My Two Bits
(The Editorial with one-quarter byte!)

What is "My Two Bits?"

My Two Bits is the official editorial page for the editor of Techtite.com. Techtite will accept reader submissions, for reviews as well as any editorials deemed well written and pertinent to this web site's audience.

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---This Editorial Can Be Closed By Clicking This TINY LITTLE DOT!

---100 Years to Live...? Poor You!

---Brad, Jen, Angelina, and those who give a flying...

---Long Live G4TV...

---"Big Brother," Kaysar, and The Value of a Game...

---No News is Good News...

---Paranoia, Box Office Destroy-a...

---An X-Box 360 Editorial.

---"State of the Site" Address, 2006.

---Why Hollywood Needs Its "Stones"

---The X-box 360's "Three Red Lights of Doom"

---The Bizarro PSP/360 Switch!

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No sidebar comments for this review. Yet.

The My Two Bits editorial for July 2006 is titled :

Is PSP Too "Good" For Its Own Good...?

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Yeah, I know; two PSP-related editorials in two months, but bear with me. I'm no fanboy. I just play games on various systems and if I play more games on one than another, well, that's just life. That said, allow me to disagree with the majority of the gaming planet as I say: my DS collects dust, and my PSP is right on my bedroom nightstand. That's life to this gamer.

Yeah, I know: the DS is more "fun." Why? Well, I can see why. It's because as small as the games are (little memory cards versus mini discs, after all), Nintendo has made another old-fashioned "cartridge" video game system, so to speak, and that means speed. Put in a DS game card and you're good to go, with no load times. In a world where everything is zip, zip, zip, that's good news to most young gamers.

Yet these same gamers must see how limited DS is. Does it play video and music files? No. Internet connectivity? No. Once again, it must also be said: games are on these itty bitty chips, which sorry to say, most often means itty bitty games. While waiting 7 seconds for a level to load may seem like a "long time" to little kids, the levels on a typical DS game are smaller, repetitive, and quite frankly, intended for little gamers. Sure, the DS has a touch sensitive screen, but unless you're a member of the age group who loves Magna-doodle and Etch-a-Sketch, I don't see the thrill factor of being able to draw little doodles. Younger gamers like it though, and that's cool.

Here's the thing, though: PSP has more potential. That's a fact...but that's also a flaw. No potential for a game system to do anything else, means no disappointment. Add such potential, and the whiners come in like a flock of crows. PSP has internet connectivity but too few games support it yet. It can play music but the PSP is too bulky to use as an iPod. It can play video but only "PSP compatible" video files, and since no PSP accessory can record PSP video on-the-fly (yet), this means recording digital video by some other means and then converting it to PSP, which takes twice the time. Mind you: PSP can play crystal clear DVD-quality video via UMD movie discs, but such discs cost as much as a DVD, and even a diehard PSP fan has to admit: that's just dumb. Yet the Nintendo DS is a little game system that only promised to play little Nintendo games. It does. Say what you will about the DS but it promised only gaming ---even if much "smaller" games--- and Nintendo delivered on their promise.

Yet what about all the cool stuff PSP can do...? First there's the internet. It was actually very impressive for someone over at Sony to allow this option at all; an internet web browser, right on the PSP. Why is this so cool? Well I don't know about you, but my PC takes forever to load. With a PSP I can bookmark my favorite web site and go there in seconds. As for games not using this internet-connection feature as much as gamers want (yet): pardon me for using the old mantra, but games take at least two years to produce. The PSP has only been internet savvy for around a year and a half. If you want to know where the internet-intense games are, wait half a year to at least pass the "two year" barrier, and ask again.

Then there is music and video, which I'll cover both at once, since they're pretty much the same deal. You can convert music to the PSP if you know how. You can convert video to PSP if you know how. If you don't know how, well, here's the easiest way to do it, which isn't as "easy" as it is doable. Get your PC one of those ATI TV Wonder cards to record video. Then download any of about half a dozen PSP conversion video tools. In terms of price, the new TV wonder card will probably cost you just a little more than most PC games, at around $59. As for the software: many PSP conversion tools are free. With the TV Wonder you can record anything you can see on your cable TV service; any movie, TV show, news broadcast, and all your favorite programs. From there you can use about a dozen free programs to convert to PSP's format, and very easily. As for music: if you know how to handle any standard MP3 player, you can easily copy your MP3 music to the PSP. Just put it in the folder labeled "music," and that's it.

