What can I say… I’ve already finished my gaming backlog except for games that I expect to drop in price soon… no other games due until the end of the month… and they had Lumines and Untold Legends…
I am weak. :oops: :cry:
Nice screen, and no dead pixels. Incredibly flimsy plastic parts, though, and the lack of a clamshell is a step backwards compared to SP and DS. The cheap textile cover Sony threw in with the “Value Pack” doesn’t really cut it, either. I got a Logitech clamshell case, somewhat expensive but very stable – you can use the device without taking it out, and you can leave everything plugged in while the case is closed.
I hadn’t realized that Lumines and Meteos are made by the same team – Q Entertainment, published by Bandai. Are these guys on a roll or what? Any other brilliant Q puzzlers that I should know about? Lumines is even purer genius than Meteos. The color matching plus having the 2x2 blocks break into two columns when one side lands on a column makes you twist your brain into knots, trying to predict the final pattern. This plus the time line and the special blocks is perhaps the absolute minimal set of changes that you could possibly apply to Tetris in order to create a totally new and compelling game. These guys are the Miyamotos of puzzlers!
Untold Legends is a classic case of misrating due to reviewer boredom. You see, it’s the same exact game as the overrated Champions of Norrath for the PS2. Same random dungeons, same load times (in fact I thought the PSP is slightly faster), same graphics, same gameplay… even the music sounds similar. The only changes are the setting (fairly decent generic human high fantasy instead of EverQuest’s elvish idiocy), the dialog (scrolling text instead of cutscenes and speech – a good thing as CoN’ cutscenes were pathetically bad), and so far an improved game balance (mobs were beefed up and bosses are not as impossibly hard).
If anything UL should be rated higher than CoN, mabye by half a point or so, since they managed to pack a slightly improved version of a PS2 game on a handheld. Instead everyone is moaning how it’s “more of the same”, complaining about the exact same problems that didn’t seem to matter with CoN, and docking the score by 10-20%!
Ignore the foolish reviews. While I’d still rather play Diablo or Dark Alliance, Untold Legends is certainly serviceable and definitely the best game of its kind to be had on a handheld.
Since this is a PSP thread… anyone had luck connecting to wireless networks? I wander the streets and the ‘none’ encrypted ones still don’t let me in… when I tell the machine to open a browser on connect it just seems to go onto a blank page.
Um, you don’t get a free Internet connection with your PSP. You need to provide your own connection and your own wireless router that your PSP can hook into. Also, you must enable wireless connections with the little sliding switch on the lower left.
No problem connecting to wireless networks here. I’ve been able to connect to my work and my neighbor’s wireless network, as well as a couple random networks that were visible from various places I’ve had lunch at.
Yeah, I can connect, I just don’t get anything happening. I figure the networks are all locked up nice and secure. Was hoping to see more open ones hehe.
Looks like the drop bears have a lot of cash. Last week’s Australia sales charts show only a single non-PSP title among the top ten! (And that one’s a Pokemon game for the GBA – nobody’s playing non-portable consoles down under anymore?)
In England it just outsold the DS launch approx 2 to 1. My guess it’s the same all over Europe - marketing was massive here, while only a few busstops had DS posters. I don’t think anybody but the hardcore noticed that launch.
Evertbody knows what the PSP is, question is how that translates into sales.
The PSP did seem to sell rather briskly here as well, although I don’t know how much stock the stores received to begin with. Nobody had anywhere near those 35 vaunted launch titles, though – I counted about 10-12 different titles that were actually available.
Interestingly, out of the 17.2 million UMDs shipped so far, only 9 million are games – the rest are movies. And Sony expects the movie share to increase above 60% while predicting total UMD sales of 130 million by 2008.
Personally I have zero interest in watching movies on that tiny screen so I hope someone will still make a game or two for the PSP…
Gamefly carries UMD movies and the airport dvd rental kiosks in the US also carry them for rental (rent at say, LAX, return it when you land in new york)
They are certainly advertising like crazy. Even here in Finland, the PSP ads are absolutely everywhere. On the other hand, I don’t remember seeing a single Nintendo DS ad here when it launched. I think interest in handhelds is pretty low here (Finland) in general, so it will be interesting to see how well the PSP sells.
