Sony Rolls Out PSP go Offerings
San Francisco plays host to SCEA's official PSP go launch event and we were there to check it out. Everything from Minis to GTA inside...
Published: September 23, 2009
[Minis]
It's been a long time coming, but the success of Apple's App Store (not to mention analogs from Blackberry, Palm and, soon, Microsoft) means there's a clear demand for bite-sized offerings that can be fetched by and played on a single device. Though it's obviously meant to be something aimed at the download-hungry PSP go owners out there, PSP Minis are small enough (there's a 100MB cap on everything) that even those with smallish Memory Sticks can grab the titles for play on the UMD-equipped PSPs.
To help pepper the launch window with as many solid concepts as possible, Sony sought out some of the biggest and most well-received games up on the App Store right now and set those developers to work converting iPhone games to the PSP format. The result, from our limited play time, are a handful of games that work surprisingly well without the addition of a touch screen, which is obviously the iPhone's main interface. Subtly tweaked, the games we tried out were solid little pocket-sized offerings and at least one of them offers as much content as a full UMD release within that 100MB overhead.
The biggest standout was probably Fieldrunners, a cute little tower defense game that fills a niche oddly missing on the PSP given the genre's runaway success on the PS3. The analog nub zoomed in and out, the d-pad selected areas of the open field and X would place a tower from a handful of different types. In typical fashion, the Triangle Button can speed up enemy waves, and it largely came down to how we balanced the cost of placing and upgrading towers vs. the types of enemies and increasing numbers per wave. Good stuff.
[Apps]
Originally announced at E3, but with no real details beyond the fact that it was meant to be a tool for using "mood" to auto-generate playlists from your music, Sense Me was actually on hand, running on a PSP go. This was the first time we'd actually seen the app outside of a slide and a nod at the mega-presser, so we were curious to see how it would work and if it was a sign of more than just games coming to the PlayStation Store.
The short version is that Sense Me was... confusing. See, it's not really meant to play any of your music in a traditional way; there's no way to list stuff (that we could see) in a simple display of all your music, and things are instead broken down into mood. The software essentially analyzes the tempo and, we'd assume, the waveforms to see what notes are being played, then organizes them into a handful of different categories like pop and dance. What was neat was seeing the whole interface, which uses the album's art and displays things in sort of a cross between Apple's Cover Flow interface and something that will be familiar to anyone who has played SingStar over the years.
Favorite tracks could be marked as such, and it looked like there was an option to build something of a custom mood-based playlist, but we were so pressed for time that we didn't get a chance to suss things out further. Rest assured that when we get the chance to sit down with our own copy of the software and feed a few dozen albums into it, we'll let you know how things turn out.
It's been a long time coming, but the success of Apple's App Store (not to mention analogs from Blackberry, Palm and, soon, Microsoft) means there's a clear demand for bite-sized offerings that can be fetched by and played on a single device. Though it's obviously meant to be something aimed at the download-hungry PSP go owners out there, PSP Minis are small enough (there's a 100MB cap on everything) that even those with smallish Memory Sticks can grab the titles for play on the UMD-equipped PSPs.
To help pepper the launch window with as many solid concepts as possible, Sony sought out some of the biggest and most well-received games up on the App Store right now and set those developers to work converting iPhone games to the PSP format. The result, from our limited play time, are a handful of games that work surprisingly well without the addition of a touch screen, which is obviously the iPhone's main interface. Subtly tweaked, the games we tried out were solid little pocket-sized offerings and at least one of them offers as much content as a full UMD release within that 100MB overhead.
The biggest standout was probably Fieldrunners, a cute little tower defense game that fills a niche oddly missing on the PSP given the genre's runaway success on the PS3. The analog nub zoomed in and out, the d-pad selected areas of the open field and X would place a tower from a handful of different types. In typical fashion, the Triangle Button can speed up enemy waves, and it largely came down to how we balanced the cost of placing and upgrading towers vs. the types of enemies and increasing numbers per wave. Good stuff.
[Apps]
Originally announced at E3, but with no real details beyond the fact that it was meant to be a tool for using "mood" to auto-generate playlists from your music, Sense Me was actually on hand, running on a PSP go. This was the first time we'd actually seen the app outside of a slide and a nod at the mega-presser, so we were curious to see how it would work and if it was a sign of more than just games coming to the PlayStation Store.
The short version is that Sense Me was... confusing. See, it's not really meant to play any of your music in a traditional way; there's no way to list stuff (that we could see) in a simple display of all your music, and things are instead broken down into mood. The software essentially analyzes the tempo and, we'd assume, the waveforms to see what notes are being played, then organizes them into a handful of different categories like pop and dance. What was neat was seeing the whole interface, which uses the album's art and displays things in sort of a cross between Apple's Cover Flow interface and something that will be familiar to anyone who has played SingStar over the years.
Favorite tracks could be marked as such, and it looked like there was an option to build something of a custom mood-based playlist, but we were so pressed for time that we didn't get a chance to suss things out further. Rest assured that when we get the chance to sit down with our own copy of the software and feed a few dozen albums into it, we'll let you know how things turn out.
