Schild's PSP Countdown Thread

[WayAbvPar]

You don't have to do it yourself...just post his # and we can all take turns!

[schild]

Passing out now. As of 11:50EST, infrastructure mode does NOT WORK. If I were a betting man, I'd say it would be on around noon PST. So a few hours here. There's a chance, if there's enough interest that I'll open up a PSP forum for gaming tags and whatnot since the online shit looks easy to use and most of the games in the future will be enabled. Quasi-XBL Portable = Luv.

Oh, and the DS still sucks.  :-D

[Shockeye]

I'm sure that schild has passed out from gamegasm and lack of sleep, and I'm so goddamn tempted to call his ass and wake him up, just for the sheer pleasure of hearing him slur out the word "Whorebag."

But I won't.

Fortunately for the rest of us, I am that much of an asshole.

Calling now...

[Toast]

Plenty in stock at Round Rock Best Buy.

I resisted the urge to buy one.

[MrHat]

My thumb hurts after playing Lumines for an hour.

[schild]

Every Best Buy ot 250.

Edit: And according to my friend, every single one in DC was sold out by noon. He's gonna try and find one in Virginia tomorrow.

[Trippy]

One question. What's with the "special" memory stick you need? I've got a ton of "regular" ones.

What did they change that the PSP requires a "special" memory stick. I have the feeling I've been violated yet another time by some Best Buy pressure selling asswipe.

The Memory Stick Duo form factor is much smaller than that of the original Memory Stick (about 1/3 the size) so that's why the PSP uses the Duo -- it presumably would've taken up too much internal space within the PSP to support the full-sized Memory Stick.

[Trippy]

Some PSP vs DS humor:

http://www.tokyopia.com/deluxe/pspwned.jpg

[stray]

It's a sad day when gamers consider Nintendo to be a joke.

[Shockeye]

Some PSP vs DS humor:

http://www.tokyopia.com/deluxe/pspwned.jpg

I seriously dislike the glare I'm seeing on those PSP screens. Ick.

[Fabricated]

Picked up mine today, with Metal Gear Ac!d and Twisted Metal.

Conclusions:

-Ad Hoc works at least, but I dunno on infrastructure since I don't have a wireless router. Played some Twisted Metal with one of my best friends who also got his today. Was great fun.

-Twisted Metal is great, but the controls are too twitchy for my tastes. The analog nub is no help.

-Metal Gear Ac!d is fun, with some odd balance problems (I massacred an army of guards with grenades) and a severe lack of David Hayter voice acting.

-The screen is fucking AMAZING. Blows the DS's screens completely, utterly out of the water on every level. Clarity, lighting, viewing angles, everything. The screen itself is robot jesus.

-My friend's PSP had some dead pixels on the far sides of the screen, he may send his back in. The UMD loader feels kind of flimsy, and the square button feels like it has nearly nothing until the left side of it. I dunno if Sony fixed the problems with some PSP's square buttons.

-Battery life? Unknown to me. I'm playing it hooked up to the charger since the battery isn't charged out of the box.

-Wow, the music and movies on the sampler disk fucking suck. Bad movies and worse music. The videos of the other PSP titles make me want to waste the pathetic little money I have left. It was a mistake not buying Lumines.

-Spiderman 2 looks fucking awesome on the PSP. I'm looking forward to using PSP video to throw anime/south park/family guy/etc eps on my PSP when I get enough scratch for a 1 Gig stick.

[schild]

Hmmm.

My square button is perfect.

Glare is a nonissue when you're playing.

Battery lasted 6 hours (so far, still says it has half charge, volume was at 1/2) playing Ac!d and Lumines at min brightness (I can't see needing to ever turn brightness up except with dark shit off a memory stick).

Screen very much is robot Jesus.

Nintendo is dead to me.

[schild]

How will you launch progs off a memory stick? This is how.

Playing a user-created adventure game on the PSP will require the Adventure Player UMD software and a Memory Stick Duo with the saved game data. Wannabe developers will create their own game data on PCs by using a development kit called Adventure Player Studio, which will be downloadable when Adventure Player hits retailers.

