Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Wednesday 31/8/2005

It's the night before Christmas… or rather, the afternoon before Sony releases the PSP in the UK. HMV on Oxford Street will be open at midnight tonight to press the first precious black lozenges into the hands of the desperate, and the BBC want to film a quick segment with me opining about What It All Means.

I get there about ten minutes before the film crew, and hang around the games area trying to look inconspicuous. The place is crawling with journalists — I see someone from the Independent with smudger in tow, plus a radio crew hassling passers-by. Earwigging on conversations between staff, it turns out that anyone turning up at midnight on the hope of actually buying one will most likely be disappointed; most of the stock's been reserved already and nobody seems to think there'll be any left by Thursday morning. But HMV has lots of publicity, and the punters seem to be excited, so everyone's happy.

Except those who've been trying to buy PSPs from the States and Japan, where they've been available for nine months; Sony has been busy taking legal action against grey importers for 'trademark infringement', or those who've been playing cat and mouse with Sony's software, cracking the protection one week to get their own software into the system only for Sony to 'upgrade' the firmware the next to prevent them. That seems like great fun; there is so much freely available and easily portable emulation software out there that you can make your PSP pretend to be almost anything. I quite fancy turning it into an Amiga 500, which was pretty much the last time I took a serious interest in games — my later console reviewing days still leave me with a cold shiver of fear when I remember trying to find something interesting to write about Jurassic Park.

The downside is the storage: Sony's own-brand memory sticks (Cost twice as much as SD! For no advantage!) and the resolutely non-writeable own-brand mini-DVD for which you can have a choice of, oooh, thirty movies at premium prices. However, the PSP does have Wi-Fi so the chance is there for someone to produce a wireless portable disk add-on, on which you can bung your ripped bits, emulators and other warez. Then it would be kewl. Then I might even take steps to obtain one.

But be warned: it could lead you into acts of antisocial madness. Last Monday, the international journalists at the Intel Developer Forum were taken on a boat trip around San Francisco Bay. As the lights of the city burned into the fog and the Oakland Bridge towered magnificently overhead, every soul on board was captured by the eerie beauty of the view. Every soul, except for these three young hacks — who were busy playing an impromptu multiplayer wireless game involving cars. They didn't look up at the scenery — or each other — for hours. This also illustrates another reason why the PSP is at heart evil and must be stopped: you cannot hold a beer at the same time as using it.