, and Loco Roco, while no Katamari, is at least okay.
How is that possible if it doesn't even have 100 games? Possibly you mean that 95% of all PSP games suck 100%, and the last one sucks 80%?:-D
I own a PSP. I use it for Puzzle Block Party, a game that uses about a fifth of its blurry battery-eating screen for actual gameplay (the rest is used for weird animated comic characters). I wish they made it for the PSP, then I could, uhm, try to sell my PSP on eBay or something.
Your on-screen saber behaves like a real sword would, e.g. it remains where it would remain if you had hit something hard. As soon as you move your controller into a position which would be physically possible again, the on-screen saber snaps to that position.
The on-screen saber could also constantly move to the "nearest physically possible" position without moving through any on-screen objects while you move your controller through "impossible" positions.
As for not being able to play your games if Microsoft stops it's online service. Well you'll still be able to play them unless you deleted them, have a hardware failure or didn't copy them to a memory card. At this point though, i think it's the equivalent of saying that a CD with your game on it is damaged and the game is so old that it's impossible to find again.
Okay, if the game keeps working even if Microsoft kills Live, I guess the terms are somewhat acceptable if the games are cheap. However, I'm wondering how to attach my user name to a console if Live isn't available anymore? Somehow I doubt the username stays with the console if Live disappears. So if I dig out my old Xbox 360 15 years from now and it has stopped working and I buy a "new" old one, I can't play my games anymore.
Also, if games are only available online, the whole vintage gaming scene, the whole second-hand games business simply disappears for that console.
It's like taking away part of our culture. It's as if the content of all books from a certain publisher disappeared after a few years, with no way to read them ever again. If Hamlet was a Live game, nobody would have access to it today.
In the end, it's probably a trade-off. If the games are five bucks a piece, you may not care if you can't still play them a decade from now. If you view games simply as a way to kill time, you may not care if there's never going to be a "vintage console culture" around your particular console.
Me, I still play Pitfall on my VCS 2600. Just a month ago, I bought an old Odyssey console on a flea market, and I've had lots of fun with it. I want people 15 years from now to have the same options.
Kahney is the Troll who wrote The Cult of the Mac, a whole book doing nothing else but trying to pull a Dvorak on Mac users. He wrote a series of article for Wired, trying to paint Mac users as insane, ignorant cultists who value image over quality.
Nothing he said has ever contained anything of value to anyone. Let's just stop feeding this Troll.
VirtualPC for Windows does exactly what VMWare for Windows and Parallels for Windows do.
Which is to run different Intel-based operating systems on a virtualization layer. The virtualization layer is the hard part. Writing a Cocoa frontend isn't hard. Microsoft would not have to rewrite VirtualPC for Macs (as they've claimed), they would have to port VPC for Windows to the Mac, which is a hell of a lot easier.
Point is, this isn't just a case of persuading the existing Mac product to compile for Intel
Yes, this is exactly my point: It's nothing at all like compiling VPC for Mac on the Intel Mac, even though Microsoft claims exactly that.
VPC for Macs would not even be involved in this. It has got absolutely nothing to do with an Mac Intel version of VPC.
The downloadable model of the xbox 360 for downloadable content and live arcade games is NOT tied to a machine, but to a specific user.
Uhm, isn't that even worse? Not only can't I sell those games or buy them from other gamers, this also means that once Microsoft stops their Online Service for the 360, I can't play those games anymore?
You buy a license to "use" the code, not the rights to "own" the compiled code
Do you think I'm stupid? I know I'm not buying the rights to the compiled code. I have never claimed anything like this. I'm not trying to get more rights, just to get the same rights I've always had when buying games. Or books. Or CDs.
They also could use something akin to Sony's MagicGate (tm) format, where the data is encrypted in the drive itself, except that the content is somehow tied to a TPM chip in the PS4. This would give them the advantage of a solid state memory design, combined with tying it to their platform and "securing" the data from piracy.
