Ok, I was a bit naughty a couple of weeks ago, and traded up both my PSP S&L for a 3003, and my DS Lite for a DSi. I hate myself for being a sucker for these incremental iterations.

I'm not particularly a fanboy of either camp, so here's my fairly unbiased opinion on the two iterations:

PSP 3000 Series
This is one of those things where I just had to resign myself to accepting that I just wanted "to have the newest one". I use my psp for video as much as I do gaming to be honest, so I sold myself on the premise of having a screen that was easier to view when out and about.
***Actually, a re-occuring conversation thread about the PSP has always been "who is the PSP supposed to be for?". That's me actually, so I'll ping on a blog about that at some point in time.***
Anyway, I think my official opinion on the PSP 3000 is "meh..."

The screen certainly does have a more vivid colout pallete when the 'wide' colour profile is switched on, but I can't help but thinking that overall the screen is not actually as physically bright as the previous iteration. If you switch the colour setting back to normal, the first thing you notice is that the home screen colours look fairly washed out (way more so than on the 2000s), but once you play a game on it, it all seems to be just fine. With the 'wide' colour setting enabled, I do think the colours look more crisp (a bit more like watching something on a regular lcd tv). Oveall that's quite nice. I think this would particularly make an improvement to the picture you watch if you were to play something in a dark room - that's where the previous PSP screen always looked the most washed out me, it's not something I've got around to doing with the 3000 yet, but I can already tell there will be a distinct improvement.

As for the microphone, well, I'm not really bothered about that. I may use it for skype at some point in time - my dad retired out to Portugal, and it costs a bomb even to ring him on the landline (what kind of bomb? A giant one, of course - sorry), I just haven't been bothered to set up an account yet. In terms of game functionality, well you let me know if you hear of a title being developed to support it, and we'll worry about that then.

Overall, unless you play a lot of games late at night before going to sleep, I wouldn't really bother with it. The 2000 does everything this does, so unless you are a new purchaser, or have accidentally broken an older version wait and see what gets said at E3 (expect more 4000 than psp2 to be fair - oh god, I bet I buy that too).

A shoddy start to "The Year Of The Playstation".

DSi
Of the the two most recent handheld iterations, I'll be honest I was more interested in the PSP 3000s screen that the camera and music playback on the DSi. So why get one? Well since I asked, I'll answer that question:

1) I was straight up underwhelmed by the PSP 3000.

2) Chinatown Wars.

I'd been playing this on the DS Lite, and was overall enjoying the experience (must stop getting sidetracked by the drug trading, but that's another blog entirely). Anyway, right from the go when playing this on the DS Lite I was impressed by what they'd managed to shoehorn onto the platform. Much like the PSP versions they put out the game basically lays down the gauntlet in terms of what on open world experience can and in fact should be on a handheld platform. The thing was, that the top screen (where the action takes place) always felt very cramped. It had vaguely crossed my mind that this might look better on the slightly bigger screens of the DSi. Except they key word is SLIGHTLY. I wasn't originally prepared to buy a whole new system just so the one game that pushed the hardware looked 'a bit better'. I'd written it off on that basis. Until I played the level where you drive the tanker (high octaine dash or something like that). Then the system actually physically struggled to crunch everything it needed to process - it slowed down quite badly.

Anyway, that reminded me about what I'd managed to forget entirely - the DSi is a proper iteration, and actually roughly doubles the clock speed of the main processor, and gives it 4 times the memory.

So the next day, my DS Lite was cleaned up, boxed up and duly packed off to my local indie games retailer (Grainger Games represent) and I had my DSi.
Of the two, it was much easier to see the value in trading up to the DSi. Pictures and Music notwithstanding (I have a digital camera that's better, and a 32gb ipod touch for giantbombcast and what have you), there's the DSi Ware store - oh, actually nevermind.

