To take my mind off the pregnancy chaos that’s been going on in our lives over the last few weeks, I bought a Sony PSP video game a few days ago. This joins the Nintendo DS I picked up just before Christmas.
I still love my Nintendo DS and regularly play it, but I wanted to see what all the fuss around the PSP has been about.
Firstly, the PSP is clearly aimed at a more mature market with its asking price of $250, as opposed to the DS’s more manageable $150. The unit is very attractive, looking more like an expensive portable DVD player than a video game. The sleek black finish is very appealing and the screen is of a very high standard, blowing away the DS’s smaller and lower resolution screens.
The PSP’s games confirm the assumption that Sony is aiming at an older market with the PSP. They’re generally much less cute than their DS counterparts and quite a bit more expensive on average. Unfortunately, they actually show a lot less imagination in general than DS games. Most of the PSP games are shoot-’em-ups and racing games. Yawn. The DS has those, too, but thankfully it has more original games, such as Mario 64 and Warioware Touched!.
The fact the PSP has so few appealing games served to initially put me off it, which is why it’s taken me a month since its release to purchase one. The only two really cool-looking games on the market are Lumines and Mercury, so those are the ones I bought to begin with. Both are puzzle genre games, with Lumines building on the theme of Tetris and Mercury harking back to Atari’s 80s arcade classic Marble Madness.
Mercury‘s graphics are brilliant. Clearly, a lot of work went into designing the mazes in this game and getting the physics of the flowing blob of mercury just right. Unfortunately, it must have quickly exhausted the developers, since they created only six levels, each of which has about ten or so mazes, each with their own mission. Some involve getting a certain percentage of mercury from one end of the maze to the other, avoiding various hazards on the way. Others involve a specific task. Yet others involve multiple blobs of coloured mercury, usually requiring one to mix the blobs and form new colours. It’s an incredibly appealing game, but after just a couple of days, I’m close to 50% of the way through the game. Compare that to Mario 64 on the DS, which took me three months of fairly heavy play to get through.
The PSP can play a UMD disc, which is a new proprietary format medium from Sony. The idea is that people will use their PSP to watch movies, but since the PSPs are crippled with region-encoding, I certainly won’t be playing into their hands by purchasing any films. They only one I’ll be watching is the copy of Spiderman 2 that came with my unit, a free gift with the first million units sold.
Since UMDs are read-only, one needs a way of storing game state, such as scores and position reached within a game. To that end, Sony includes a memory stick Pro Duo slot on the PSP and a 32 card in the box. That’s fine for saving your game state, but Sony has also made it possible to listen to MP3s, as well as view JPEG photos and watch MPEG-4 films. For this to be a viable option, you need a 1 Gb memory stick, a decidedly scarce item at the moment.
I’m still struggling to get mencoder and ffmpeg to rip and encode DVDs in the most space-efficient way, whilst still preserving reasonable quality. All I’ve watched on the PSP so far is a short clip of birds flying around Mykines, made by Sarah during our holiday on the Faroe Islands last year.
The PSP’s battery life is quite dismal, way behind that of the DS. The PSP’s deliciously huge screen has to draw its juice from somewhere and you, the user, will definitely notice this.
I’ve yet to play Lumines; I’ll probably wait until I’ve finished with Mercury before I touch that. So, my opinions are based on having played just one game. Nevertheless, I have to say that I think the DS has the overall edge. Sony has the better hardware with the PSP, no question about it, but Nintendo has made that irrelevant by introducing the idea of a touch-screen into video-game playing. That one innovation, if properly taken advantage of by the game designers, makes for incredibly original and refreshing games, the like of which we haven’t really seen before. It adds a whole new dimension to game-playing. The PSP on the other hand, takes traditional game-playing, and updates that for 2005. The PSP is a wonderful gaming unit, but it’s just the next logical step in the sequence of hand-held units. The DS, on the other hand, makes an evolutionary leap and introduces a radical new idea.
That’s not intended to be a put down of the PSP, though; the PSP and DS are very different units for very different markets. Yes, both are for gaming, but, once you get more specific than that, they don’t have much in common. Most consumer review sites are full of DS owners reviewing the PSP and saying that it sucks, along with PSP owners saying the same of the DS. I think they’re all missing the point. Being fortunate enough to own one of each, I can honestly say that I enjoy and appreciate both of them for what they are. I think the DS ultimately advances the art of game-playing more than the PSP, but the PSP looks a lot nicer and plays movies and MP3s, which is a very nice bonus (even though my entire music collection is encoded in OGG format, so I won’t be using it).
One nice thing about the PSP is that it can associate with a wireless network, which enables it to download new levels and even new firmware from an Internet connection. There’s even talk of a Web browser and e-mail client, although I think that will be stretching the limitations of this unit a little. The various hack sites have already managed to get their PSP units to do limited Web-browsing.