Kiwi's Blog - What is Sony doing with the PSP?

RSS Bot · December 19, 2009

When this handheld system came out, everyone who wanted one was excited to get their hands on this system. I mean, they made PSP e-magazine for it, made videos that would play on the PSP, and etc. The media on the other hand didn't care much about it. Is Sony either on-board with this system, or not? Do Sony suffer from bi-polar disorder? Sigh... It an awesome handheld system with great potential! What happening to it?

Anyway, my personal experience with this system was wonderful. I preordered the system back then. EB games had a midnight launch, so I couldn't wait til morning to get mine and my car's was in the shop to fix the emission or something. I begged my brother to let me borrow his car, so I can go over there and pick it up. I brought it home and played with it til 5 in the morning. It was something awesome and no other handheld system had 3D accelerated graphics with smooth texture at the time. UMD format was awesome. It can hold up to 1.8 gig of data. Plus it uses memorystick to save games and user's personal data. I brought Lumines, Wipeout Pure, and Untold Legend. The most disappoint aspect there wasn't a whole lot of full motion video in those games(Wipeout Pure had that short intro of your ship but that had to be loaded first into memory and it plays from that).

At that time, I was visiting IGN PSP General forums. Everyone on the forums was excited with this system. The media doesn't really care about this system. IGN don't even have a permanent person to take care of the PSP side of their website. They had intern taking care of it, and one of their Sony editor staff member pitched in to help out that side of the site once in awhile. Whatever...

Back then. It is a jack of all trade system, master of nothing. Movie format when it came out, was gimped at 320x240 resolution or 48000 pixels. Audio format that can be played is MP3, AAC(I think), Atrac-3, and later WMP. It has a web browser, but the lack of RAM kills it. Loading IGN.com on the PSP is impossible due to the images it's loading. The maximum images size are limited to 1280x960 because PSP only have 2MB of video memory. Sony later added Flash 6 support, again RAM limitation kills it. Should I really explain? Flash browser format are compressed when loaded into memory. It decompress animation in real time. Any PNG or JPG images in the flash movie will be converted to BMP and that stays in memory and it'll add up quickly until it runs out of memory. A typical flash movie that doesn't have a lot of images, at 1-2 MB file size will run to the end of the movie without problem. It has audio podcast that can be streamed. Movie podcast have to be downloaded before you are able to play it, only if the movie formatted for PSP. It had that Location Free TV, which really no one really has. The features were just thrown in and it was OK. I mean, it works, but not perfectly.

The UMD format, this format is much smaller and more portable to transport. You couldn't put a DVD in your pants pocket, but you can put a UMD in a small plastic bag(keep dust, lint out..) in it. Why didn't this format take off? It's because it only plays on the PSP. If Sony would have made a UMD player that would play UMD movies on the TV screen, then I think it would have been more successful. After all, the movies on the UMD format is actually 720 x 480 resolution, so it wouldn't look pixelated when played on the TV. I think Sony missed the opportunity with this format. I don't think the prices killed it. It's the propriety nature of this format what kills it.

What is Sony doing with this system now? They made the PSPgo. There's no way to play the game you already owned on UMD. If I was Sony, I would release an external UMD drive that plugs into the unit and you can play game(music videos, movies, if you count those.) off of that. I don't like the general idea of digital distribution, especially on a game system(Wii, PSP, DSi, Xbox360, and etc) that may break. On PC, it's fine. I mean on the PC, you can fix it much more easily than a game system. With a game system, I don't find sending a game system that you brought and you're getting in return another system that may be flawed, fun. For example, I had to send my white DS to Nintendo because the L button is sticking. I got a new system in return. It had a very annoying very bright red dead/stuck pixel on the touch screen. I have a red stuck pixel on my brick version of DS and PSP, but it's not noticeable. On the DSlite, the pixels are much brighter than the other 2 system. Eventually the L button got stuck again and I sold it to someone who took it apart and couldn't put it back together(He still owes me 28 dollars). To this day, I fear that my Wii will break and I will have to deal with Nintendo and have my save files erase, since you can't back them up completely get a new system from them.

Now, I still play with the PSP. The battery that came with the system still function. The PSP does have some battle scars. It had that little nick on the screen when my older brother dropped it. It has a burn spot on the left side of the screen, that'll teach me for putting an UMD into the cloth PSP case while the PSP was in it. The system itself is surprisingly durable and a lot of fun to play.

Again, when I got the PSP. I totally ignored the DS. I was thinking, why even bother with this system Nintendo? Don't you care about making games anymore Nintendo... I thought the PSP was the future. November of that year, my girlfriend let me play the DS, and realized that I was dead wrong about that system. Castlevania:Sorrow of Dawn was the first game I played on that system. What's worse, it had FMV on it(I like FMV, what's wrong with that?). Hell, Metros had an awesome FMV telling the story about Metros. Lumines had NO FMV. Untold Legend also had no FMV. There's nothing wrong with the games itself, it had 1.8GB of space available instead of 64MB. Aside from that, I decided to buy the DS that month because that system too have potential. Now I have both handheld systems, so I have more games available for me to play.

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