It would also give them the disadvantage of people not buying it because they can't take their copy of Halo 3000 to a friend's place for a few matches. They can't sell their used games. They can't buy used games. Stores would be screwed anyway since they make money selling games, not consoles. Hence, no shop would carry the console. But maybe they intend to sell it via the Interweb, too?
I agree. If it's supercheap, I could possibly live with it. I'd pay a few bucks for Super Mario Bros on the Wii, for example. But I would never buy a game for 20 bucks or more if I couldn't burn it to a CD myself. I don't want to pay 50 bucks for a new PS4 game which then gets "attached" to my console. The reason is simple:
I own a VCS 2600. I still play it from time to time. All my old games still work. If it breaks, I buy another 2600 from eBay. I can go to a flea market and buy old 2600 games, even though that particular instance of Atari is long gone.
I actually bought a SNES last week. I can go into a games shop and buy used SNES games. I can play my old SNES games from 10 years back. I can play my friend's SNES games.
I could do none of these things if games were downloaded and attached to a console. What if Sony goes the way of Atari? What will I do if I want to play my games 10 years later, but I can't transfer them to another used PS4? What if I want to trade games with friends? What if I want to take Super Monkey Ball 7 to a friend's place for a few rounds of monkey race?
You're conveniently forgetting that most people would simply not buy Mac OS X for PCs. Yeah, the margins are higher for software than for hardware. Doesn't matter if you ain't selling any.
And even with the high margins, Apple makes more money on each Mac sold than on each Mac OS X box sold if the box is priced below 400 US$.
Look at Be OS: It was free, and people still didn't want it.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to get an anti-glare screen protector too. It also hides some of my scratches, so that's good. On the other hand, it makes the screen visibly less bright, so that's not so good. And watching movies outside in a train when the sun's shining is still not possible.
Actually, my screen pretty much looks like one of these old passive-matrix color LCDs. I guess it might actually be a passive-matrix color LCD, although I haven't looked it up. It's a fairly new PSP, only a few months old, so if they've switched suppliers, it wasn't for the better.
And yeah, 4 hours of battery life isn't really what I would describe as "great." For example, my GBA micro gets way more than 10 hours of battery life. In fact, I always take it with me in my pocket to play games when waiting for a bus or sitting in a train, and I simply plug it in on sunday evenings. It has never run out of battery power.
Hell yeah, I agree 100%.
And yes, even so, the PSP is probably better for watching movies than an iPod/Zen/GP2X/DS is - not because the PSP is doing such a great job, but simply because the other devices' screens are so small and not wide-screen.
I actually bought Pac Man World 2 (which isn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be :-) since you can unlock the old Pac Man games. I got no Pac Man Vs with it... I guess it was never released in Europe then. Gotta get the US version... Fortunately I do have a US Cube.
The only time I've seen Pac Man Vs was as a demo from Shigeru Miyamoto. Did they actually release it? Is it a bonus on some Pac Man game? Where did you get it?
No, it's not. Sony went after two properties when choosing a screen: Big and Bright. They got those two, but they messed up the rest. First of all, it's blurry as hell. When I first played Ridge Racer on my PSP, I thought they had actually managed to implement motion blur on the PSP. "Wow, didn't think it could do that", I thought. Until I played some other games. All of them had motion blur. It's not the games, it's the sucky screen. It's especially visible in games like Lumines, Loco Roco or Puzzle Block Party. Watching dark or high-contrast movies becomes pretty much impossible. In some scenes in Advent Children, all characters have purple shadows following them. It's not the movie, it's the screen.
Second problem: It sucks batteries like, well, I was going to make a porn reference, but then I changed my mind since that would be a positive association. The screen, together with the disk drive, simply kill batteries. And since you have your own fricken hand over the battery light while playing, you usually don't notice it until the PSP simply suddenly goes to sleep. Great design there, Sony.
