psp - the love hate relationship

I love my PSP, no I don't... I hate it, um no actually I love it... oh dear my head just exploded!

About a year or so ago I remember reading IGN and looking at all the latest news about the PSP and the Nintendo DS. I was trying to decide which of the two handhelds I should buy, once they came out over here in the UK... I mean I was racking my brain. Anyway, as it turned out the PSP was going to be delayed by about a year or so over here so I opted for the DS.

When I got the DS I must admit I wasn't really that impressed with it, I mean it was OK but it didn't blow me away... you know Zoo Keeper was good but not a show stopper. A short while after using the DS, however, I grew to appreciate the design and began to feel that Nintendo had actually thought this thing out pretty well.

A couple of months later, a local game store started selling imported PSP's at a reasonable price so I went and checked it out...

I swear, I was blown away by this thing. It looked amazing, it felt good, nice weight, fantastic graphics, easy menu system, superb mp3 sound quality, great headphones with inline remote and I could rip dvd's onto it and watch my fave films on the move!

What more could anyone want?

So without hesitation I just handed over the cash and hurried home feeling like a kid at Christmas. I got in, I charged it and within minutes I was playing Lumines and for a moment I knew this machine was something special, that this blows the DS out of the water and Nintendo would see the PSP become a name synonymous with handheld gaming.

So what went wrong, why is my PSP like so many others; just stuffed in a drawer in the house and almost left for dead. Well I think there are a number of reasons, and despite all the pre-release press about the PSP's battery life... guess what... It's not the battery life.

In fact the battery life is very impressive IMO and has never been an issue for me (when it was used). No, the real problem is something I think Tom at Eurogamer [Link] pointed out a long time ago and I started to realise that I was buying games that were already available in a superior form at half the cost for the PS2. These type of games were also the type of games that you wanted to enjoy in the comfort of your armchair or sofa and not in a lunch break or on the bog. As time went by I also started to resent something else: The load times! It was about this time (around 3 months) I began to have this uncomfortable feeling of relisation that this machine just wasn't geared up at all for 'on the move' entertainment hub.

It was fragile, it took too long to boot a game, you couldn't listen to music without quitting the game, dvd's took 4 hrs to convert to PSP format, the browser is crap and UMD disks self-destruct if you keep them in anything but the case they came in.

So all in all, the feeling was a bit like the time you've gone for the girl who looks amazing and offers the promise to make all your dreams come true, only to find she's no good in bed or dull as dishwater and in the morning you'd wished you'd gone home with her less good looking friend who was much more interesting anyway and probably a lot more fun.

Still, having said this, I'm still holding out. I haven't put the PSP on eBay just yet and I still believe that if Sony change their focus from 'all things to all men' to 'fantastic games', sort out the load times and offer an Xbox Live Arcade type service for 'twich' gaming... it will be worth every penny spent in the end (I hope).