I had planned to do a sort of ‘happy birthday’ post for the PSP as it turned three years old (in the US, that is) at the end of March.  But also during March I made use of my PSP along with some new software updates to do a variety of new things, and wanted to highlight the ever-growing usefulness of the device as a multipurpose device.  So now you get a merged post that will do both!

Back on March 24th, 2005 I was parked in my local Best Buy waiting patiently for 8AM to arrive.  This was clearly the moment in my life where my previous 15 years as an avowed gadget junkie (I mark my purchase of my first HPLX palmtop device as the start of that) converged with my love for gaming.  I say that because despite having a GameBoy since they released and a GBA SP since *it* released, I wasn’t much of a handheld gamer.  (in fact, I only got the GBA SP because there was a super deal offerred at release in a local store, and because I really wanted the backlight and clamshell)  I was still playing exclusively GBA carts in my DS (which I got as a Christmas present) and even that accounted for <5% of my gaming time.

So the only way I could account for my desire to drop nearly $400 on a PSP and a couple of games was that it was a really cool gadget.  So I bought it along with a couple of games – Lumines and Untold Legends, to be precise.  There were a couple of expectations I had for the PSP: on the one hand I was looking for the same thing I have always been looking for in a handheld game – classic PC FPS and RPG; on the other hand I was looking for a ‘window into the console world’, which seemed simple enough since the system was being pushed as having easy PS2 portability among other things.  We will set aside for now the pure idiocy of the fact that I have constantly been looking for FPS and RPG games on handhelds to fulfill my PC gaming desires.

It is interesting to look back at the history of the PSP over the last three years.  At the end of 2005 I did a series of articles for RPGDot looking at RPG’s for the GBA, DS and PSP.  The GBA was the clear winner at the time in terms of breadth and depth of games, and the DS was weakest with only a few mediocre entries (for RPG’s that is, even my article notes that some of the best 2005 games were on the DS).  The PSP had perhaps five games under the RPG umbrella, yet I called it ‘the best next gen handheld for RPG fans’.  So it is pretty clear that 2005 wasn’t a great year for handheld RPG’s … but while the DS started getting good games in the second half of 2005, the PSP was still struggling.

The weak points of the PSP were on display in many of the problematic 2005 releases: games felt like cut-down PS2 ports, prices were too high (this is when they were ~$15 more than a DS game on average), controls made you scream for a second analog stick, and load times just made you scream.  Of course, the seeming irony of having a touted and anticipated feature be PS2 ‘gaming on the go’ turn into a liability is much more understandable after playing control- and feature-limited games such as ‘Dead to Rights Reckoning’.

Yet at the end of 2005 the PSP had sold about as many units worldwide as the DS, and led by a considerable amount in the US.  But in May 2006 a little thing called the DS Lite came along … and the rest is history.  The only reason it matters is that the monstrous success of the DS has been the constant source of speculation regarding the state of the PSP.  2006 in general was a year of problems for the PSP – the sales charts never seemed to feature any PSP games, the hardware sales showed a battle between the PSP and GBA for 2nd place with the DS far ahead, and the games themselves were generally lackluster ports or had so many technical problems that they were hard to recommend.  And Sony seemed to have forgotten the handheld as they focused more and more on the upcoming PS3 console release. As a PSP fan, we seemed destined to endure a stream of ‘ZOMG PSP r ded’ articles and just hope that 2007 would be better!

Fortunately 2007 was a great year for the PSP.  On the games front there suddenly seemed to be a constant string of solid game releases that weren’t plagued with technical flaws.  Sony seemed to remember that they had released a handheld a couple of years prior and started pushing the system through demo kiosks and stronger marketing (well, still not very good, but better than the very embarrassing 2006 campaigns).  They also dropped the price of the system for real, as opposed to the ‘value release’ that essentially lowered the price by getting rid of all the included extras.  And technically, they still worked to plug the ‘hacked firmware’ holes, but also started releasing new firmware that actually did new things.  And finally, in September they released the ‘PSP 2000’ system that I already detailed here.

So how about 2008?  So far it is a great year for the PSP!  The first >2 million selling game in Japan is Monster Hunter Freedom G2, which has propelled the PSP to lead all other in hardware sales for several weeks already this year.  Aside from the Monster Hunter game (the series has found little favor outside of Japan but every release is an absolute blockbuster there), there are a couple of other major releases: God of War: Chains of Olympus and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII.  God of War is a new entry to the popular PS2 franchise (which GamerDad discussed here), and is an excellent game that is technically one of the best games I have played on the system.  The graphics, characters, sound and effects are just fantastic throughout, and the gameplay keeps pace with the technical aspects in terms of excellence.  Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII also looks and plays fantastic, pulling you right into the heavily storied Final Fantasy universe.

But aside from gaming, the PSP has always had aspirations of being a multimedia convergence device.  From the beginning the system could display pictures, play music and also play movies.  Sadly those features started out fairly limited, and some of them are still barely adequate.  Perhaps the best feature is also the least useful – viewing pictures.  You can set up slide-shows, page through pictures easily and so on.  I have constantly packed a few dozen pictures on my PSP, and have not shown them to a single person outside of my family.

