Sony PSP
I bought a Sony PSP a couple days ago, along with Lumines and Gottlieb Pinball.
The PSP is really sleek and cool looking - makes the Nintendo DS feel like a clunky toy (even though the PSP is bigger and heavier than the DS). The screen is outstanding, though it gets fingerprint smudges almost immediately.
Lumines is pretty cool. Not quite so amazing as some rave reviews have described it, but still quite good. The gameplay itself is decent, but the audio-visual experience is what really sets it apart. If you’ve only played one of the quick-n-dirty clones on the PC, you may have experienced the gameplay, but you haven’t experienced the game.
Gottlieb Pinball I played only briefly - seems ok but not great.
The PSP also includes a Wi-Fi web browser. I had it up on my home ‘net connection pretty easily. It’s very ‘gee-whizzy’ to browse the internet on a handheld device smaller thana standard paperback. BUT, even with a fast ‘net connection, browsing is slow (someone told me this is because of the PSP’s limited system RAM), and the system to enter characters/words (i.e. for web addresses) is absolutely awful.
Overall, Lumines is interesting to me as a game designer, but I think the DS has a wider library of interesting titles in general, and is much cheaper to boot (DS = $129, PSP = $250)
February 10th, 2006 at 1:16 am
Hi Phil,
Thanks for an awesome blog, it’s definitely one of the best out there and really goes down well with the morning cup of tea
Anyway, at this point I would probably sell bodyparts to have a go at developing for the PSP, I think it has potential for some really interesting game ideas (pity most publishers are just treating it as a smaller PS2 and a haven for ports and rehashes) and I’d love to dev for it using the real tools, as opposed to the home-dev stuff that’s been surfacing.
If you’re looking for some interesting (different) games on the system, try out Mercury (a puzzler that is massively underrated by the press in my opinion), GripShift (a driving puzzle game.. it seems wrong at first but give it a few goes to grow on you) and Metal Gear Acid (just for the different experience of controlling the character through card gameplay).