geekdaddy

I am one of the hundreds of thousands of gamers who own a Playstation Portable. I should love it; after all it cost me enough when I bought it. I don’t. I don’t love it the way I love the Wii, or my PS2, or even my Gametap subscription. Sometimes I wonder why.

First off, the games face some real challenges. The whole UMD disc thing is a big, fat pain in the butt. I have had 6 of those plastic rings break, rendering the games useless. I usually have game insurance on what I buy, especially at Game Crazy, but it is still no fun to go exchange on a gimpy leg. The selection of games is okay, if not awe-inspiring. My favorites are retro classics, (SNK, Sega, NEO-GEO) D&D types, (Untold Legends, etc.) and Puzzle categories. The games are usually formatted fine, although some of the PSOne Classics you can download from the Sony online store are formatted a little funny.

That brings us to Sony’s problem number two, which is homebrew applications. So many home developers are making cool programs for the PSP these days. A great example is PSP Genesis. This is a Homebrew Sega Genesis emulator. I understand…..piracy is not what you want to promote with your product. However, the cat and mouse game between Dark Alex (M33) and Sony is wearing thin. What if Sony went the WiiWare route with the homebrew community? Why not make a “channel” where homebrew applications that do not infringe on copyrights can be put out legally? Then homebrew guys and gals would get recognition for authorship, maybe a little cash, and we as PSP users would get to download more content without UMD problems. Everybody wins. At the very least get the Playstation Store to offer more content, at better prices.

Thirdly, the web browser is arthritic. I am not downloading gigabytes of porn on it. Well, not most nights! I am trying to do simple things like check the weather, or my e-mail. It is slow, clunky, and quite obviously an afterthought. One other thing that bugs me about the browser is the memory. I have a 8 gig stick, but my web browser can’t use that as a cache. Two words Sony should look up in the dictionary is virtual memory. Even Windows 98 had this feature. Or, you could go the ReadyBoost route like Vista did.

Video on the PSP is okay. I don’t have a huge problem with converting regular format video to MP4. In fact there are web services out there where you can find this conversion already done. (It rhymes with Myso-Hunt) I love watching Robot Chicken, Mythbusters, and Doctor Who. Scrubs is cool too. If Sony had a video download service like iTunes does, that would go a long way to keeping this kind of stuff legal.
So, overall the Sony Playstation Portable is solid, dependable, but not very exciting. I do like it for some uses, but feel that other uses are lacking. I think a bunch of the problems could be ironed out within the software with updates, if Sony so chose. I will be waiting. (Insert crickets chirping here…and the howl of a lonely coyote) AKB :}

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