Category: Otaku

The other day I bought one of the new model Playstation Portables (PSP), the ‘Piano Black’ version.

Very little has changed, as you can see from these comparison shots (courtesy Famitsu), in which the new model is at the top:

The new model, which everyone now calls the PSP Slim, is a little bit thinner, and more than a little lighter. While the changes look (and are) subtle, the end result is a unit that is more comfortable to hold and play, especially for long periods. Furthermore, the PSP Slim has more onboard memory and the OS now has built in UMD-caching which means load times are reduced, in some cases significantly. The screen seems a little better as well. I did comparison between my two PSPs and the shadowing on the new screen seems less noticeable.

I also have zero dead/stuck pixels on my new screen, which is 2 or 3 less than my old PSP 🙂

My conclusions? Well, if you have an old PSP (and I think only one person reading this does) then this is only worth the upgrade if you play it a great deal. Furthermore, the battery life of this unit is actually less than the old model due to a smaller battery (which can be expanded with an additional purchase). The addition of TV out capabilities is meaningless to me, so I’m not factoring that in.

If you don’t even have a PSP, does this new model warrant buying one? In a word, “No”. The PSP is still an answer in search of a question. Sony continues to muddle the marketing (games are listed fourth on the box) and the fact that they have not yet abandoned the foolish proprietary UMD disc format is a sign they don’t seem serious about the future of the system.

Great games do exist (for instance, Monster Hunter 2 and Jeanne D’Arc both came out in the last month), and many others are on the way. So it’s not as simple to dismiss the PSP as bereft of good games. But at the same time we only has so much free time, and handheld gaming time is much better spent these days with the vastly superior DS Lite.

(Unless your a total game maniac like myself, who now owns not one but two PSPs…)

Ok, so the title is the name of a real arcade game Capcom released some years ago. But I’m co-opting here because of something I found this past weekend.

Through a secret source, I came into possession of two old issues of Dragon magazine, one from 1992 and one from 1986. Each are fascinating reads, an absorbing glimpse into the history of RPGs, and one into an era in which MMORPG’s (such as World Of Warcraft) hadn’t killed the industry.

< Dragon 117, January 1986 For those that have followed AD&D over the years (such as myself) these magazines are also an interesting look at how the game once was. More of a roll-playing game than a role-playing game, each issue is full of all sorts of charts and tables that allowed the GM to basically randomize everything (such as the wind speed and temperature of a cyclone...). Diehards back in those days seemed to embrace such an approach, perhaps even celebrate it. Therefore the following quiz, taken from the pages of Dragon 117, may very possibly have seemed a little less absurd to the readers of the day then it does to us now? < Can you answer Q10? I also obtained, from the same source, the rulebook (all 14 pages...) of a 1980 TSR sci-fi RPG named Star Frontiers: < Is that Chewbacca on the right? Believe me when I say it's as awful as it looks :)