Third problem: Glare. You can't play PSP games in a Train or anywhere where any kind of sun is involved. It reflects like a mirror. What the heck were they thinking? Shiny looks nice when on display in a shop? Well, thank you, but did you actually think of the people who want to do crazy stuff like using your product? Guess not.
Also, the screen scratches very easily. I was very careful, but I got a scratch on my screen simply from accidentially dragging the little wrist band over it. Gah.
So, in conclusion: They managed to hit "bright" and "big", but they missed pretty much everything else. This makes the screen average to sucky for a portable.
This list contains both released and in-development games.
Yeah. I probably never played it long enough to get to that point.
I'll look into Every Extend Extra. First time I've heard of it, sounds interesting from what I found on Google. Can't rent games, though. Nobody over here rents them out.
Yeah, that too, probably.
My PSP isn't downgradeable. New ones aren't (yet), I think. And if you actually do want to download demos or buy games, you can't do that with a "fixed" PSP, either.
With a DS, you have none of these problems.
Never, if you want your hair to remain where it is.
You mean the PS2 version plays as badly as the PSP version? Gah. I heard the PC version is pretty cool though, with keyboard and mouse.
Yeah, and that's a real shame, too. The few times I've found enough people to play with have been a blast. It's an awesome game.
It's a launch title. I can play games for a long time, but years? Also, Puzzle Block Party plays similarly, so I can't really go back to Lumines. I always want to turn the blocks in Lumines now that I'm tuned to Puzzle Block Party.
I own it. It's probably a good game, but I'm more an F-Zero person, myself. Wipeout Pure simply feels slow and sluggish. F-Zero cars are fast, accelerate fast and turn quickly, and it's kind of hard for me to adjust to Wipeout Pure. I'll probably give it another chance, though.
Haven't played that one. I'm reluctant to buy Rally games because I prefer games where you race other cars.
I've played through Loco Roco (it's been out for some time in Europe). It's too short. Mercury may be nice. I tried to download the Mercury 2 demo, but my PSP crapped out on me and Sony won't answer support mails.
Anyway, those are probably all good or okay games, but it's a bit telling that people are still naming mostly launch or near-launch titles when talking about good PSP games.
Right, of course.
Yeah. Loco Roco has been out for a month or something in Europe. It's fun, but short. I played through it in a few days. Didn't get every last Mui Mui, but probably not going to play it anymore. Lumines is a launch title. It's way, way old. I've been playing it for months, but eventually, I did get bored. And now that I play the other puzzle game, I can't go back to Lumines. The concepts clash too much. I've become terrible at Lumines since I always want to turn the blocks.
You're right, though. Lumines is a good game, and Loco Roco, while no Katamari, is at least okay.
How is that possible if it doesn't even have 100 games? Possibly you mean that 95% of all PSP games suck 100%, and the last one sucks 80%? :-D
I own a PSP. I use it for Puzzle Block Party, a game that uses about a fifth of its blurry battery-eating screen for actual gameplay (the rest is used for weird animated comic characters). I wish they made it for the PSP, then I could, uhm, try to sell my PSP on eBay or something.
Your on-screen saber behaves like a real sword would, e.g. it remains where it would remain if you had hit something hard. As soon as you move your controller into a position which would be physically possible again, the on-screen saber snaps to that position.
The on-screen saber could also constantly move to the "nearest physically possible" position without moving through any on-screen objects while you move your controller through "impossible" positions.
That's because unlike myspace users, slashdot users at least know into which browser field to put a site's address.
I know lots of Mac users are (justifiably) angry at Microsoft's decision to drop VB support for the Mac, but it doesn't seem to be an anticompetitive action. Erik Schwiebert from Microsoft's MacBU explains some of the issues with porting Office's VB to Intel Macs, and it's a fascinating and eye-opening read.
Highly recommended.
