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State of the Industry - The Ramblings of a Nintendo Fanboy by Link

by rawmeatcowboy
20 October 2005
GN 1.0 / 2.0

State of the IndustryThe first edition of a weekly editorial by one of our new staff members, Link. Inside Link talks about how he feels the video game industry is doing as a whole, all the while keeping his Nintendo fanboy status. Check out his first editorial below, and click the more… link to read it in full.

To PSP or not to PSP?

The PSP has been out now for 7 months, so I think this is a good opportunity to see how the PSP is doing from a Nintendo fanboy point-of-view. It is important to note that a Nintendo fanboy does not care about multimedia capabilities and sometimes, graphical power. With this in mind, lets look into this PSP phenomenon and wonder why it is as successful as it is.

Let me start off by telling everyone what PSP stands for. It’s not “PlayStation Portable” like most people thought. It actually stands for “Ports from the Sony Playstation.” Don’t believe me? Take a look at the game library. Wait a minute, did I just say game library? Is the PSP a gaming machine? Did I just blow your mind? You might not believe it, but Sony did originally intend to release this as a videogame unit with multimedia capabilities. It was not intended to be an SNES or Mac OS 7 emulator. I think Sony has done a less than stellar job trying to combat these homebrew hacks and realized that without them, the PSP would have to survive on its UMD movie and game library, and they realize maybe allowing homebrew applications can sell this thing more than the current game lineup ever could. The way they have slowly fought back against the hacker community has proven this to me.

Now onto the “Ports from the Sony Playstation” argument I started earlier. Honestly, what gives Sony? Do you just not want to try? Was this system just a way to sell UMD’s? Did you realize you released a unit with horrible battery life just like the Game Gear, Lynx, and Turbo Express (read the end of the article to read about the Turbo Express) and realized they all failed, so desperate times call for desperate measures? Allow homebrew apps? Allow cracking the multimedia capabilities to allow porn and illegally downloaded DVD’s? And the final desperate act, releasing port after port after port even though you specifically said that you would be encouraging developers to create new franchises for the PSP? When they do port a game over, they basically add multiplayer features onto the identical game that you can find for the Playstation 2. Just call this thing a PS2P because that’s what it is! Lets look at the current games ported
over to the PSP, shall we?

Wipeout Pure

Ridge Racer

MVP Baseball

Burnout Legends

Dynasty Warriors

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition

Need for Speed: Underground Rivals

NFL Street 2: Unleashed

NBA Street: Showdown

Tony Hawk Underground 2: Remix

ATV Offroad Fury Blazin’ Trails

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006

X-Men Legends 2: Rise of the Apocalypse

FIFA 2006

Madden NFL 2006

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects

NBA Live 2006

Star Wars Battlefront 2

SSX On Tour

Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire

The Sims 2

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Hot Shots Golf: Fore!

And the worst port of them all, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. The reason this is the worst port of all is because I am a huge fan of the Grand Theft Auto series and I am extremely disappointed that the system seller/must have game/killer app is no more than a port of a game 3 versions ago and 5 years old! Not only is it a virtual port but also the multiplayer is not truly online. Rockstar Games chose the ad hoc mode so be prepared to have a friend right near you to play this game multiplayer!

When Sony does decide to have an original game come out for the PSP, they are less than stellar (with a few exceptions, i.e. Lumines).
Death, Jr. was the first game ever announced for the PSP and it came out with luke warm reviews. But don’t worry, I am sure Sony will be bringing out their console platformers like Jak and Ratchet and Clank which should sell the system but of course they should, they are ports of the console version.

Let’s look at prices; most new releases for the PSP cost as much as the console counterpart with some even higher than the actual console version, which most people should find ridiculous. Memory cards for the PSP are obscenely expensive completely ruining the barriers of entry for the casual fan to get into this system for the multimedia features. The game lineup definitely is not attracting people to this system.

I am not going to get into the display and need for Playstation 2 level graphics in a handheld because I feel that this can be argued but my other points are something I consider factual. As far as graphics are concerned, next generation graphics are not what makes a game good!

I hope you took this with a grain of salt considering I am a Nintendo fanboy but I hope I made some points that everyone could agree with. Wanna yell at me for this article? Go crazy and email me@dougkaplan.com with the subject “PSP or not PSP.” I will try and get back to every upset PSP/Nintendo hating person out there.