I noticed that in all the ads the picture of the PSPs menu is blue, but when I saw the actual PSP it was a lite yellow/green color. I found out that the color changes from month to month. Which is kinda cool and weird...however, they should still have a setting where you can change it to whatever color you want. I heard April's color is pink, but not sure if that is true.....(or why for that matter.)

I just checked it is a pink, rosey color.

Well go down the non-legal route. Who's caring now?

If you want bonk did you see the really cool GCN remakes hudson did for some of their old stuff.

FWIW, $150 in 1991 can be inflation-corrected to $215 in 2005 dollars. So the PSP is still more expensive.

VAIOs do/did have colour changing wallpaper. It would change the background image depending on the time of day so at night it'd be a night time scene, morning and it'd show the same scene but at dawn etc... It did it via Active Desktop and a little script in the page.

I got adventure island I still need to get bonk. Mine is from a local videogame store that sells imports but you could get it from many places online like lik-sang or buyrite

It looks much better than the screen shots (at least adventure island does) It's like it's 2d but there are 3d objects thrown in there.

Okay, I didn't know they were only imports. I'll still check it out. And sorry, I meant Splatterhouse, not Slaughterhouse (5?)

RE: PSP

Rob bought one on the way to NABX last week and holy crap... i was impressed. Lumines is the best game since Tetris! The screen on that thing is rediculously good... any car game on it is just amazing.

Ok. After playing one of my friends PSPs, and getting $100 in Best Buy certificates from the TV, I decided I could deal with getting a PSP for $150 real cash.

Game wise, the machine is damn fun. The launch titles ensure people have at least one game to grab, if not two or three. I myself got Wipeout, Twisted Metal and Lumines. All three have been great fun, with Lumines getting most of my attention on the puzzle mode. I'd like to pick up Mercury, but without the tilt sensor, it doesn't seem as fun as it could be.

Now, media wise, I'm not so impressed. Video quality of the Spiderman 2 movie included is very nice. However, media off the Memory Stick is not so nice. Seems Sony put in a 320x240 size limitation (or 368x208 for 16:9) on movies off the memory stick. So you end up seeing the unit upscale to the native 480x272. It also limits the video format. Off UMD, it can play Mpeg4 or H.264. Off the stick, Mpeg4 only. So a high retail price, and the do it yourself media options are crippled. And of course with no UMD-R or RW format, I'm stuck to the sticks only.

The photo viewer is ok for showing off pictures. I'm not sure if I can take my duo stick right out of my camera yet or not, still need to try that.

The MP3 player, well, it plays music, much like every other device under the sun these days. It it does so with no real amazing features. I'm holding an awesome LCD, and all it does is use a tiny fraction for the song info, and has no visualizers.

While the games are fun, I do still stand by my point that $250 is too much for this machine. It's odd that it launched in Japan at an equivelent price of $180. Guess Sony wanted to milk the US market a bit more, or anticipated the dollar continuing its drop against other world currency.

Sales wise, the PSP seems to be moving slower then expected. The only numbers are 500k in the first two days, and 600k over the first week. The DS did about the same on numbers both in the US and Europe when it was first released. Numbers from Japan at the end of 2004 showed the DS at 1.8mil and the PSP at 1.0mil there. Seems the lower price is helping the DS for now. Hard to say what the future holds, especially if the DS doesn't see any decently rated games soon.

I just picked up lumines and I have been playing it for bursts of 30 minutes or so at a time. Sometimes you get focused on the puzzle and then suddenly the music and enviornment change and you want to watch it instead of play the game.

I got a PSP over the weekend along with Ridge Racer and Lumines. The hardware is impressive. The screen is the best I've seen on a portable device. It fits adult hands and the analog stick is nice. I do wish the shoulder triggers were analog for gas/brake in driving games.

Mostly I've played Lumines which is a fun game if you dig the music (which I do). You've got to play with the headphones to appreciate it. If you only listen through the crappy internal speaker it'll be just another Tetris variation. I'm not a hardcore gamer. I usually don't play for more than 30-60 minutes in one sitting. So I like games I can pick up, play for a little while and move on.

Ridge Racer is fun, too, though racing games cry out for a big screen to get the immersion factor.

No doubt, $250 is expensive. Right now it's a luxury purchase for overgrown boys with disposable income like me. The $50 "value pack" is just a way to gouge the early adoptors. I believe the price is supposed to drop to $199 with no accessories after the first million are shipped. I expect it to be $199 with a pack-in game by Christmas. Lumines would be a perfect pack-in game like Tetris was for the original Game Boy.

WOW


*edit*
warning, you'd better have about half an hour to devote to this

I've got a Japanese PSP imported by somebody I know and it is pretty nice. There are a few dead pixels on the screen which are a bit annoying but can't do too much about that unfortunately. The Japanese ones have the same region code (2) as the UK just on the off chance that I might turn insane and decide to buy UMD movies. I might get one UMD movie just to see how it looks but thats it.

The only game I've got is Ridge Racer and I'm very impressed. Annoyingly somebody I know decided to use the New Game option and then said Yes to the prompt do you want to overwrite your old one so I have to start over

There seems to be a small homebrew community for the PSP as well. The initial Japanese release PSPs running v1.0 of the firmware had a backdoor in that it would allow you to run unsigned code in ELF format. All other territories and Japan now come with v1.5+ which has plugged this hole.

I'm not sure who started the rumour about the steel wool and the screen coating but I've managed to put a very light scratch into the surface already just by using it. You can't see it unless you angle the screen but it's still there. There is also a tiny flaw in the surface as well from where they applied the coating.

I was playing some Mercury last night. It's also very cool. Think Marble Madness++.

Oh. One minor problem with getting a Japanese PSP. The meaning of the X and O buttons are reversed in XMB. O = Accept and X = Cancel unlike everywhere else.

This was the original scheme but everybody else decided to swap it around for some unknown reason. There isn't any way of changing it. It only affects XMB however, the games just use whatever convention is correct for their region.

Yeah. It's very cool. Instead of being a marble, you're a blob of mercury. Many of the levels involve splitting the blob of mercury to do two things at once. Also, there are "paint shops" that color the blob of mercury, which act like keys. And if you split the blob and color each blob differently, then recombine, you get a new color. It's really neat. There are some elements of Sokoban, too.

Cool. It does sounds like it has even more possibilities for infuriating you than Marble Madness however

Yeah, I did find it sees the photos, but will not play back the movies. Seems silly for a Sony Camera and Sony Handheld to not work togther 100%, but it seems thats the norm for any large company. The pictures are very slow to access at the 5 megapixel size, and the PSP aparently does not make any attempt to save a thumbnail or smaller image. In one way I appreciate not cluttering things up, but it also makes for a slow and ultimatly pointless feature. It's easier to just show pictures back on the 2 inch LCD on the camera, and playback movies there.

Mercury is indeed a lot of fun (beyond the long load times for no good reason). The game was supposed to come with a tilt sensor though, but that got scrapped until they see what the success of the game is.

I got a decent bit of use out of my PSP while on vacation at E3, but I'm finding it sits collecting dust most days at home. It's a shame to see, but the device to me does not live up to any of the non game hype it gets, and so it serves one purpose, to play games on the go. I was hoping to see at least some useful media purpose out of it.

I've got a copy of Mercury now and damn is it hard! The actual game looks fine but the menus and text does look very dated. Reminds me of old Amiga games. Button assignment is weird as well.

Yeah, other than the actual game itself, it feels very shareware-y. And the load times are too long for no apparent reason. Still, good game.