Mind you; if your complaint is that there is no direct conversion program from video to PSP, I must agree. It would be cool if ATI or the equivalent made a device for the PSP that would allow you to record video files direct to the PSP. They already have a USB TV tuner, so all they would need to do is modify that tuner a little bit for the PSP, and put the software on a UMD. Yet as it stands, all you really need to do is convert the files, and is that so hard?

As for UMD movie discs, the gripes are simple: nice but not the price. If there is no feasible way to sell a UMD for less than a DVD, then it may be best to scrap the sales of UMD movies right now (and sadly, rumor is that's exactly what Sony has done by the time you read this). It might have helped if a UMD could contain the same extras as a DVD, and sometimes (like for Sin City or Tron) they actually do, but even then we're talking about an itty bitty disc on an itty bitty screen. Many gamers expect an itty bitty price as well, and they have a point. If there is no feasible way to sell a UMD for less than a DVD, then it may be best to scrap the sales of UMD movies right now (and sadly, rumor is that's exactly what Sony has done by the time you read this). Current plans are to sell movies for a fee than can be placed on your PSP memory card, but until we learn what sort of fee and what sort of movies are to be offered, little can be said here.

Then there are the games. Look; anybody can say they "loved" playing Super Mario 64 all over again on the DS. It's all a matter of taste. All I can say is: I had more fun playing over half a dozen PSP games in the past year:

• Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. True they came out with it for PS-2 recently but come on: a Grand Theft Auto game on the PSP is totally cool any way you look at it, especially when load times were practically nil, no matter where you went throughout a whole city(!)...
• Lumines. For decades gamers have attempted another Tetris and this was it, plain and simple. There's nothing else to say here aside from that if you never heard of Lumines you're not a diehard gamer.
• Daxter. The Jak & Daxter game series is a platform game you either love or love to hate, but for fans of the series there was this superb game for the PSP, and only PSP. Maybe I'm just a diehard Jak fan but I had far more fun playing this than playing Super Mario 64 on an itty bitty touch screen. No fanboy retort required. I'm just saying.
• Death Jr. I'm a diehard Tim Burton fan, and anybody who loved Nightmare Before Christmas would die to play this, pun not intended.
• Me & My Katamari. Okay; so the PSP has only one game "thumb stick" and that means having to control the "Katamari" with arrow keys and the four fire buttons (triangle square circle and X). It's still totally cool that they were able to fit a Katamari game onto a UMD disc, complete with all the stuff to roll up, all the cool music, and all the riotous humor.
• Tekken: Dark Resurrection. Simply put; this is a portable Tekken, with all the single player and multiplayer goodness you'd expect. Yes some idiots are peeved that you can't connect to the internet for versus play, but that's just plain nitpicking. There's just no way that the Nintendo DS will ever provide a decent fighting game on a screen that just isn't wide enough, and that's that.
• Tomb Raider Legend. No jokes, please, about having Lara Croft in your pants. The fact is that they fit a whole Tomb Raider game onto a little disc, playable anywhere. Add to that an exclusive to PSP option, to have the system make random "quests" and treasure hunts. In essence; the Tomb Raider with the biggest replay value is on PSP.
• Lemmings. It's an old game but on the PSP it just plain rocks.

True, this list is just personal opinion, but this is an editorial, so...yeah, personal opinion is allowed here. I'm just saying.

Nintendo fanatics insist that the DS has more games. Well, that's a cheap shot, because...of course it does. Any game design team that has only a little DS game chip to work with is going to be finished with their game much sooner than someone with a whole UMD disc to fill. Yet how many of these games are any good? It's a matter of quantity over quality. Yes, there are the occasional titles like Super Mario on the DS, which make it all worthwhile. Yet after too many games like "Pac Pix" I've all but sworn off any upcoming purchases for DS that do not have "Mario" in the title. Anything aside from the little guy in the red cap has been a bad DS experience for me.

Yes, I know: many gamers disagree. One Playstation magazine even titled their article about this dilemma: "PSP! WTF?" Ouch. Yet the fact is that PSP has a lot of good points to it, and perhaps, that's the problem. Nobody expects much from their DS because it's built like a toy, so they treat it like a toy...which is to say, if it's fun, they're happy. Yet PSP tries so hard to be a Jack of all Trades, it seems to have forgotten to be a game unit at its very core. The DS may be a "toy" but it has a larger game lineup, and for younger gamers, quantity trumps quality. We all know PSP is the portable system with the greater potential. It is now all up to PSP's game designers to use that potential to its fullest.

As Always: I'm Techtite, and these are My Two Bits...