Chinatown wars however was clearly designed with the DSi in mind. The difference between the Lite's 3" screens and the DSi's 3.25" looks insignificant on paper, but once you switch the thing on you couldn't go back. All of a sudden the top screen didn't look too cramped. The first thing I did on it was replay that tanker level, and it flew comparatively - I was actually aware of the physics put into the tanker and trailer rather than a sensation of swimming in syrup. It whips through the menus on the the DSi in comparison to the DS Lite.

Basically the DS as a wider platform has just become PC gaming. Chinatown wars has clearly been designed with the DSi in mind, but still using the DS Lite as the minimum spec benchmark to put it in PC terms.

That's basically the death knoll if you own a DS Lite. Basically Cinatown wars, pushing the old processer to its limits, is not fully taxing the new spec by definition. That gives developers more freedom in their game design that can push the platform to those often mentioned "DSi only" games. This could go one of two ways given Nintendo's recent track record - route 1 = Awesome Video Games, route 2 = bad mobile renditions of wii music to play on the bus.

Anyway, by the time the DSi Ware store properly gets up and running (I mean let's be honest, they might as well not have bothered with the initial efforts), with some old GBA, SNES, hell even NES ports (and megadrive ports?) the DSi shop could be fun.

All things considered the DSi is not just an iteration of the platform so much as it is an evolution of the platform. I've despaired of Nintendo's direction of late, and I'm ignoring those "A little bit of..." store titles as I say this, but:

Nintendo is officially +1 Cool Point in my book.

I just hope they don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again on this one.

Oh my god, I just saw another cut of the UK tv advertisments for the latest feather in Nintendo's cap, Wii Music.

I've not read any formal opinion on this product at all, I don't need to. I had a sneaking suspition that taking the basic (and I mean that in the loosest) format of your Rock Hero World Band: Mania! style game, and making t shit, sorry acessible was never going to work.

My proof of this has been the horribly self conscious rictus of the "Dad" in the tv advert. The whole thing just proves that Nintendo actually had no idea just why Wii Fit was so successful. I see now that it was just a case of "with this technology we could do this..." and it happened to take off. I mean I'm no gaming industry guru, but if one of your employees came up to you and said "if we pretended the controllers were instruments then we could do this...[Wii Music]", my answer would be "You are fired", not "Awesome, I think we'll lead with that at next year's E3".

Anyway, what was I on about? Oh yeah - the guy in the Wii Music advert. The Marketing guys Nintendo UK are using were clearly good enough poker players to sit there and convince the Nintendo staff that it could become another lifestyle product if marketed in the same way as Wii Fit was. They guy in the advert though, he know''s. He clearly still has a healthy soul, and every last bit of it is writhing in agony as he bravely tries to smile over it and pretend he's having a good time.

It's a shame, my take is he took a gig he didn't like because he's got bills to pay or a family to feed. Yeah, it's a real shame because he clearly just went straight out after filming and spent everything he earned, plus a bit more on the hardest drugs he could get his hands on. Just so he could face his family again.

And if you go out and buy this game, the blood from his nose is on your hands. YOUR hands!

And anyway, assume for a moment we were to spend any time with the game. The way I see it, it has merit if as a really bit of fun for very young kids. Except the adverts are attempting to position this as fun for 'all' the family, or not even that, as an evening in for a bunch of trendy twentey somethings - what?

At a time when video games are finally starting to break through into the mainstream media as a valid form of entertainment, this is something of a step in the wrong direction, thanks for that Nintendo.

I wasn't there at the NES days, but I basically grew up with Nintendo over the years, they were always good clean fun and had an overriding sense of charm. Two things are happening here. In an industry which I feel is coming of age, we've got one of the gang that's continuing to behave in such a childish manner it's starting to become embarrasing for the others to associate with it. I'm not saying companies can't develop games for a younger audience, but you have to realise which products to target at which groups.

