By Ronals Diemcke
On March 24, Sony Computer Entertainment will unleash its beastly portable system in North America, the Playstation Portable, or PSP for short. At $250, the system has some of the most advanced technology available on the market out performing the Nintendo DS by leaps and bounds in terms of graphical capability. I’ve had my hands on one since December when it was released in Japan, and the system is very serious competition for long time portable front-runner, Nintendo.
The PSP in terms of style is something that your not going to feel geeky for holding or carrying around with you, its sleek black exterior looks a lot like a piece of audio/visual hardware rather then a game system. The face of the system has a 16:9 widescreen LCD with a resolution of 480×272; in comparison, the resolution of the one PSP screen is still greater then the two combined Nintendo DS screens. That means sharper image quality.
Above the screen in the speaker for the unit which delivers crisp clear stereo sound, at certain times I’ve hardly been able to believe that the sound I’ve been hearing has been coming from the tiny speaker setup on the unit.
Below the screen are buttons such as controls for the brightness of the screen which is adjustable to three different settings depending on how much light you need to be able to see what your doing. (If you are running the system while plugged into the AC adapter, a fourth super-bright option becomes available). There is also a volume control, a mute button, start, select and home buttons. While most of those are self-explanatory, the home button is a feature that makes it seem more like a computer and less like a game console. From any game, you can press the home button and quit the game and go back to the main console menu where you can play various types of media or change games, but I’ll get into that a bit later.
The rest of the controls on the face of the system are laid out a lot like a regular Playstation 2 analog controller. The classic direction pad, square, circle, x and triangle buttons are all back. The major differences to control are found in that there are only one left and right trigger buttons instead of two and the replacement of the two analog sticks with one jog control stick. The jog control stick is used in much the same way as an analog stick, but without the necessity of protruding out as far, so it’s more durable and less likely to break off. Since it hugs the black case of the unit, all you need to do it slide it in the direction you want to move.
So the controls are much like its PS2 counter-part and it ends up looking graphically just as good as any PS2 game, but is it just a game system? No – it ends up being so much more. In addition to the ability to play games, the system also plays MP3s, Mpeg-4 video, and can display pictures. The system support’s Sony’s Memory Stick Duo format for putting any type of media you wish to view and are also where you’ll store save games. The system also has a USB port so you can hook up your PSP to your PC and load MP3s or other media onto the memory sticks just by hooking the two together. You can also backup your save games onto your computer this way too. The system also has a flashable operating system so that you can update your PSP when Sony releases new software for it over the Internet. All you’ll need to do is go to a location where there is wireless internet and you would be able to use the built-in 802.11b WiFi to connect to the net and grab the updates which may supply bug fixes and add new features. A web browser, e-mail client, and notepad have all been rumored updates that Sony has been working on for the PSP’s software. Sony also intends for there to be downloadable demos that you’ll be able to grab from the net, load on your Memory Stick Pro, and then try before you buy. You’ll also be able to use the built-in wireless network setup to play games without a link cable or any extra peripheral.
Sony, being the huge media entity that it is throughout North America and Asia, is also going to be putting major motion pictures on the same UMD media that will be used to store the games that come out for the system. In fact, for the US launch, Spiderman 2 will ship on a UMD with each system for a limited time. Speaking of the UMDs, or Universal Media Discs, they are far more versatile then the SD cards that Nintendo is using for the DS as they can store up to 1.8 gigabytes of data and are based off of Sony’s older minidisk technology.
The major concern currently is battery life and it’s where Sony’s juggernaut has its biggest problem. The Japanese PSP with sound on and full brightness, depending on the game, was able to run for about 4 to 5 hours on a full battery as opposed to Nintendo’s DS which was able to last for roughly 8 to 10 hours. The good news is not only is Sony working on an extended battery, but the standard U.S. battery will be optimized by 30 percent more.
Sony expects to ship around 15 games or more in the first month alone and that will completely dwarf the number of games that Nintendo has been able to release in nearly six months. Sony has proved they can make a decent gaming platform twice now and the PSP is going to prove the third time the charm. However, one can’t have a great platform without great games, and while Sony seems to have their ducks in a row for the PSP’s launch only time will tell.