While I was in the hospital a package arrived at my parent's place with a PSP (Playstation Portable). I was blown away at the gift, it was the last thing I expected anyone to get me. Now, I'm a big fan of portable gaming. I have a Gameboy Advance SP which I love. I'm still playing a fair number of games on it even after having it for over a year. And to be honest, the system I really want to try out is the Nintendo DS. I'd only been interested in the PSP as a curiosity.
All that changed once I took it out of the box and started playing around with it. The PSP itself sports a nice shiny black finish with a decent sized screen. You've got standard directional buttons, the familiar playstation square, circle, triangle, and X buttons, and a joystick type controller. There's also a left and right button at the top. It comes with a demo disk that doesn't have any playable games, but does have trailers from games and movies. The first thing that blew me away was watching the movie trailers, the quality of the video was really nice. The trailers from the games looked really slick too.
The PSP also multitasks quite well and, like Alton, I love a tool that multitasks. You can load photos, music, and movies onto the memory stick it comes with to view/listen to. Unfortunately the stick you get is pretty small. I'm already saving up to get a bigger one.
So, overall, I give it two big thumbs up with some comments as to things I think they could have done better. The first is including a slightly larger memory stick. The next would be to have at least some playable demos that come with the game. The next has to do with the kind of games. My friends also got me a game called Ape Escape. Which, while fun, felt like it would work better on the PS2 than it did on the PSP. I've since gotten Ridge Racer, Hot-Shots Golf, and Mercury. All of which feel quite comfortable on the PSP (And which I'll hopefully review in the next few days). Hopefully we won't just see lots of ports of PS2 games.
The one last thing I find myself annoyed at is the price. Though mine was a gift, if I were looking to get something for myself I'd be much more willing to just pay $150 for the Nintendo DS. I'm really not sure who Sony is trying to target with the PSP, it almost feels more like an executive toy. Especially with them releasing movies in the UMD format. Seems just the thing for the traveling businessperson.
