Back Yard of the Universe

So, Sony have finally announced the PSP2, or NGP (Next Generation Portable, apparently, and almost certainly not the name it’ll be known by when it comes out), after years of speculation, rumour and all the sort of stuff that you get in the fevered melting pot of the Internet. It looks pretty cool, what with its touchscreen, HD resolution, dual analogue sticks and more processing power than you could shake a 3DS at. I won’t bore you with the technical details of it, because you can find out all of that on better sites like Engadget, but suffice to say it seems to pack quite a bit of a wallop.

Thankfully, those horrid it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time UMD discs are gone as well. Sony originally thought they would be a new portable medium, but sadly they went the way of the MiniDisc into obscurity. The problem with UMDs was mainly that they were slow and seemed to soak up a lot of battery power (and also, they made a horrid access noise that sounded like someone scraping metal across tarmac), and also came out about five years too late, just as large-scale flash memory storage was starting to become affordable. Funnily enough, large-scale flash memory storage is also what the PSP2/NGP/whatever will use.

In terms of appearance, it looks pretty much like the old PSP, which is not a bad thing as Sony’s old handheld was surely one of the loveliest-looking pieces of consumer electronics in the last ten years. Yes, the iPhone and iPad have Apple’s wondrous minimalism on their side, but the PSP looked cool and shiny without compromising its functionality. Here’s a picture what I nicked from Engadget:

What worries me, though, is if you rewind the clock back a staggering seven years to when the original PSP was announced, everyone at the time said how cool it looked, how powerful it was, how it was going to beat the upcoming Nintendo DS, how it would revolutionise portable gaming and basically change the world for the better, so that we would all be living in peace and harmony together, black and white, man and woman, and all that crap. But, erm, it didn’t. The PSP suffered a lack of decent third-party games (well, games in general), as well as an horrendous piracy problem. Too many things on the PSP were poor ports of PS2 titles that just didn’t play as well with the single analogue nub. It also fairly poorly compared to the DS which was seen as more appealing to the mass-market with its Brain Training games and similar. It’s rather ironic that now the DS market is seen as over-saturated.

Still, let’s not get negative about it already; I get fed up enough as it is with everyone on the Internet moaning about things. Let’s just wait and see what games launch with the PSP2/NGP/thingybob and what price it is. I’m looking forward to it more than the 3DS, I have to say, and that’s not just because my less-than-20/20 vision means I probably won’t be able to view the Nintendo machine’s 3D effect properly. Roll on Christmas 2011!

I bet the battery lasts about twenty minutes, though.