There's no doubt there will be a backdoor there to run homebrew apps. Snes9x plz.

[Trippy]

and the square button feels like it has nearly nothing until the left side of it. I dunno if Sony fixed the problems with some PSP's square buttons.

Did you mean right side? If so, that's "working as intended":

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/01/24/news_6116985.html

You can take a look at how the internal design lines up with the buttons here:

http://www.gamesarefun.com/consoles/psp/square.jpg

There was an actual manufacturing issue with the square button mechanism where it had some extra plastic that wasn't being removed causing it to stick. That problem was supposedly fixed before any US PSPs were built:

http://www.gamepro.com/sony/psp/games/news/42228.shtml


Edit: Fixed typo

[MuffinMan]

Edit: And according to my friend, every single one in DC was sold out by noon. He's gonna try and find one in Virginia tomorrow.

Came into my work at 5 and we had only sold 4 of the 18 that we had. All of the other Circuit City's in mid-Michigan only sold about 2-4 as well. Few calls to Best Buy stores around have reported shitty sales as well around here.

Any release sales numbers been put out yet?

[schild]

Any release sales numbers been put out yet?

I'm sure they'll come out after the weekend. They launched on a workday. Though every Bestbuy got an assload and opened 2 hours early to sell them.

[SirBruce]

I saw my first PSP commercial on TV last night during Robot Chicken.

Bruce

[Hoax]

I saw my first PSP in person this morning on the Muni streetcar...

Damn not only are they $250 but they are the size of a small brick lengthwise.  What in the fuck would I do with it?  Buy a fanny-pack to store my gaming device?  No thanks, handhelds that can barely be handheld and are too big for even my baggy jean's deep pockets is just..  well, stupid?

[Furiously]

Is the honeymoon over already Schild? I figure I will avoid buying one by living vicariously through you for a few days.

[bhodikhan]

Katamari Damacy - PSP

Then my life would be complete.

No. Really.

[MaceVanHoffen]

Katamari Damacy - PSP

Then my life would be complete.

No. Really.

Oh, man, I love this game.  I picked it up for $20 from the pimples at EB Games on a lark.  Fell in love with it instantly.  I am quite certain, though, that much of the game is nothing more than a Japanese drug trip.

[Jain Zar]

Katamari Damacy - PSP

Then my life would be complete.

No. Really.

From what i understand there will be a Katmari D. game for the DS though.

[bhodikhan]

I hope someone with a brain realizes that the PSP would be a better platform IMHO.  One would think a "port" to the PSP from the PS2 would be far easier than porting it to the DS. Hopefully SONY used a similar API for the PSP that resembles the PS2.

I'd hate to see a great game wasted on the DS.

[Strazos]

At least it would be a damn good excuse to whip out that stylus.

[Shockeye]

At the Wal-Mart Sucker Center near my house they had 25 PSPs in the case. I asked the best-washed employee there how many he'd sold and he told me 2 or 3.

[schild]

I'm sure there will be Katamari on the PSP. Namco, with Soul Caliber III, has shown it's love of exclusivity on Sony platforms. The sheer fact there is buzz about it on the DS blows my mind. I expect one for the PSP to be announced at E3 or one of the many big Tokyo Game Shows before this holiday season.

[Fabricated]

Some smart person figured out how to trick the PSP into going online with Wipeout.

"OK, got bored with the PSP.
 
 Wipeout game has a download option to get extra crap. But there is nothing yet.
 I thought that maby its a standard web browser.
 
 So I looked in my proxy log to find out where it was going. Got the URL.
 "http://ingame.scea.com/wipeout/"
 Firefox got a 500 error (forbidden). Damn....
 
 Whats the easyest way to block something? Restrict by user_agent!
 
 Turned on the user_agent logger in my proxy server. Got the user_agent of the PSP.
 "SCEJ PSP BROWSER 0102pspNavigator"
 
 With a Firefox plugin I changed its user_agent to that.
 Web site loaded.
 
