Psp Or Not? - Buy a PSP? Or spend the money on somethi

I wanted to get a PSP in the near future, but i'm having some second thoughts about it. One of my friends told me it had the graphics power of a PSone, which of course didn'y impress me very much! But the magazines say its the next generation portable games console, with MP3's and movies. So which one is right?

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Whoever told you it has the graphics of the PS1 is full of it and probably a Nintendo fanboy. It has a processor that is capable of more polygons per second than the PS2, but because it is working on a smaller resolution. Still, the point remains that I'd call the graphics near-PS2 quality. Find someone who has it and get a look at it. Watch some of the videos at psp.ign.com. Games you should check out for a real indication of the PSP's graphics and how good they can be are Ridge Racers and Madden 06.

I can tell you that owning a PSP makes long car-trips and plane-rides go by like nothing. There's also nothing like having some of your favorite console games on the go, though there are plenty of original PSP titles. For a first game I'd recommend Burnout Legends, especially if you liked Burnout 3. This captures the awesome feeling of speed and the graphics from the console-cousin very well.

Another excellent choice would be Lumines. It's a 2D puzzler that looks like tetris but is far from it. It's a brilliant collusion of light and sound from the same revolutionary developer who created Rez for the PS2. Though it doesn't show off the graphics, it is addicting.

I say if you get it, you won't put it down for a long long long time. There's too many good games!

 

 

 

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Personally i think the sony Psp is not worth the money. It only has about 32 mb of internal memory and the highest memory card is only 2 gb. if your like me that isn't enough for music. But on the other hand if you are only interested for the games and the fact that it is almost like a portable dvd player, then you might want to buy it. But my final decision would be to save the money and wait for Sony PS3 that is supposed to come out in Early spring.
Have you ever heard of the iAudio X5. It is a portable media player that not only plays videos but it also has great battery life and it only cost about $300. but if your serously in it for the games then dont get it because there really is no point unless you are constantly traveling.

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They're both right. The PSP games look like PS2 games at quarter VGA resolutions. The tech is definitely very impressive in that they fit this much power in such a small size. It's CPU has an embedded VPU & 8MB eDRAM, it has two GPUs with 2MB eDRAM to handle both polygons (33M textured&lit poly/sec, 664Mpixel/sec fill rate) and curves (beziers, splines with tesselation to polys .. and even hardware accelerated skeletal animation), and it has video (MPEG) & sound (virtualised multi-channel) processors.

The PS2's GS (Graphics Synthesizer) chip can output 75M polys/sec, and the EE (Emotion Engine) 66M polys/sec, 38M lit polys/sec or 16M polys/sec as part of a curve. These are all theoretical benchmarks, which mean nothing in the real-world gaming benches. Unfortunately being a closed platform for consumers I don't know of any standard benches for any console. But just taking all these theoretical peak figures, about a 1/3 the power, but running at 1/4 the resolution, so it should be able to look better than PS2 games in theory .. eventually! This is all speculation at the moment, can't do much more than that!

However I have seen some videos of PSP games and they do look like PS2 games, if a little blocky sometimes (due to the low screen res, but not distractingly so). Basically if you like console games, and have a lot of spare time when being mobile, then it's probably worth the cost ... but only as a gaming machine really!

Unfortunately, you see, it relies on proprietary storage .. UMDs are read-only (and I doubt anyone will bother making a burner for those), or flash memory (Sony's Memory Stick)!! So unless you want to repurchase a whole load of movies on UMD, the movies would need to be on expensive 1GB Sony MS's ... and flash memory is usually expensive anyway compared to HDDs let alone Sony proprietary stuff too .. it also has a limited number of writes! For audio, Sony made the recent decision to finally support mp3 rather than simply just their own ATRAC formats! Also, the low screen res means you won't watch at DVD res let alone HD res's! CODECs wise it can handle mp3/ATRAC, MPEG4 etc ... which means annoying transcoding if you prefer to store AV in HD video, HD audio or open/non-lossy audio formats.

Personally, I'm more of a PC gamer, since I often tend to bored of many console games very quickly. The only console I can remember that had a good flight sim was the PC Engine (which also had a portable variant, the GT) .. Falcon was the game. I'd much rather put that money towards an ultra-portable laptop with a decent 3D chip, DVD drive, higher-res LCD and decent battery life. I could then use it for PDA & work tasks too!

Summary: if you love console games and are often on the move, go for it. The only other mobile options are the DS (if you specifically like the touchscreen games or Miyamoto games), a decent gaming laptop or a subnotebook (if like me you are entertained for hours by adventure games, strategy games & PC RPGs ;-)).

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