Ok, so on the one hand you've got Nintendo's innapropriate behaviour undemining the efforts of the rest of the industry to generally grow and make more of the non-gaming public take it seriously. On the other you've got one of the games companies that I grew up with, and always highly regarded that's suddendly lost all apparent sense of reason, and that can't even make the distinction between things that are fundamentally good and things that are bad.

It's all a bit sad really. And that's my rant over.

Why, oh why are Sony continually posting the obscure tat, rather than the big PS1 titles on the store?

WHY DAMNIT!

Here are a few titles off the top of my head that should have been up there since day 1:

Soul Calibur / Edge / Blade - Awesome, could even have ad-hoc multiplayer patched in, in my fantasy dreamworld.
Metal Gear Solid - I'm half remembering the control system was a bit full on, so maybe that is stopping this.
Silent Hill - shockingly I missed this at the time (apart from the demo bundled in with whichever Resi game it was bundled in with)
Oh, yeah while I'm on with it:
Resident Evil
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 3: Nemisis
I mean these have hit pretty much every other platform, so why not the one they don't really need recoding for?

Get real world - this game will never exist on the psp as we know it.

It will certainly not exist in a relevant timescale.

This was advertised by Sony as a launch title in the UK prior to PSPs release, how rediculous is that?

Here's my theory on the matter:

Kazunori Yamauchi has as his main driving passion in the creation of the Gran Turismo series the accurate moddelling of the driving experience, in a way thet is foremost enjoyable, but also representative of the actual experience.

As such, I personally can not see him / his team being motivated to hack the entirely analogue control scheme down to rely on the one analogue stick offered by the PSP hardware.

Sony on the other hand, one would assume would really have liked to have seen a high profile title like Gran Turismo appear on their handheld system, for the simple reason that it is popular enough to sell PSPs. I fell for it, I impatienlty bought a Japanese implort PSP 1000. This was a direct response to the UK launch date being knocked back due to under production until a date which was after the holiday I wanted to use it for. At that time though, Sony had glossy brochures in retailers which showed that same front of box shot we've all been clinging to for the last 2, possibly even 3 years.

In that time, I broke my psp, bought a slim and lite. Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 has become Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3, which itself is suffering from heavy delays due to the time taken to produce the high-res vehichle mapping.

Again, given Yamauchi's consistently communicated approach over the last 10 years (happy anniversary GT!) do you think, he's going to be more inclined to continue to push towards making the most technically advanced simulation he can on the cutting edge hardware, or in watering down the vision in order to shoehorn it into a portable system that fundamentally lacks the technical specifications to be able to reproduce the feel of a Gran Turismo game?

No, me either. It's back to taking solace in the TOCA series in the meantime. But that's ok, because they're not bad games on the PSP.

Sinclair Spectrum 128k +2a
Roadblasters, Operation Wolf, Ghouls and Ghosts, Ghosts and Goblins, Green Beret, School Daze (I'm going to unfoundedly and outrageously claim this as a likely inspiration for Bully and even in it's own limited way the sandbox style of gameplay), Chase HQ, F40 Challenge, BMX Simulator (Think I read that this was the first one from Codemasters, wasn't especially fun, but this is kind of what games were like back in those days, and I played it a tonne).
Status: KIA

Sega Megadrive (japanese import)
Golden Axe, Strider, Ghosts and Goblins, Bare Knuckle / Streets of Rage, Pitfighter (even though it was clearly pants), Road Rash, John Madden, EA Hockey, Ok, I suppose Sonic the Hedgehog too. That Shinobi style thing where you wound up fighting the t-rex (or t-rex skeleton depending on the version you had) in the hull of a tanker - can't think of the name of it at the moment.
Status: Sold

Atari Lynx (I so blatantly should have resisted my inner graphics whore and got a gameboy)

Only ever had Shadow Warriors for this which I suppose makes that memorable even though it was SO hard. Lynx's novelty feature was that you could set it up left or right handed, so you basically flicked a switch and it flipped the video output so lefties could hold it upside down, must have seemed like a good idea at the time...

