When I gushed about the 3DS earlier this month, talking about how it will probably be the best handheld Nintendo's ever made, and how some of the innovations within it were 'huge', I had no idea Sony would be announcing their Next Generation Portable so soon after. Yes, January just wasn't crazy enough with new announcements and developments, between 50,000 tablets shown off, most with Tegra 2, NVIDIA's Project Denver, Windows 8's ARM support, AMD's CEO leaving, NVIDIA and Intel's settlement, Sandy Bridge's launch, OCZ leaving the RAM market, new cellphones, gaming news, and tons and tons of other shit too numerous to be counted...no, we had to close this phenomenal month with the friggin PSP2 unveiling.
This was one of the first unveils I was actually present for (online at least) when it happened live, and let me tell you, it's pretty exciting to be there right when something like that occurs. Technically the name hasn't been finalized yet, instead referred to as the NGP by most circles, but I refuse to use that, preferring the more universally recognized acronym. Rumors leading up to the PSP2's announcement really started several years ago, but as these things tend to do, the accuracy much improved as time approached the supposed due date. Just a couple days before the announcement, a spec list showed up with some pretty ridiculous suggestions, but it turns out, almost all of it has been shown to be true. The PSP2 is pretty much a gadget fan's wishlist brought to life.
While a lot of it is what most people expected, some of it is actually pretty creative and interesting. In fact Sony's been showing some pretty unique, almost Nintendo-like innovation, along with an increasingly open attitude towards gaming. Sure, there's the whole Other OS fiasco, which has now lead to Sony suing a hacker, mostly serving just to fuel a fire of bad PR for themselves, but aside from that, things like Sony adding Steam support for the PS3, and PlayStation Suite show that they're not as restricting as some companies with how they let people play their games. The Steam support is nice mainly for people who like Valve games and don't want to pay for downloadable game updates, along with some nifty cross-platform PC-to-PS3 interoperability. But PlayStation Suite caught me off guard. Essentially Sony's allowing many of the games that were only purchasable through their PSN store, to now be purchased on any Android Gingerbread (and presumably newer) smartphones. This a big deal for a company primarily making their business on Sony-branded hardware. While their secret-to-everybody PlayStation Phone has yet to be made official, it's nice to know Sony won't be limiting gaming access to their own Ericsson brand. Instead the main selling point for the PSPhone, or Xperia Play, will be a gaming-native button layout, leaving the choice to consumers if they want to play games with an emulated touch interface, or a more ideal control scheme. I think Sony knows that with all the cellphone games out there, they can't pull consumers on the merits of their Suite portfolio alone, so I think this will prove to be a positive move for them.
A lot of what you see in the PSP2 admittedly comes off as a "me too!" response to the 3DS. The PSP2 has two built-in cameras, it has an internal gyroscope, and hell it even uses flash ROM for games, making it the first cartridge-based Sony gaming system. But the biggest "me too" feature is touch. Granted, it's probably more a response to smartphones than the 3DS, certainly in regards to which it most resembles. The 3DS still uses the now archaic resistive touch technique, being less finger-friendly and generally necessitating the use of a stylus, while only accepting one touch input at a time. Sony's multi-touch capacitive surface is much more up with the times, as is pretty much everything else about the PSP2, but they take it one step further by putting another touch surface on the back of the device. This is an intriguing inclusion to say the least, and has led to some really innovative ideas on display at their press conference. Sony probably realizes they've got to differentiate their portable with more than just great specs and Sony-exclusive game franchises. It's a bit of a risky move, but not quite up there with some of Nintendo's oddball designs.
No one can argue it's not a beast though. It's got not one, but four of ARM's top-of-the-line processors, when other companies are only now just thinking about quad-core mobile devices. They've taken the same approach to their graphics, packing a four-core version of the fastest embedded GPU Imagine Technologies offers. The best part is, these parts are using standard API protocols. It's more a symptom of the current hardware ecosystem than a conscious decision on Sony's behalf, in that the best performing parts are only going to come in the ARM/OpenGL ES-compliant variety, but Sony finally has a system that is truly easy to program for, and it shows. The press conference was full of demos claiming to have only taken a couple weeks to create, and in the case of MGS, were able to be ported straight off of the PS3 version.
