I recently got a PSP from a very good great friend for my birthday. Not something I would splurge on myself with, being that when you have a job and a house and 2 kids, video games quickly become a time luxury that gets surpassed by things like trying to read, take out the trash or like... eat and sleep. But that aside, the thing is dope, the design of it is just slick, it is made to be touched and looked at as much as possible. So much in fact that if I have it on my desk I find the need to cover it up with something so I don't pick it up and start playing with it during the few seconds I have while Photoshop loads, oh precious few seconds.

This brings me to what is probably my favorite feature, and most practical. Sleep. With a flick of the power button at any point, the system goes to sleep, from a pause screen to the middle of a race the system nods off with a flick. Then when you are ready again, say that the conference call starts to get boring…again, flick it again and you are right back to where you were, pause screen or in-game. Brilliant _and_ practical.

Needless to say the screen is gorgeous, amazingly gorgeous, buttons feel great, sound over the headphones is very good. It is also nice to have speakers integrated in the unit, unlike the iPod. They are no Kicker 12’s, and are fairly quiet at full volume but it is nice to have something that you can listen to MP3’s without headphones. The included 32MB memory stick is a joke, like selling a car with a 2 gallon gas tank, if you expect to use the system for anything other than games. A 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo (yeah Sony naming!) can be had for around 100$ (macmall/buy.com/newegg) _if_ you can find one in stock, they seem to be in short supply. Not a terrible price really in relation to a 1GB iPod shuffle at $150 in my head.

I have Lumines and Ridge Racer. I am a RR fan, and if you like it on the consoles it is the same here, great graphics and drifting. Lumines is a Tetris style block building puzzle game, terribly addictive and a lot of fun, puzzle games are so perfect for portables in my mind, Tetris on the original game boy is still a latent image burned into my retinas that I can see when I close my eyelids. This is the same type of thing, lots of incentive to play and progress to open up level which are vastly different, making the levels every changing look part of the challenge. Both great games, but there are not many others I would like to pick up, maybe THPSUG2REMIX, but with new games at 49$ a pop, I am a bit cautious and will wait for used and price drops (U District Hollywood has some good used stock, got Lumines there for 31$). Sites like psp-vault are hosting game saves pulled from the memory card as well for the cheaters out there, just download load on the card and startup.

The whole method of placing video on the PSP can really only be described as retarded. See IGN's write up or How to get video on the PSP (engadget) and get your MP_ROOT\100MNV01 on, or check out PSPware for the Mac, it is slick. WiFi connection was easy at home, to check for network updates, and the USB connection gave me not problem at all, very straight forward.

Good stuff Sorny.