Friday, March 25, 2005

Portable Fun

So I ran across the new Sony PSP at Best Buy today, and decided to pick one up.

First impression: The hardware rocks, and there are a number of cool games.

The screen on this thing is incredibly impressive, it's just beautiful, and the sound (with headphones anyway) is great, although the built in speaker is a bit sub-par.

As for games, I picked up Lumines, a tetris-esque type thing with beautiful graphics and addictive gameplay and Wipeout Pure, a futuristic racer that really seems to take advantage of the hardware. Both are a lot of fun, and I forsee a lot of wasted time in my future as a result. The games really feel like you're playing a PS2 game on a handheld, and just blows away anything I've seen from any other handheld system. I mean I love the Nintendo games, but technologically speaking it just isn't even close to the same thing, they're just in totally different leagues.

The bundled copy of Spider Man 2 is pretty sweet. The screen works just as well for movies as it does for games, as you'd expect, and I can totally see myself using it for them on long plane rides. I suppose there's a reasonable chance it'll catch on for people with long train rides as well, although I'm having trouble picturing myself buying all that many movies for it. I hope it'll be possible to rent them though, that would be handy.

Now I just need to sucker a friend into picking up another one so we can try out the WiFi networking...