My New Toy: The Portable PlayStation
A week ago I finally gave in to pent-up techno-lust and bought Sony's portable multimedia unit, the PSP. It was a long hard choice between it and the unquestionably more productive Treo 650, which is a hybrid cel phone/Palm PDA device, making it an open-ended gadget capable of simpler games, and playing music and videos. The problem with it though, is that my cel phone carrier Sprint has crippled most of its neater features, and charges you quite a bit to connect to the Internet in any lengthy fashion. (To be fair, every other carrier is doing this too) I suppose the other choice was the Palm TX, but ultimately the sheer sexiness of the PSP won me over.
So far, I've been playing an addicting game called Mercury. It's like those puzzles where you tilt a box to get a ball through a maze, but in this case, the maze is a beautiful 3-D rendering of space-y floating platforms, and the ball is a blob of mercury and all its splattiness. Ambient techno plays in the background as you try to ever-so-gently move the analog-thumbstick to tilt the platform enough to steer the blob through various tasks -- all without the blob plummeting to its death, getting zapped by lasers, splitting up into pieces against sharp corners, and running out of time. Definitely not the sort of game that would play well on a Palm or cel phone without some spiffy graphics and sound chips. Tapwave's Zodiac was a Palm-based game system with 3-D graphics and sound, but they went out of business this year.
Things I don't like about the PSP: Having to choose between some really cool homebrew applications and game emulators vs. Sony's improvements. The lack of a second analog stick (to make it more like the PS2). No way to leverage my iPod as a hard drive (since the PSP can't act as a USB host). Unnecessarily decreased resolution when playing movies I've already bought and put onto a memory stick. (Sorry Sony, I'm not buying a UMD of a movie I've got on DVD).
But overall the PSP is a great device and satisfies my gadget cravings. For now...
So far, I've been playing an addicting game called Mercury. It's like those puzzles where you tilt a box to get a ball through a maze, but in this case, the maze is a beautiful 3-D rendering of space-y floating platforms, and the ball is a blob of mercury and all its splattiness. Ambient techno plays in the background as you try to ever-so-gently move the analog-thumbstick to tilt the platform enough to steer the blob through various tasks -- all without the blob plummeting to its death, getting zapped by lasers, splitting up into pieces against sharp corners, and running out of time. Definitely not the sort of game that would play well on a Palm or cel phone without some spiffy graphics and sound chips. Tapwave's Zodiac was a Palm-based game system with 3-D graphics and sound, but they went out of business this year.
Things I don't like about the PSP: Having to choose between some really cool homebrew applications and game emulators vs. Sony's improvements. The lack of a second analog stick (to make it more like the PS2). No way to leverage my iPod as a hard drive (since the PSP can't act as a USB host). Unnecessarily decreased resolution when playing movies I've already bought and put onto a memory stick. (Sorry Sony, I'm not buying a UMD of a movie I've got on DVD).
But overall the PSP is a great device and satisfies my gadget cravings. For now...
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