I bought a PSP about three months ago, but I don’t think you can review hardware until some time has gone by. Three months probably isn’t really enough, but I’m not sure I’ll remember to do this in a year.

The PSP follows the same uninspiring marketing strategy as the PS3, which that “this machine is not just for games". Maybe because the PSP doesn’t HAVE many games, at least not compared to the DS. But it has almost as many that interest me…I’ll be honest—the games I’m interested in are ports, remakes and scaled-down sequels—specifically Peace Walker (Japanese demo available here). But that turns out to be nearly the same as the DS for me. The exceptions are Lumines and Elite Beat Agents.

At first I was only interested in the PSP for playing games when visiting my parents’ rustic Tennessee home, but it turns out it does all the things I wished the DS could. In fact, I would guess that most PSP owners start to think of it more as an iPod competitor than a DS competitor. The biggest difference is that the PSP has a physical disc drive and no touch screen. Also, the PSN has Final Fantasy Tactics for sale and the App Store doesn’t.

The web browser doesn’t work very well compared to Mobile Safari, though. It tends to run out of memory for complex sites or at least render them incorrectly. It has tabbed browsing, but of course three tabs use 3x the memory. To compensate, Sony built in some common internet apps like radio and Skype. I haven’t used Skype yet, but the radio works fine. However, my main use of the browser has been to read books. I used GutenMark to chop up Project Gutenberg books into chapters and read them while waiting for the bus. I’ve also all but replaced my paper Bible with mobile.biblegateway.com.

The other reason that the PSP makes me think of the iPod is that both are sleek gadgets. The PSP d-pad is the best one I’ve ever seen or used. The buttons are at least as good as the PS2’s, although they are not colour-coded (a point which is unimportant except when playing a Daxter whack-a-mole game). And the screen looks really good. I don’t know what the pixel density is compared to the iPod, but I think it’s brighter because the PSP sure burns through battery faster than an iPod. Unfortunately, the screen has problems with dead pixels; mine shipped with one and got another one on my cross-continental road trip this summer. The Internet claims that this is an ongoing problem that fluctuates slowly.

The back of the PSP is not as sleek and shiny; both the battery cover and the UMD cover move a little when closed. The bigger problem is that UMD is an idea that could most generously be called “audacious” in 2004 but as flash memory has gotten cheaper and faster, in 2009 is outright bad—there are now better ways to deliver up to 1.8 GB to people. In addition to eating up battery life, I play most of my UMD games with my isolating headphones because the whir and grating of the drive head is so loud. Even worse, UMDs are fragile; I bought Metal Gear Portable Ops used and the plastic cover had gotten popped in a little so that the disc would not read without some case-bending.

Fortunately, more and more games are available on PSN. Although I prefer the wider size of the PSP, the UMD-less PSP Go has forced Sony to make new games available online. I don’t expect to buy many more UMDs. Besides, the PSN also has indie games which aren’t for sale in stores. Sony has something of a reputation for getting more good indie games than Microsoft or Nintendo, and the PSP games follow this trend.

Of course, part of that could be that a lot of them are ports from the PS3, like Everyday Shooter and flOw. But there are also cool original games, like Holy (Invasion of Privacy,) Badman! and Half-Minute Hero.

Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!

Holy Badman is an ecosystem game—like a cross between Peter Molyneux’s Dungeon Keeper and an ant farm. You play an ancient wrathful god woken up by the latest evil overlord. You excavate his underground lair in such a way as to kill all the heroes coming to defeat him and banish you.

It’s a fun idea, but more as a proof of concept: I downloaded the demo, but I don’t feel a real need to buy the game, because it’s MORE fun just build a dungeon without worrying about the oncoming heroes. The translation is also really good: it’s a very loose style; the game title itself is indicative.

Half-Minute Hero

Half-Minute Hero is another demo—it’s not been released yet. I probably will buy this one when it comes out, though. 30-second Hero is a JRPG you can play in 30 seconds. Well, almost. Some levels have a statue where you can pay the Time Goddess to rewind time. The cool part is that it’s actually fun! And it actually captures everything you do in a typical JRPG except the story!

Here’s how it goes: you start off in the field. Walk in circles to get into random battles. Press left to fight enemies. Level up from getting experience. When you get low on health, enter a town (which pauses the timer) and rest at an inn. Then buy a better sword. Repeat one more time, then dash across the bridge to defeat the evil overlord before he can muster the power to cast Ultimate World Destruction.

Sounds pretty familiar, right? I know, I know, you’re missing the deep storyline. But in levels with rewind, you’ll probably have enough time to:

1. get an old man his medicine
2. defeat a giant boss monster
3. go on a pointless side quest through a swamp and a cave

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

Since the real reason I bought a PSP was to play Metal Gear, I bought Portable Ops already. It’s best described as the original Metal Gear, much modernised. There’s not much story, and everything is divided into discrete environments that only hold a few buildings each. The heart of the game is starting from point A and getting to point B (marked with an ‘X’ on the map.)

Along the way, you are supposed to return knocked-out soldiers to point A. This is the only real new game mechanic: after you’ve captured soldiers, they will spy on the other locations and steal supplies. The rest will back up Snake on missions. Because Snake is so awesome, this would be superfluous, except for two things: disguises and inventory. If the soldier matches the level, he will be disguised and will not trigger an alert unless you parade him right in front of a guard. Inventory is also limited to only four slots per person. This makes Snake essentially a pacifist, because once equipped with a tranquiliser pistol and some healing items, he only has one slot left for on-site procurement.

The new system isn’t tremendously fun, but at least it’s different and interesting for a while. I had to replay one of the longest sneaking segments in the game because I forgot to give at least one soldier TNT and a decent rifle for the boss at the end of the level, neither of which were advertised ahead of time. The story-based excuse for this is weaker even than “Rescue the Hostages” from the first Metal Gear, though. It’s thin enough that I wonder whether Kojima was much involved with the game, or whether it was just reusing scaled down resources from MGS2 and 3.