Playstation Update

Symantec announced on October 6th that they had discovered the first “virus” for PSP. I put virus in quotes because technically the malicious program is a trojan horse. This simply means you have to download and run the beast to have it cause any problems. If you do run it, however, it will delete critical system files, rendering your PSP useless.

The evil program, named Trojan.PSPBrick by Symantec, is advertised as being a hack to modify the PSP’s firmware to allow you to play pirated games. As such, if you destroy your PSP using this technique, Sony has said they will not be covering the damage under warranty (not a big surprise).

So, bottom line is, don’t download strange files claiming to hack your PSP. Especially if they don’t come from a source you consider reputable.

Uhh, just in case you already “brick-ified” your PSP:

More info at Games Digest.

The PSP was introduced with one of the strongest starting lineups of games of any system I can recall. Since then, we’ve been in a sort of slump. No great games to speak of while we wait for the holiday rush (which will soon be upon us).

X-Men Legends 2 is an exception. It’s really one of the best action role-playing games out there currently. Very good graphics and sound for a PSP game, and an impressively long play. Publisher Raven managed to cram pretty much every detail from the full size console game onto the PSP version.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, the story is basically this. The Brotherhood and the X-Men are forced to stop squabbling and join forces to defeat the baddest of the bad guys: Apocalypse. This Apocalypse character has kidnapped some particular mutants, with plans to extract certain special DNA bits, to make him even more powerful, so he can take over the world. Not exactly a brilliantly different story, but really better than most.

The best part of the game, really, is that you can play such a wide variety of characters. You can of course play as all of your favorites, but there are a few more obscure characters, like Sunfire and The Scarlet Witch. There are even a few unlockable characters. Nice! Put together a couple of your favorite X-Men with a Brotherhood character or two, and you can come up with some pretty cool combinations.

Your party consists of four characters. You control one at a time, but switching between them is quick and easy. You’ll find yourself doing this often, since certain puzzles and activities require the attention of specific characters. Of course the best way to play this game is cooperatively. The game supports both ad-hoc and online modes, where each player can control a character. Better this way than letting the AI control 3 characters, unless of course you get stuck with someone who doesn’t really follow the rest of the party, in which case the camera gets pulled back to such an extent that it’s difficult to see what’s happening.

A great game overall, I’d say. Plenty of bad-guy-bashing action fun to be had. And definitely the best PSP game to surface since the original lineup in my opinion. Check it out if you haven’t yet.

Official Site