As my many loyal fans will know, I’m not really a fan of the PSP. I’m not that gay for Sony in general, actually, for reasons I can’t really be bothered to go into here. Again.
So it may come as a surprise to some that yesterday I bought a shiny new PSP. A white Slim and Lite PSP, to be specific. Technically, I didn’t actually pay for it as I traded my (now, annoyingly, fully working) Premium Xbox 360 in for it. Of course, I knew I’d get a PSP eventually. As much as I hate the thing, it’s the only way to play certain games, and as you’re aware – I’m all about the games.
With it, I bought two titles I’d been after for a while – Lumines and PaRappa the Rapper. Yeah, so I have Lumines for the 360 and could get PaRappa to play on my PS2, but that’s not the point. The point is that Locoroco, Castlevania X and Me and My Katamari are not available anywhere else and I wanted them too. They’re now on order. I also picked up new game Patapon yesterday, the release of which was the tipping point to finally deciding to get a PSP.
But you want to know what I think of the console, right? Right!
The Console
It’s rubbish. Seriously. It’s so badly made and flimsy it makes the OneStation, POPStation and Gameking all look like top quality products. The shell is made from cheap crappy plastic. The R button sticks. The UMD “hatch” is starting to bend already. The battery cover keeps falling off. The little rubber things that attach the memory slot cover to the unit don’t look like they’ll last five minutes. The analogue “nub” won’t auto-centre. The power plug doesn’t fully fit into the power socket. The speakers, even when on full volume, seem very quiet. The “wifi on” latch doesn’t stay “on” (although wifi stays active). Some of the buttons are strangely placed as well, with my thumbs hitting the Start and Home buttons accidentally several times already. Perhaps I’ll get used to this, though. I did have a dead pixel when I first turned it on too, although that seems to have gone now.
Oh! And the fingerprints! I’ve not touched the screen, at all, and yet it’s covered in fingerprints already! Does it suck them out of the air or something? And what’s with the mechanism for inserting UMDs? Or, rather, the lack of any such mechanism? You just drop them in without any holder, slot or guide. It’s like there’s something missing inside.
On the positive side, the screen is very nice (although I was expecting it to be a bit glossier for some reason), but it seems to suffer from momentary burn-in – when the screen goes black, the previous image is still displayed for a second or so. The unit is easier to hold than I thought it was going to be too, and is certainly more pleasant to grasp than the older fat PSPs that I’ve used before.
The Games
First up was Lumines. It’s great. It doesn’t use the analogue nub, so the control is actually a little better than the 360 version. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same game, albeit with different “skins”. Great!
Then, PaRappa the Rapper. Which is bloody impossible. Much harder than I remember the PS1 version being from when I played that. Not that it’s bad at all – it isn’t – but I need a lot more practice. I wish they’d made the bar across the top of the screen with the button prompts on it a bit bigger though – it is rather small and hard to see.
Finally (for now), Patapon. Which is AMAZING. Such a simple idea (hit buttons in time with the beat to perform actions) but original, cute, clever and fun. And I can’t get “pata pata pata pon!” out of my head. Excellent!
The Verdict
If it wasn’t for the games, I’d feel horribly ripped of. Well, no, I wouldn’t as I sort of, technically, got the PSP for free. But I’d be disappointed. I think the trick to enjoying the PSP, like the PS2 before it, is for me to only buy those games I simply can’t get elsewhere or the limitations of the console don’t affect.
