G-pinions

Almost nine months later, I pick up a PSP. Not that I need one at the moment, of course, but I couldn't pass up a good deal. I'll summarize what you've already heard about it for the last six months or so: it's a fantastic piece of hardware with not a lot of games (especially interesting, exclusive ones). It still stuns me every time I turn it on though - every line of text is crisp, every color is vivid, every sound is resonant - it makes me feel like a caveman watching TV, wanting to look behind it to see where the action is coming from. I even hopped over to G-Pinions on the relatively new built-in browser, and we're lookin' mighty fine. It actually resembles the 360 quite a bit in system functionality, which is high praise indeed.

Despite not particularly needing another mouth to feed, I did bring myself home two treats tonight. Tokobot, which is completely charming, and Lumines, which has finally filled a hole in my soul. I also played some multiplayer GTA at work, but that's a different story for a different paragraph. A bit more about Tokobot first - it's got character, it's fun, and it's unique. It's what I want on the system, and considering I won't be buying too many games for it, I should be in no short supply of experiences such as this. It's a litttttle bit of Pikmin, a little bit of Megaman Legends, and a whole lot of platformer. You basically manipulate your squadron of Tokobots to do your (evil?) bidding, forming ladders to climb, bridges to cross, and through the magic of holding hands, various attack formations. The translation and very Japanese vibe of the game are a bit hard to absorb at first, but thankfully good gameplay is universal. I'll probably give a bit more insight once I've really gotten into the meat of it, but I'm pretty pleased so far.

GTA multiplayer is just a blast. We had quite a riot with two and three people, I can scarcely imagine how fantastic it would be with eight. I works exactly how you'd expect. It's GTA after all, and the engine and design lend itself to almost anything you can imagine. Chainsaw vs. Motorcycle fights become instant classics, as do grenade-lobbing face offs from various terrain heights. The game doesn't change particularly to accommodate the multiplayer, but again, it's not hard to have fun in such a flexible world. There are tons of modes, tons of skins, and an infinite number of ways to plot your kills. I suppose that the controls don't lend themselves to the system quite as handily as I'd like, but when everyone has a relative handicap you don't even notice.

It's weird to be writing about the PSP. I almost got one at launch, decided against it, and never really looked back. Now that I have one I'm fairly content with it, and it appears I didn't miss out on much in-between, as the best game is still a launch game. And it is SUCH a different system than the DS, I feel completely justified in owning both (well, outside of the fact that I don't really play them outside of the house too often). Don't expect the coverage to ramp up that drastically, as it's still my least important child until it proves itself otherwise, but know that now we can cover everything properly (except for that filthy PC drek of course).