Playstation Update

Last week, Ubisoft released the first Prince of Persia game for the PSP: Price of Persia Revelations. A good part of the game is simply a port of Warrior Within, but there’s also a good amount of new content. Prince of Persia series executive producer Yannis Mallat says that a good 1/3 of the game is actually new, so it might be worth looking at, even if you’ve already played Warrior Within on PS2.

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The PSP version of Rockstar’s tremendously popular Grand Theft Auto series has to be one of the best games available for the PSP. As always, plenty of sex, swearing, and wonton violence round out the picture. Ok they are the picture. If you don’t already have this game, you must get it.

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Technorati Tags: psp, reviews, gta, grand theft auto, rockstar, playstation

Scheduled to be released in the second quarter of 2006, Pursuit Force should be a rockin good police chase game. It received the Gamespot “Editor’s Choice” award for the best PSP game at E3 2005.

In the game, you play a rookie cop in the fictional Capital City. Your job is to clean up gang-infested streets in the five districts of the city. The best way to get that done, of course, is with lots of interesting vehicles and large weapons. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, speedboats and helicopters will be available for your enjoyment. And what fun you’ll have with 25 different weapons to use to complement the vehicular mayhem!

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Sony has been trying desperately since its launch to sell the PSP as more than a portable game system. You can of course play music and video on it. With the 2.0 firmware upgrade they introduced a web browser. The latest and greatest use for the PSP is Talkman, an “interactive phrasebook”.

Using Talkman, which is available in Japan, you chat with Max, a blue bird that speaks English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. You select your native language the first time you fire up the UMD, and then you can have Max teach you how to say “how much does this cost?”, and “where is the bathroom”, in whichever language you like.

I seriously doubt this will make it to the US. There’s just not that much use here for learning to say things in Asian tongues. Maybe if it’s extended to include Spanish and French. Still, I think it’s an interesting demonstration of what Sony thinks is possible with the PSP.

From Gamespot.

Technorati Tags: psp, playstation, talkman

Capturing the look and feel of the larger format SOCOM games, Fireteam Bravo for PSP is being called the best shooter yet for the PSP. In the game, you play “Sandman”, leader of a two person SEAL team. Lonestar, your partner, is at your disposal. You may tell him to be aggressive or defensive, as well as issuing more specific commands like “defuse”. Yeah, that sounds like a good thing to have the sidekick do for you.

The single player game spans 14 missions in four locations: Chile, Morocco, South Asia, and Poland. All excpect Chile overlap with SOCOM 3 for the PS2. This is where the “cross-talk” between games comes into play. By completing certain missions and secret objectives in each game, you can unlock skins and weapons in the other. The sync is accomplished by connecting the PSP to your PS2 via a USB cable. If only the PS2 supported WiFi, this could be a little less convoluted. The PS3 will supprt 802.11b/g, so I guess we’ll have to wait a bit for wireless sync.

You can play with up to 16 players in both ad hoc and online modes. Sounds like one of the most impressive online PSP games to date, with leaderboards, clans, message boards, and so forth. Modes include team deathmatch, hostage rescue, free for all, and a couple others.

Detailed review at Gamespot

Technorati Tags: psp, socom, playstation

Ok now this is pretty cool. If you update your PSP to the new firmware release 2.50, you can now stream video over your wireless home network, or even over the internet at a hotspot if you have a fast enough connection. This is an expansion of Sony’s LocationFree program, which up until now has been supported on certain Sony TVs/Monitors, and on their Vaio notebooks.

The catch is you have to pony up $350 for Sony’s LocationFree wireless base station and software. Attach this thing to your home entertainment center, and you can stream live tv, dvds, or pretty much anything else over the internet to your PSP or PC. With an onscreen “universal remote”, you can control most major brands of a/v devices. So basically you can log in, switch your equipment over to TV, change the channel, and start watching your show over the internet. Pretty slick. Now if they can get it set up so it can rummage around and find the DVD you want, that would be helpful. I guess this is when a massive DVD changer comes in handy.

I think this is a fantastic idea, but they should really let you do at least part of this for free. Logging in to your network and controlling your TV is cool, but most people aren’t going to shell out $350 for it. What they need is an idiot proof server that you can run on your PC, that will let you at least stream your own digital video and music over the net. Now that I would really be interested in. Or partner with TiVo so I can stream my TiVo shows over the net. Yeah, that’ll happen.

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A new budget line of PSP games, called “The Best” has been announced in Japan. The PSP has been on sale there for about a year now, so it’s time to start repackaging the old games and selling them for a bit less. Similar to the PS2 “The Best” line (that would be equivalent to our “Greatest Hits” here in the US), these will be older games that have sold well.

The first round of “The Best” in Japan will be:

• Metal Gear Acid
• Minna No Golf Portable
• Vampire Chronicle
• Mojipitan
• Ridge Racer
• Lumines
• Armoured Core Formula Front

Sony has not announced any plans for a “Greatest Hits” line for PSP in the US, but I would think within the next 6 months to a year we’ll see something similar.

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I came across something interesting today. PS3Forumz is holding a contest where you can win a free PSP. All you have to do is register on the site, and post once a week, and they’ll enter you in the drawing.

If you really want a free PSP, post more. For every 30 posts you make, your name will be added to the list again for the drawing. It’s a brand new site, and there aren’t too many users registered on the site yet, so you actually have a chance of winning. I just registered as “gary”, come say hi.

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Just what everyone needs! A device to clamp onto the front of your Playstation Portable, so you can watch tiny games on your giant TV. No joke, I think there’s a teeny little camera stuffed in this hideous device, which pipes the screen output through a composite or S-Video output to your screen.

For a mere $99 you can inflict this atrocity on your PSP, though be warned, according to the manufacturer’s website, the device is for “educational purposes only”. Uh, not exactly sure what I’m supposed to learn from this thing, but we’ll just let that go. Quotes from (likely fictional) source proclaim: “Widescreen Bliss!”, “The Most Anticipated PSP Accessory for 2005/2006!”. You must check it out: pspontv.com.

Just what I always wanted.

From Engadget.

Technorati Tags: PSP, tv, pspontv, playstation

Sony announced this morning that it has begun selling a new software package for the PSP called “Media Manager”. The PSP has been marketed as an all in one entertainment package from the get go. It will play games, obviously, but it’s also supposed to be useful for playing music and videos, picture viewing, and so forth. This new software makes it easy to get all this stuff from your computer onto your PSP.

Trouble is, they want $19.95 for it. It should be free. Apple doesn’t charge you $250 for your iPod, and then expect you to shell out another $20 to be able to actually get music onto the device. Just go download iTunes, and you’re off.

Come on, Sony. If you want people to view the PSP as an all-in-one media device, you have to make it easy for people to get their goodies transfered onto it, and you can’t charge them for it. Give the software away, and you might find that in time, more and more people are using the PSP for media. You might even find that you start to acquire users that use it primarily for media, rather than for games. If you really need the extra money, give the software away, and start selling downloadable music and videos a la iTunes.

Sony Press Release
Official Sony Download Site

Technorati Tags: playstation, psp, audio, video, media, sony