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I've had one for a week now. Thoughts are much the same as they were after I spent a couple of days with a friend's this time last year.
Looks fantastic, but then you pick it up and realise that it's remarkably flimsy. Power buttons should click into place, especially when they're sliders like this. Half the time you never know if you've turned it off properly or just slipped it into Sleep.
Attracts greasy fingerprints like nobody's business. That glossy sheen is a blessing and a curse. Being black makes it worse - this wouldn't be anything like as noticeable were it a lighter colour.
My square button seems to work fine (as far as I can tell - it's only Ridge Racers that uses the thing so far) but it's hilarious that you can actually see the lack of proper alignment with the board underneath when you look at the machine face-on. I can't believe they didn't even attempt to try and disguise the fact that it's a bit wonky.
Screen is amazing. One dead pixel on mine, but thenkfully it only shows up on white or black backrounds, and then not to a great degree. Have to look for it before you see it.
Analogue slider is silly. Moving it to the right feels significantly different - easier - to moving it to the left. Right = a more natural position for yr thumb to be in anyway and so easier to make small adjustments in that direction. Left - cramptastic, meaning lurching control of whatever it is you're controlling on-screen.
Shoulder buttons have an annoying clickiness. Worse, the one feels very different to the other. Build issue, rather than a design issue, I suppose.
I still think the speakers sound lower quality than those in the DS. Maybe not such a big problem, becuase I always use headphones with portable gaming machines anyway.
Menu system isn't brilliantly intuitive, but does the job. I still find myself having to stop and think about where certain options and bits of functionality are hidden away, though.
Anyway. Games. Ridge Racers I already knew was great. Still is. It's acutally a superior game to the 360 entry in the series, as far as I'm concerned (possibly an unfair comparison, considering that all the tracks in teh PSP game are taken from the previous games, so are automatically guaranteed to feel more enjoyable to somebody who's a veteran of the series).
Mercury wasn't too impressive at first, but gets better the further you dig into it. Physics on yr blob of liquid metal are amazing, once you start paying attention to them. I dislike the inclusion of enemies in some of the levels - it's a puzzle game, it shouldn't include that kind of random threat to your points-scoring play. The time challenges and ones where you need to split the mercury into different blobs and colours are the strongest levels, by far. Very good game.
Virtua Tennis I've played for ten minutes and thought was shit. Not immediacy to your control - try and change a direction and your player has to finish off the animation they were already in the middle of before respondoing. Also fails because of the analogue nub - it's impossible to get the sort of precision required. I might give it another chance at some point, but as I've got other things to play there seems little point right now.
Lumines. Wasn't sure at first, but it quickly grew on me. Just as with Rez, you don't really notice how your play is affecting the music until you've put some hours in and your improved ability at the game allows you to pay some attention to the other things that are going on. Some superb music, too, but damaged somewhat by the way that it forces you to go through the tracks in exactly the same order each time. Highly addictive, still. The perfect partner to the DS's Meteos.
Japanese oddity Baito Hell 2000 is odd. And funny. And clever. And bloody boring. And worrying. And addictive. Part art project, part social commentary, part cyncial piss-take of Wario Ware and other minigame compilations, part cruel joke at the expense of the player. Examination of the idea of work as play. Has you 'playing' a number of minigames that don't ask you to do much more than repeatedly press the same buttons over and over again. One has you working on a production line, putting lids onto biros, and only ends when you quit out of it. Another has you sorting chicks into baskets - male, female and dead - for ten minutes. Doesn't just riff on Wario Ware in this way, though - also includes a large number of utterly pointless unlockables (which are ten pixel high images, all lacking any interactivity) and some 'toys' that include an image of a pair of eyes that you can hold over your face and another that turns your PSP screen into a light by displaying a single colour. Seriously.
Published by Sony themselves, which gives me some hope for the future. It's nice to see a large publisher (the largest?) putting something so biting and left-field out. Does this page have anything to do with the minds behind it? I dunno, but it's almost perfect.
Taito's Exit might be the best-looking game on the console. The screen is at its best when it's displaying bright, vibrant 2D images, so this is a perfect fit. Hugely enjoyable platofrm puzzler. Has animation and control that feels like the old rotoscoped Prince of Persia games. You're an escape artist who goes into buildings threatened by natural catastrophes and rescues the inhabitants. Each of the people you rescue on any one level ahs their own skills and abilities, and you have to juggle them all to figure out a solution to get all of them out of the building before the timer runs out. Great visual style - backgrounds are all a bit Powerpuff girls, characters are all black and white film noir stick figures. If the PSP has a steady stream of games like this, it'll easily lift itself out of the hole that it's been in since day one.
On that note, just downloaded the Loco Roco demo. If there's any justice in the world - and if the full game lives up to the promise shown here - this'll become recognised as the PSP's killer app. Obviously influenced by Mercury, you move a gelatinous blob around the levels by tilting them left and right. Said blob can be made bigger by eating flower buds. If it becomes too big to get through certain passageways, you split it into a number of smaller blobs, then squidge it all back together again on the other side. What makes it special are the visuals - I mean, look at it and tell me that it's not fucking aces - and the brilliant sound. Some tiny Japanese kid's been roped in to sing the soundtrack, and the designers had the fantastic idea of making it look like it's yr blob itself that's doing the singing. So, when you split it into lots of little blobs, you get all of them singing together, changing teh melody and backing each other up while they're rolling around the world. And the soundtrack is exactly what you'd expect and want it to be - catchy, upbeat, poppy. I suspect that it'll get fucked over by Sony Europe when they localise it, so I'm importing this baby as soon as it comes out.
PSP, then. Nice enough hardware, if nothing revolutionary, with a few great games. I know there's a lot of dross out there for it, but there are also some gems. Software library can't hope to compete with that of the DS in terms of overall quality, mind. |
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