"did you get a feel for what people thought about it....or in other words how many times did you hear sugoi"
I went to the PSP stand three times. When i first got there, i thought "uh, oh, i'm gonna have to queue for hours to see this thing..." - now granted there were a good number of machines, but the queues were only 3-4 people deep for everything except for ridge and Musou, which had about 10 people. This is a far cry from having to queue two hours to play the GBA at Space world. Saying that , over at Konami, there were long queues for Ac!d stretching a fair way.
I'm pretty sure everyone who played on the PSP was left in awe of it in terms of how it feels as a piece of hardware. The games though, apart from the odd one or two, aren't anything too special at the moment (things look nice, but it's nothing that hasn't been seen before albeit in a portable form) although i expect some great games to come eventually.
I did here a few japanese people and a few kids mention that they thought the unit felt "heavy". That might be interesting, as the DS weighs around the same (a little more i believe) so if it's unweildy , it might be a mild issue. Felt fine to me, obviously heavier than the GBA SP and GBA.
The buttons felt good, the triggers felt especially good, analogue stick was hardly used in anything , but i had a fiddle with it anyways. The Start button is in a kind of odd place that might make emergency pauses a little tricky, but everything is nice.
Also, being the scummer that i am , i stuck my greasy fingers all over the screen to see how it affected the view. Obviously, it collected on the surface, but a quick wipe off and it was clear as crystal again.
The screen just has to be seen to believed.... i mean, jesus. It's so good - crisp, sharp, no apparent altered colours/washed out effect from the back light, nothing. I could find nothing wrong at all with the screen. Nothing. It's like a perfect plane of glass. I tried to see how reflections would affect it in the sony booth, but there were only slight areas of full light, but i could see zero reflections from what little light was there. Not exactly the most scientific test in the world, but , hey, at least i looked for it.
On the dev front, I've had a few conversations with devs who have mentioned that , although coding the PSP is tantamount to console dev, dev teams are still being offered "handheld" rates to create PSP content, and the quality of games will be reflected thus. That's a shame, but hopefully if the PSP takes off sufficiently enough, then that might change. Some of the gmaes do look like real stinkers, but i guess that'll all be part of the "launch tax" (the rash of games that are insanely shitty, but you end up picking up in the mad rush of launch day, but later regret bothering with....), but Minna no Golf, Ridge, and Lumines look to be good. Tokyo highway battle looks pretty good too, especially when compared to Need for speed a few screens down which looks pretty bad at the moment. Musou - i think i'm musou'ed out... Coded Arms was a massive disappointment. Seeing it in action made a mockery of the screen shots. I didn't play, but people who did try it said they were less than impressed, although the assumption is that a lot of these games are early in dev.
Anyways, now all that remains are the final two thorny issues for sony : Price and battery life. I did intend to just stand next to the girls with the PSPs tied to them and monitor when they went off the floor. I saw quite a few of the girls going in and out, but guaging the battery life from that would be impossible and foolish.
On the subject of games and spaced releases which Kutaragi mentioned (and hopefully won't lead to the delay of the machine) , Sonys own advertising at the show seemed to counter this thought - a video on one of the big PSP mock up screens showed a date counter going from i-missed-when until Dev 2005 , with a second counter showing number of games released. The number was flying up until at the end the figure was well over the hundred barrier. Mixed messages it would seem, or perhaps delaying tactics to make sure all the rough edges to the PSP package are knocked out (ie: more launch titles, UMD business in place, downloadable content established).
One thing to say about the hardware though, even if the PSP turns out to be 33,000, given the tech and (especially) the quality of the machine, that looks to be more than a bit of a steal. Obviously the games and content need to be improved, but hell... colour me very impressed indeed so far.
The only other thorny issue (and this is just negative speculation) is the fact that only the 32meg mem stick is listed as an add on. I'm sure the PSP will be able to handle more than 32 meg, but on the other hand, it maybe a pseudo anti piracy measure to try to prevent games whole-sale being run from the mem-stick in the first place, or to limit the extent of downloadable content to protect UMDs (initially?). I doubt that scenario personally, but sony have had a bit of a bad run and some weird decissions/news of late - i couldn't rule it out 100%. But hell - i think that's just the doom-monger in me.
But yeah, i can't wait to play more of Lumines - the music was fantastic, the game simple and addictive, and the graphics stylish and funky.
Also, the anologue pad isn't going to scratch the surface, it doesn't touch and the amount it moves isn't big enough to reveal anything anyways. It feels very nice by the way.
wow - turned into a bit of a long rant! apologies.
