malvasia bianca

One of my friends brough a PSP into work, and he let me play through a bit of Wipeout Pure. (Hmm: the official capitalization seems to be WipEout . Sigh.)

Nice screen; a big improvement over the GBA. Good to have an analog joystick. Great graphics; not as good as the current generation of (non-handhold) consoles, perhaps, but not so far off, and certainly better than the previous generation. And I quite enjoyed the game. It reminded me of Extreme G, the first game that I got for the N64. I only got that game because other, more prominent games (Super Mario 64, Goldeneye) were out of stock at the time (the woes of cartridges, sigh), but I had a lot of fun playing through it. And it’s been a while since I played through a nice techno-racer.

I’m not about to run out and buy a PSP right now, however, for the same reason that I’m not about to run out and buy a DS: there aren’t anygames that I see as must-haves, no games that I’d rather play instead of games I don’t have yet for consoles I already own, or even games that I’d want to spend time playing while somebody else was using the TV, instead of reading a book or blogging or something. It wouldn’t surprise me if I bought one eventually, just not right now. (Hard to say; it might also be the case that it will be almost exclusively populated with inferior versions of games on non-handheld consoles.)

It’s too bad that more people at work aren’t active video game players; while some people dabble in video games, most people don’t, and I seem to be by far the most devoted video game player there. If several people owned PSP’s, I’d be happy to get one myself, and then we could all play games together over the wireless network at lunch. Something to look for in my next job, I suppose… (That would go over really well in an interview: “Tell me whether or not people play video games at work.” If any future prospective employers are reading this years from now, I assure you, I’d only play games at lunch time!)