The sheer power of the device has garnered it the designation of "almost PS3 level graphics", which may or may not be an accurate description, but there's no doubt that this system follows along the same lines of its predecessor, sitting just under the big console of the time. Many are talking up the possibility of cross-platform games being similar enough that you'd essentially be getting the same experience, even able to carry your saves across systems, or play multiplayer games between them. It opens a lot of questions about such ideas, and also others that are less rosy. If the PSP2 shares so much of the experience with home consoles, what will make it stand out? What's the incentive, besides taking that experience on the go? This may be why Sony chose not to include TV-out functionality, and while some may lament that fact, there's no doubt the built-in OLED screen is going to be one of the best viewing experiences possible for any gaming device, beyond that of current commercial televisions, still limited to conventional LCD or plasma technologies in the near future. Sony certainly built the PSP2 to withstand the test of time, but did they build it to stand up in the market?
Many will argue this is a continuation on the misguided direction Sony took with the original PSP, leading to a fairly mediocre percentage of the portable gaming market next to the DS. Debates rage on about which will be the dominant portable of the future, with many stating that the PSP2 really doesn't have a chance for the same reason the PSP didn't. But let's analyze that for a bit. Is this really a second take on the same exact situation from the last generation? There were many reasons the DS was such a success, and why it had practical and competitive advantages over the PSP, and there are many reasons why those advantages don't apply this time around.
First of all, the DS was cheap. At $149, it was a lot more attractive to mainstream consumers than Sony's $249 handheld. This price advantage would only increase over time, as Nintendo continually dropped the cost of the DS, and Sony did very little to reciprocate. The DS also had a more sturdy design, with much longer battery life, and all the colorful Nintendo games you'd expect on the system. All these factors added up to one key selling advantage: parents. The DS was the choice for young children, and much like the Wii, even had a lot of productivity software that made it appealing to non-gamers as well. This was spurred on by another key advantage.
The touchscreen. Of course, it was more than the touchscreen, it was the fact that it had a second screen to go along with it, and pure digital controls and limited 3D capabilities that made traditional games less appealing to produce on the system. This fostered a lot of experimental game experiences on the system, more out of necessity than anything. Sony was much more about console-like experiences, with very little to distinguish their games from PS2 ones.
The last reason was the game medium. Sony failed at this twice with the PSP. Of course everyone knows about the infamous UMD format. It was loud, it was slow, and it sucked for portable gaming. Sony has experience in using optical discs as leverage over their competitors, but the PSP was a hard-learned lesson in why not all truths are universal. To address this fault, they attempted to go with an even more forward-looking game delivery system with the use of digital distribution. But with less overall features than the first PSP iterations, and a price that wasn't lessened, the PSP Go didn't take off with consumers. Flash ROM carts were cheap, small, and quick to load games off of. In short, the perfect portable medium.
That's probably why Sony sucked it up and chose flash carts for their next generation portable. In fact, if you look at all the above points, you'll notice that none of them really apply anymore. The PSP2 may still be powerful, and still may provide console-like game experiences, but in many ways, so will the 3DS now. The DS hit a unique niche with its limitations that I don't think Nintendo will really be able to duplicate again. The 3DS now has very capable 3D graphics and an analog nub that more firmly grounds it in traditional gameplay. The 3D screen may not even pay off for them, possibly limiting its appeal further instead, especially in the long term. With the touch surfaces on the PSP2, there emerges the possibility for innovation just as unique as Nintendo has enjoyed, and we're already seeing it in games like Little Deviants. They're both going to dip their toes in augmented reality games, and since the 3DS is no longer cheap, neither system is really going to appeal to mainstream consumers. Until the 3DS gets a major price drop, that just leaves the more hardcore gamers, and with the second analog stick, the PSP2 has a much better chance at finally delivering the full-fledged gaming experiences first attempted, but poorly executed on its older siblings that those kinds of gamers look for. Battery life on either system won't likely be very satisfying, and lightweight games might actually be better served on the PSP2, where multi-touch iPhone ports will align well with its capabilities.
In essence, the PSP2 has more of a competitive chance than the PSP did not wholly because of the changes made to it this time around, but because of the changes made to the 3DS. The DS stands a good chance of enjoying an extremely long overlapping existence with the 3DS, with consumers likely unwilling to jump to a system that really has very few of the appealing niche qualities of the forebear. In fact, Nintendo's greatest competition, especially during this first initial year, will be with itself. When the PSP2 comes around, its uptake will undoubtedly be slow, but with few factors holding it back, we might just see for the first time Nintendo being usurped as absolute market leader. I'm not saying I anticipate writing the 3DS's obituary some time in the future, because I can't imagine it not becoming a huge success. But if Nintendo isn't feeling worried about the potential threat that lies ahead, maybe they should.