Okay, if the game keeps working even if Microsoft kills Live, I guess the terms are somewhat acceptable if the games are cheap. However, I'm wondering how to attach my user name to a console if Live isn't available anymore? Somehow I doubt the username stays with the console if Live disappears. So if I dig out my old Xbox 360 15 years from now and it has stopped working and I buy a "new" old one, I can't play my games anymore.
Also, if games are only available online, the whole vintage gaming scene, the whole second-hand games business simply disappears for that console.
It's like taking away part of our culture. It's as if the content of all books from a certain publisher disappeared after a few years, with no way to read them ever again. If Hamlet was a Live game, nobody would have access to it today.
In the end, it's probably a trade-off. If the games are five bucks a piece, you may not care if you can't still play them a decade from now. If you view games simply as a way to kill time, you may not care if there's never going to be a "vintage console culture" around your particular console.
Me, I still play Pitfall on my VCS 2600. Just a month ago, I bought an old Odyssey console on a flea market, and I've had lots of fun with it. I want people 15 years from now to have the same options.
Can we just ignore this guy?
Kahney is the Troll who wrote The Cult of the Mac, a whole book doing nothing else but trying to pull a Dvorak on Mac users. He wrote a series of article for Wired, trying to paint Mac users as insane, ignorant cultists who value image over quality.
Nothing he said has ever contained anything of value to anyone. Let's just stop feeding this Troll.
Which is to run different Intel-based operating systems on a virtualization layer. The virtualization layer is the hard part. Writing a Cocoa frontend isn't hard. Microsoft would not have to rewrite VirtualPC for Macs (as they've claimed), they would have to port VPC for Windows to the Mac, which is a hell of a lot easier.
Yes, this is exactly my point: It's nothing at all like compiling VPC for Mac on the Intel Mac, even though Microsoft claims exactly that.
VPC for Macs would not even be involved in this. It has got absolutely nothing to do with an Mac Intel version of VPC.
Uhm, isn't that even worse? Not only can't I sell those games or buy them from other gamers, this also means that once Microsoft stops their Online Service for the 360, I can't play those games anymore?
Do you think I'm stupid? I know I'm not buying the rights to the compiled code. I have never claimed anything like this. I'm not trying to get more rights, just to get the same rights I've always had when buying games. Or books. Or CDs.
And what you seem to forget is that VirtualPC for Windows does exactly what VMWare and Parallels do.
It would also give them the disadvantage of people not buying it because they can't take their copy of Halo 3000 to a friend's place for a few matches. They can't sell their used games. They can't buy used games. Stores would be screwed anyway since they make money selling games, not consoles. Hence, no shop would carry the console. But maybe they intend to sell it via the Interweb, too?
I agree. If it's supercheap, I could possibly live with it. I'd pay a few bucks for Super Mario Bros on the Wii, for example. But I would never buy a game for 20 bucks or more if I couldn't burn it to a CD myself. I don't want to pay 50 bucks for a new PS4 game which then gets "attached" to my console. The reason is simple:
I own a VCS 2600. I still play it from time to time. All my old games still work. If it breaks, I buy another 2600 from eBay. I can go to a flea market and buy old 2600 games, even though that particular instance of Atari is long gone.
I actually bought a SNES last week. I can go into a games shop and buy used SNES games. I can play my old SNES games from 10 years back. I can play my friend's SNES games.
I could do none of these things if games were downloaded and attached to a console. What if Sony goes the way of Atari? What will I do if I want to play my games 10 years later, but I can't transfer them to another used PS4? What if I want to trade games with friends? What if I want to take Super Monkey Ball 7 to a friend's place for a few rounds of monkey race?
You're conveniently forgetting that most people would simply not buy Mac OS X for PCs. Yeah, the margins are higher for software than for hardware. Doesn't matter if you ain't selling any.
And even with the high margins, Apple makes more money on each Mac sold than on each Mac OS X box sold if the box is priced below 400 US$.
Look at Be OS: It was free, and people still didn't want it.