 Wait? Its a web browser? cool.gif
 
 Made a DNS record (I run my own lookup server).
 Redirected the URL DNS to my local box.
 Put in my own index.html file.
 Threw hyperlinks in the file.
 Im now searching on Google through the PSP!"

[schild]

I already apologize for the goddamn audio. Oh, and this is the Sony Connect website - their software for conversion.

Edit: Ignore the link. Sony gets an F for effort.

[schild]

Source: The latest issue of Nintendo Power, Nintendo's official US magazine.

The official story: See below.

What we heard: What could be more fun that a diminutive alien rolling around a huge ball of sticky junk on the screen? How about a diminutive alien rolling around a huge ball of sticky junk on TWO screens? In a upcoming release schedule of the latest issue of Nintendo Power, Namco's quirky hit will roll--no pun intended (ok, a little pun intended)--onto the dual-screen handheld later this year. But despite the article being in Nintendo's own publication, a spokesperson for the company said it was "not our place to comment on the matter." Namco also insisted the Nintendo Power mention of the game was unfounded. "I can assure you that Katamari Damacy for the DS is still just a rumor," said a rep. "Namco Hometek has not made any official announcement for this title for the North American market." So did the editors of Nintendo Power just make it up? Highly unlikely.

Bogus or not bogus?: Not bogus.

That's from Gamespot - obviously. If it's coming to the DS I'm pretty confident it's a lock-in for the PSP. Which I think I said above in a post somewhereorrather.

[stray]

That's from Gamespot - obviously. If it's coming to the DS I'm pretty confident it's a lock-in for the PSP. Which I think I said above in a post somewhereorrather.

What's the big deal anyway? If it comes out on either one of the two (or both), it better be a sequel. Because as good as it was, that game was terribly short. I didn't find much replay value in it either.

[schild]

Just stopped in to say I beat the Puzzle mode in Lumines.  :-D

[Shockeye]

EA Games DO NOT Support Online PSP Play

If you've spent the past two days trying to get an EA PSP game to go online--STOP TRYING! Apparently the rumors that EA would support online play at launch were false. Apparently, the printing on the back of all the EA PSP games stating support for infrastructure (online) support are also false. Dan at Blog for the Sports Gamer tried hooking up his new PSP to play a little Tiger Woods online and couldn't get it to work. He the found this online retraction that stated he will never get it to work and most likely became disenfranchised (EA is becoming good at that). This news is rather disturbing, as I was looking forward to picking up NFL Street 2 only to play online against my out-of-state brothers. Now that won't happen.

Now if you are struggling to get infrastructure support to work for a game that actually DOES support it (like WipeOut Pure, etc.), there is a comprehensive PSP Online FAQ that has been compiled by Lt.Ping on the Official Playstation forums. Just don't expect to get Need For Speed to work for it.

[Trippy]

One question. What's with the "special" memory stick you need? I've got a ton of "regular" ones.

What did they change that the PSP requires a "special" memory stick. I have the feeling I've been violated yet another time by some Best Buy pressure selling asswipe.

The Memory Stick Duo form factor is much smaller than that of the original Memory Stick (about 1/3 the size) so that's why the PSP uses the Duo -- it presumably would've taken up too much internal space within the PSP to support the full-sized Memory Stick.

Saw this over at Slashdot:

http://www.psp-vault.com/Article63.psp

That guy had the clever idea to try out a memory stick to memory stick duo adapter designed for the Sony Ericsson P800 phone on his PSP and it worked. It's not a very practical solution at the moment since it ruins the portability factor though it's nothing a Dremel and some Velcro couldn't fix. I would expect more elegant solutions to start appearing, though I'm sort of surprised there isn't already something out now that does this (looked at the Lik-Sang.com site and didn't see anything).

[Jain Zar]

Sounds like this thing has serious teething problems:

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3139152

[Shockeye]

Sounds like this thing has serious teething problems:

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3139152

Lies. If there was a problem schild would've told us about it!