"PSP" is neither a new college aptitude test nor a trendy synthetic drug; it's short for PlayStation Portable, Sony's foray into the handheld-gaming market. The PSP Value Pack includes the PSP unit, a disc of non-playable demos, a slipcase, headphones, various straps, remote-control doohickeys, a cloth to keep the screen clean (how thoughtful!), a 32-Megabyte Memory Stick Duo (a tiny memory-storage device which, the manual cautions, should be kept away from children prone to swallowing small objects), and a copy of Spider-Man 2 on UMD. UMD is Sony's proprietary medium, used for both games and movies; it looks like a plastic-encased Shrinky-Dink version of a DVD.
Like the Nintendo DS, Nintendo's successor to the Game Boy, the PSP carries over its company's design philosophy: The DS imitates the GameCube's extra-cool-toy look, while the PSP, like the PlayStation 2, resembles a piece of technology accidentally transported from the future. (If Microsoft ever enters the market, its device will presumably continue the Xbox's rescued-from-Roswell aesthetic.)
The PSP's ovular design puts the focus on the widescreen-proportioned monitor, while the controls make smart use of a space that's about the size of the hands holding it. In addition to the familiar square/triangle/circle/X buttons, digital control pad, and trigger controls, the PSP features an analog stick. Like the Memory Stick, it's not a stick at all–does that word have other meanings in Japanese?–but a patterned disc that functions like a joystick.
Also like the DS, the PSP has functions beyond gaming, such as wireless connectivity, a USB port, and storage space for photos and music. (Early reports that the PSP could control time and open portals to other dimensions have been greatly exaggerated.) Its non-gaming applications have their limits, however. The 32-Bit Memory Stick Duo won't exactly hold the entire Beatles catalog; users can shell out for more storage, but the PSP seems unlikely to make all other gizmos irrelevant, given that it's bigger than the average PDA or MP3 player, and clearly designed for other functions first.
As a movie-playing device, however, it has great potential. The UMD medium rivals DVDs for crisp imagery, and the sound mix works well within the headphones' limitations. That said, watching Spider-Man 2 on a tiny screen with headphones doesn't exactly take the place of watching Spider-Man 2 on the big screen, or even on TV. If the format catches on and the selection expands beyond the Sony catalog, it could be a movie-loving commuter's best friend, but no one's likely to curl up with a PSP when there are other viewing options.
The wireless feature seems likely to appeal to multiplayer-game fans, but it remains untested for the moment, since not enough PSP units have gotten beyond the hands of lonely game reviewers.
As a single-player game machine, however, the PSP already flexes a lot of muscle. Sony provided reviewers with five in-house launch titles for testing purposes, though they aren't included in the Value Pack: Gretzky NHL, NBA, World Tour Soccer, Wipeout: Pure, and Twisted Metal: Head-On. None of these games will force players to re-examine their notions of what a game can do, but that's rarely the purpose of launch titles. Mostly, they're meant to establish the PSP as something other than the PS2's slightly slower cousin. Twisted Metal: Head-On, for one, succeeds. A descendent of the cars-with-guns-in-arena-combat Twisted Metal series, it looks and behaves much like its full-sized console relations. So does Wipeout: Pure, a futuristic glider-racing game from the venerable Wipeout series.
Both point to a problem that PSP programmers haven't fully addressed yet: Size matters. Whereas playing a racing game on a TV screen can easily become an immersive experience, playing Wipeout: Pure can sometimes feel like threading a needle, while finding a distant target in Twisted Metal requires squinting, and not of the mean "Make my day" kind. It's impressive that so much detail can translate to such a small screen, but Sony's programmers are apparently still honing their ability to make optimal use of this capability.
Still, Twisted Metal: Head-On and Wipeout: Pure are their own games. The sports titles are much in the tradition of handheld units past: Scaled-back versions of the full-sized console experience that play like clunkier, arcade-ier variations, but will probably do just fine for long plane rides.
Prognosis: Currently, in spite of some appealing launch titles, the PSP is mostly about promise. At the rate new titles are appearing, that promise should soon be filled, particularly once the focus shifts from porting reasonable facsimiles of popular games over to the PSP to coming up with games that think of the PSP first. The hardware provides a solid foundation for the next level of handheld gaming, and if developers find a way to exploit the PSP's potential to its fullest, face-to-face human interaction may suffer its greatest setback since the iPod.