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What The Sony PSP Really Needs

The PSP Background

A while back, I decided to spend some of my hard earned money on Sony’s PSP handheld. The rationale behind this was that I was going to college and would be without a television, and it would be nice to be able to have a mobile hand held system to play games on. I had a choice between the Nintendo DS, and the Sony PSP. I did some research on the subject, and a couple days later I decided to spring for the PSP. I’d say there’s a 98% chance I went with that particular handheld because of my very large ‘I love Playstation’ bias – but it’s hard to be objective in that respect, considering I haven’t actually sat down and played on a Nintendo console for a few years, but I digress.

I eventually found myself with a brand new Play Station Portable, a couple games, and lots of free time.

The trouble with the PSP

Fast Forward a couple months. It’s at this point where I was able to pick out three problem areas that Sony had created for itself in the areas outside of Japan – where the PSP hand held is ridiculously popular; and one problem that affects everyone. Especially in the last couple months, new releases have been sparse, and the game selection we have gotten is complete crap. On top of that, Sony refuses to allow any sort of home brew on the system – which means that I don’t get to play SNES games!

When I bought the PSP, I bought it with the idea of it being similar to the playstation – plenty of games, and plenty of good titles. While Asia consistently has a steady flow of new titles coming to it – more often than not, North America and Europe received the scraps. After I bought the system, I started following the PSP Fanboy blog, and with each release week I became more and more angry at Sony and the PSP. Japan naturally got all the attention, and the rest of us were getting translated ports of games that were bad to begin with (Japanese RPGs! Gasp!). I understand of course, that because the system is so popular in Asia, most of the third party development interest lies over there; but I’m pretty confident that if the right titles were ported, and if the right kind of third party interest was sustained, the PSP’s ‘outside Japan’ game catalog could become a force to be reckoned with. Things have been looking dim the last few weeks – PSP owners like myself haven’t been seeing many releases worth looking into on the system. Perhaps the last one worth noting was the port of the Playstation cult hit ‘Star Ocean’ a while back – with mixed reviews among game critics.

Homebrew is also an issue that I’d like to discuss. Unfortunately, the word ‘homebrew’ has some large devious connotations to it. Most notably of which is probably the emulator scene – the legality of which is a large gray area. And while it does bring a small tear to my eye, Sony has decided to try their best to lock the console to people who are interested in running emulators and things of that sort, because obviously they could become liable in a lawsuit by not at least making an effort to thwart people interested in running emulators by downgrading the console’s firmware. While I myself would absolutely LOVE to get something like that working on my PSP, I am equally interested in the good kind of homebrew. The kind where ‘garage coders’ throw together their own homemade games that can be played on the console. Something along the lines of Microsoft’s XNA program could potentially improve both interest in the PSP, and it’s shelf life.

Final thoughts

I don’t need my PSP to make phone calls, I don’t need it to play movies, music or whatever. All I want it to do is play games – that is it’s primary purpose, is it not? I think Sony needs to focus on generating third party developer interest in the system outside of Japan so new IP becomes generated, and we aren’t stuck with the same old shoddy, at best, game selection that we’re stuck with now – especially those gross ports of junky Japanese titles. I also think that Sony should, in an effort to generate interest in the system, and to increase it’s longevity, should actually start a similar program to Microsoft’s XNA initiative. Embracing the homebrew scene, to me, always seems like a smart idea worth considering. I’d also like to be able to run an emulator without jumping through hoops, but we can keep that between you and me.

Hopefully in the next couple months, we’ll start to see more games being released here in the States – but I’m not holding my breath. The DS lineup is getting better and better, and the PSP’s is getting thinner and thinner. It makes me sad. We need better games, more often.

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