Giant Bomb Video Game News

Sony's been watching you sit there and use cool and crazy tunneling software like XLink Kai: Evo VII to play your offline multiplayer PSP games over the Internet. Actually, they probably haven't been watching you. But they've probably been watching as XLink-compatible wireless networking hardware has started appearing in Japanese shops with handy instructions on how to play those Monster Hunter PSP games over the Internet. Recently, the company announced that it was going to get into the act itself with a bit of PlayStation 3 software designed to do the same thing. Here at Tokyo Game Show 2008, the company gave a quick update on where it's at.

The software, called adhoc Party for PSP, will appear as a free beta in the Japanese PlayStation Store on October 30. This will run on the PlayStation 3 and connect you with other players via a set of lobbies and chat rooms. It will also serve as the tunnel that connects you to other players and fools your PSP into thinking that the players are within standard Wi-Fi range, not sitting on the other end of the Internet.

The catch is that the beta will only work with Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G. Sega's Phantasy Star Portable is also scheduled to be supported, but the key fact is that unlike the free-to-use XLink Kai service, Sony's service will only work with supported games.

When XLink Kai first added support for PSP games, I gave it a shot and, after many extreme hassles, occasionally managed to connect to a couple of other players for some Ridge Racers multiplayer. Though it was a mess of network configuration and blind luck, it worked surprisingly well once I got it up and running. I'll go out on a limb here and guess that Sony's service will be a lot easier to use... but then I haven't tried Kai in quite some time, either, so that's probably become much easier to use, as well.