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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---An X-Box 360 Editorial.

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

---Why Hollywood Needs Its "Stones"

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No sidebar comments for this review. Yet.

The My Two Bits editorial for May/June 2006 is titled :

The Bizarro PSP 360 Switch.

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It's a crazy world we live in. One where by the time you read this, you're probably playing the latest Tomb Raider on PSP, with no "sacrifices" to the content, story, or level maps to make it so portable. You might on the other hand be playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion on the 360, with great graphics and everything else a table-top game system should offer these days.

Yet you might also be going to these systems' Main Menus, without a game disc inserted, to have some fun elsewhere. By now (with any firmware upgrade of version 2.0 or later) you can log onto the internet with PSP. You can do the same on the 360, albeit exclusively to X-Box Live. One system allows you to download simple games under 64 MB in size, and play them on the fly. The other system is a multimedia powerhouse, allowing you to play video clips of your own choosing, plus photos and music. Can you guess which of these two systems I'm talking about, for each feature?

Don't be too quick to guess if you don't know. Jumping to my point (in three paragraphs, so yes I'm long winded), I find it very odd that the best features of the 360 should've been what the PSP had, but Sony was scared away from them, so no dice. Microsoft in turn was scared away from making the 360 the multimedia center it deserved to be, so no dice. Seriously: why is it so easy to play a classic game of "Joust" on a video console powerhouse, yet it's more easy to play DVD quality video...on my PSP?

All the features PSP has should've been on the 360. MP3 files play with ease on the PSP, but not on the 360. Photos are so compatible with PSP you can actually insert the photo Memory Stick from a Sony-compatible camera to your PSP and your PSP will recognize it. As for video; there are many free and shareware programs that will convert your AVI, MOV, or MPG files to the PSP format, and some will even let you choose what resolution to convert them in (say, if you want a pan-and-scan image to be stretched to the PSP's widescreen format or not). Neat.

Yet the 360 can do something that the PSP can't. That is, it's X-Box Live feature allows you to download little programs of 64 MB or less and play them via the hard drive (or a 64MB memory Unit) at any time. This is a feature that would've been best for the PSP, but it is not available. How cool would it be to play downloaded classic video games on the PSP, just by downloading them to your PSP memory stick? Such games would seem to be perfect for the portable PSP, but apparently Sony is afraid that such technology would be used inappropriately to, say, hack into popular UMD games and sell them as free downloads on the internet. Not that this would be an easy task, but I doubt Sony wants to take any chances. So; no downloadable games for the PSP. Bummer.

Mind you, the 360 can download demos as large as a gigabyte to your 360 hard drive and play them with ease; same as small "full" games, which X-Box Live Arcade sells on a shareware basis (you download sample levels of a game for free and if you like it you pay for it and the game "unlocks"). Yet the 360 cannot play back "any" video clip, and that is disappointing. Imagine all of the people who see the "record" button on their remote control for the 360, thinking they can record video. Nope.

Instead, the 360 is only compatible with a Microsoft approved "Media Center." What the heck is a Media Center? Well, it's a Pc with a specially fine tuned version of Windows. Which is to say it's not a well-known PC at all. Which is to say, aside from elite people who own such a PC, the idea of playing video on the 360 is bunk. You can download a film trailer or two from X-Box Live but when you cannot playback your favorite TV series (a la iPod) or home videos of your own design (a la PSP), that is disappointing, indeed.

If you ask where I'm going with this: well, nowhere, really, but it's interesting to think about for awhile. How odd that a portable game system these days is the best way to play back your favorite video files, while the tabletop game system is the best way to play a classic arcade game? You'd think that would be the other way around. In today's world of video games, things are not so cut and dry. If anything they're downright bizarre.

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