The next best feature is watching movies.  The system could originally only play UMD disk movies with any ease, requiring movies on the memory stick to have strange names and reside in strange locations.  The system was obviously build around a hope and desire that people would buy or rent movies on UMD rather than ripping them from DVD’s they already owned.  Watching movies itself has always worked well – even better if you bought the system when it still came with the remote control that would allow you to push intuitive buttons rather than remembering that pushing the square button means … um, something.  Through the firmware upgrades the systemhas gained additional ease of use and control settings as well as the ability to name movies something you’ll remember and put them in a folder called ‘movies’.

The worst multimedia feature has always been – and remains – listening to music.  This is not due to poor sound quality – indeed, the PSP has always had excellent sound quality; I used my original PSP in tandem with a PDA and older iPod (with near-dead battery) for a while before getting myself a new iPod and the PSP sounded great.  The problem is that the system can only play songs in folders, and the folders can only be one level deep.  This is such an anemic system that it really doesn’t belong on any system claiming to be a ‘media device’ in 2008 – I checked and found that my HP Jornada 545, a Pocket PC PDA from 2000 had a more robust feature set and more flexibility!

After the first few firmware updates came out over about six months that patched security holes and a few bugs, Sony started adding on features.  The first big change was with firmware 2.0: that version added some depth to the movie, music and photo features, but the big change was the addition of the Web browser.  This allowed folks to browse the web from their PSP – though navigating the web using only the phone-like on-screen keyboard certainly never felt like anything worth doing to me.  But it did enable some other things – such as the ability to register at the Playstation site for beta testing and special demo releases.

Other features released in the past couple of years through firmware updates included the ability to play PSOne games bought from the Playstation store, more video and photo upgrades, and RSS reader capabilities for audio feeds as well as standard browsing.  The release of the PSP 2000 brought TV-output as well as some ‘under the hood’ improvements that we are only seeing come to fruition now.

For some strange reason Sony hasn’t been good at touting things people actually care about (they have been excellent at creating ad campaigns targeting the wrong things and maker users look like teenage surfer / stoner dudes).  Take the Playstation Store for non-PS3 users for example.  It had been promised seemingly forever, and was finally introduced in late November of 2007.  This should be something that every PSP owner was celebrating about and blogging and otherwise jumping up and down about.  Yet the announcement came through some fan-sites and blogs, and landed with a thud.  Yet it is well done – you download a small bit of software to connect your purchases to the PSP, then you can go ahead and get stuff and download it to your PSP.  Simple – and with the tons of PSOne games and demos and wallpapers and trailers available, every PSP owner should be using it.  Yet many I have talked to don’t even know it was released.  That is just a shame – but too indicative of how Sony has handled things.

In mid-March Sony released an update to their Internet Radio capabilities (which were introduced last November in firmware 3.80).   Though not up to the ease and capability of hooking into AccuRadio or iTunes radio stations, this provides a simple and fun set of stations that vary the content and provide a good breadth of content.  As I mentioned elsewhere, I spent the majority of March living in a hotel room, so I made use of this service and found it entertaining.

In January Sony released a firmware update (3.90) that added Skype.  Skype, for those who don’t know, is a service that allows you to make phone calls over the internet to other Skype users for free, and to land-lines for a very low fee.  It is a wonderful service – but one I have never used through the years.  But as I prepared for my month of ‘hotel living’, we wanted to be sure we could be in contact without any issues – and the cell phone coverage in our area of Massachusetts was best described as ‘crappy’.  In Corning NY, the cell coverage is excellent, due in large part to be being a valley surrounded by hills where people have dumped dozens of cell towers.  Using Skype on the PSP is very easy – once you have the hardware!  You need a headset with microphone as well as a connector with remote control, each costing ~$20 (Sony recently announced a ‘Skype set’ coming later this spring that will cut the price and hassle).  Once you have that all set, you need to set up a Skype account on your PC (or Mac) and then log in from your PSP.  Once you are there, calling is trivial.  And the sound quality and clarity are superb.  If you have a PSP and travel for business and are going to be someplace where you can’t use Skype on a PC and don’t want to use cell phone minutes, it is a definite option worth considering!

So what is next for the PSP?  The hardware still has plenty of capability, so I hope they keep pushing the games – and I’m glad that rather than trying to ape the success of the DS as much as they did in the past that developers are making things that appeal to the core PSP audience.  It is just as well, nobody is buying second-rate brain games and lawyer games on the PSP anyway (just like very few are buying graphics-rich racing games on the DS).  I would also like to see them work more on the multimedia functionality – make the system more of a viable music player.  Heck, everyone I know has at least a 1GB card in their PSP, why not make it worthwhile to squeeze a few dozen MP3’s on there?

And finally Sony , work with your supporters – for the longest time it looked like Sony was entirely focused on stopping security holes that allowed ‘custom firmware’ rather than adding capabilities and working with developers to make better games.  Sony has done little to gain any goodwill they currently enjoy, as most of their moves seem very anti-consumer.  They are fortunate that 30 million of us have seen the positive features of this cool device and bought into it, making it one of the most successful bits of gaming hardware ever.  It will likely live forever in the shadow of the DS, but it has also forever changed the landscape of handheld gaming and fueled a competition and burst of creativity that has led to a golden age in gaming on the go!

Tags: Misc