Status: Sold

SNES

Super Mario World, Legend of Zelda, Streetfighter II Turbo, Mortal Kombat, Actraiser (Populous meets Rygar just worked for me way more than it should have, it really wasn't that great at either bit), Super Mario Kart, Super Ghouls and Ghosts, there must have been more...
Status: Sold

Playstation
Soul Edge (or Blade, forget which was UK arcades and which was PS), Tekken 2, Final Fantasy VII, Gran Turismo, Gran Turismo 2, Final Fantasy VIII (although my overiding memory of this is that I copied my 25hrs in game save on to a new memory card off the front of a magazine, and deleted the original before trying the new one - oops. Never had the willpower to revisit it, which is a shame because the gunblade had that whole Ulysess 31 cool about it), Final Fantasy IX, Suikoden, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, Nemesis (which I loved but didn't play that mutch of), best for last Metal Gear Solid
Status: I think I actually gave this away

PII 266, Windows SP2 (now with usb support!)
Quake II, Half Life, Half Life Blue Shift, Half Life Opposing Force, MAME.

Playstation 2
Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil Code: Veronica, Medal of Honour, GTAIII, GTA San Andreas (is mainly missed Vice City, had actually only got around to III when it came out, which is definitely a shame), Gran Turismo 4.
Status: Sold

Nintento Gameboy Advance
(Worst handheld EVER no backlight? what were they thinking?) Genuinely struggling to think of anything I had for this, Bomberman, Yoshi's Island, I get the impression I had StreetFighter II for this, though I may just have made that up.

Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP
(fixed both of the problems with the original - backlight screen and a rechargable battery).
Advance Wars, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Game Cube (very briefly)
Legend of Zelda The Wind Talker, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes, Soul Calibur 3.
Status: Sold

Playstation 2 Slimline
Gran Turismo 4 again, Farhenheit (this game was amazing, why didn't I get around to finishing it?), Killzone (it's style more than how it played).
Status: Sold

PSP (japanese import - UK release delayed until well after my summer holiday? sod that my friend)
It's a sorry state of affairs that I had the most fun with this using a SNES emulator on the 1.5 firmware, that and the emulated Doom II (even though the controls were awful in that). Still the games landed evenutually: Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, Syphon Filter: Logans Shadow, TOCA Race Driver 2, Locoroco, Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories (this is when the PSP came good - a technical marvel), Tekken: Dark Ressurection (where the fresh hell is the PSP's Soul Calibur?), GTA: Vice City Stories, the ability to rip DVDs to watch on the commute to work.
Status: KIA

PS3
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Resistance Fall of Man, Call of Duty 4, GTA IV, GT5 Prologue, Metal Gear Solid 4 (and I haven't even started playing it yet, still... I've calmed down after the MGO beta fiasco, so that's progress of sorts, I basically want to start in to this when I have time to dig in for a session and am not too tired, no time at present for that), Rub 'a' Dub (my 5 year olf daughter loves it)

Status: Main console

PSP Slim + Lite
Final Fantasy Crisis Core, Pursuit Force, Harvey Birdman, Hot Shots Golf (it's gone all dry on the PSP horizon again hasn't it? Did I read rightly at the end of Crisis Core that the FF VII remake proper was in the pipeline?), Not being able to encode DVDs under Vista has stopped my bothering to buy DVDs and it is really dissapointing.
Status: on the back burner since I finished Crisis Core, but still in the bag for my daily commute.

Nintendo Wii
Wii Sports, Wii Fit
Status: my wife's first console - which is really the genius of the Wii.

Nintendo DS
Brain Training, Legend of Zelda The Phantom Hourglass, Professor Layton and the Curious Village (bring on the next two, I'm really enjoying this).

If anyone has actually skimmed this far I'll be amazed, started writing this for a bit of speccy nostalgia really.

toodle pip!