Poor Sales Due to Piracy? Nay.

Ever since the original PSP was hacked, we’ve all heard this millions of times from everyone- hacks and piracy “killed” the sales and the poor little thing in the long run. Consumers and often even the companies alike love to blame poor progress onto individual pirates and hackers, but in reality they are hardly the ones to blame. Not every evil in the world is solely destructive.

Lets look at Nintendo’s iron grip over all the youngsters and kids at heart alike since forever ago. When Gameboy Advanced and the DS launched, they were in fact, effortless to hack and run pirated games unlike the PSP. There was no risk of bricking the system. It was simply patch, plug and play. Now, have we EVER heard Nintendo publicly complain about piracy on their systems? Do you know why? Their target niche of customers have always been either absolutely faithful or simple too young to realize that piracy exists. Nintendo always made their buck no matter what surrounded them in the underground scenes of the online community.

Sony, on the other hand, always targeted the more mature gamer- late teens and early twenties and up, high school and college students. The ones who hardly have much money to spend on software and games, but definitely smart enough to find a loophole and get whatever they can for free. In such a case, the easiest thing for the company is to blame the hacking scene. Secure their systems tighter. Steer sheer numbers of potential consumers away instead of re-evaluating their target audience.

As I mentioned in the very beginning, private piracy- piracy of software intended solely for personal use and not profits. Profits off of pirated software is what actually hurts the companies and software developers out there. Private use, at its best, is actually a form of free advertizement. If you got to play the hottest new game for free, next thing you would do is tell all your friends about it. Then if they go buy it, they’ll do likewise and the wave takes off.

Remember, there are plenty of double-edge swords out there that majority of the public fails to see fully.

PS Vita Impressions and Review

So now that I got a chance to play with this guy for a few days, here comes a proper overview.

PSP 1000, 2000, Vita.

The weights go roughly as follows: 1000 at 280 grams, 2000 at 180 (207 w/ extended battery), and 285 for Vita.

New perks and quirks are all very cool- touch screen front, touch pad all across the back, great dual analogs unlike the old flat nub, buttons feel very good and responsive. The cameras are only alright, but considering Wifi b/g/n, bluetooth, gps, and 3g the system sports, camera quality in both can be overlooked in favor of it having them at all (and a mic to boot, say hello to Skype whenever it hits PSN).

Front, then rear camera tests.

So far, everything works great. Wifi is lightening fast compared to old PSPs with only b band equipped. On-Screen-Keyboard works very well too, no complaints about input thus far. Vita even sports this feature by default, which I find as an extremely great touch-So, as far as games go, I only got Dynasty Warriors Next thus far, but the game fully utilizes everything but maybe cameras in the unit and that makes it an excellent launch title. From touch screen, to the back pad, to even the gyro and motion sensors of the system- you’ll be using them all for special attacks and mini cut-scene fights. Gyro sequences are especially cool because it simulates looking around in-game by moving the system around yourself.The battery life isn’t too bad, I would guestimate maybe 3-4 hours including sleeping/standby in between (of up to a day in total thus far, since I do sleep once in a while ;p ).

All in all, this is an extremely promising system that sports truly powerful hardware (like a quad-core CPU, that even the smartphones these days haven’t yet equipped), and enough useful quirky ways to control the system and the games without making your eyes bleed like the 3DS.

Viva La Vita!

So, got my hand on one of these babes, so far so good.Now to sit on it and wait for the hacks 😉

Monster Hunter

Stumbled upon this on memebase and remembered how I miss those games and all the good times I had playing them. Not to mention some merchandise and more good times.

Revisiting – Gran Turismo 5

Its been ages since I played this thing, and feels good to pick it up again! Buying more cars, remembering how to drift them, progressing through A and B-spec modes, etc.

I’ve been a decent fan since the 3rd game solely due to the fact that this game can offer some extremely intense races and now has a very solid game engine. What impressed me even more is that the portable version on PSP did not sacrifice any of the physics engine, thus felt just like the PS3 version for the most part! Definitely don’t see that in portable ports these days…

P.S. I have the limited edition, but too lazy to dig up the box and take pictures of extras it came with :p

Good Old Hardware Fiddling

So, what else did and do I do? Some of these things-

Evolution of High School Standard – Ti-83 Plus Graphing Calculator

If you went to a high school in the US either half a decade ago or more recently, this calculator remains the educational standard for almost all of the levels of math classes taught. Did you know, however, that the gaming and home brew scenes also kept up with this device and a port was made for virtually all popular portable gaming and non-gaming devices alike? I will personally show you the evolution tree that I followed myself, so without further a due:

The Original, boring Ti-83 calculatorThe first and second steps of homebrew evolution, the Gameboy Advance (micro in my case) and Nintendo DS (Lite in my case):Next, Sony PSP got a port of a much more powerful, Ti-92 calculator

(I don’t really have a screenshot nor photo available, but you get the idea)

And today, the robust Android devices can use Ti-83 as well, even through a GBA emulator

(Or through the app, like Andy83)

The rate at which our technology improves is mind-blowing and I wish we would have gotten some of these bells and whistles a little bit earlier, when I actually needed them, haha.

My Weapons of Choice – Sony PSP

To this day, these systems were my best choices in gaming and I’ve clocked an inhuman number of hours over the years, customized them, sold them, soft-modded them, you name it. The 3 I currently own are:

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops 1000 Limited

Mint Green2000 with Felicia Blue faceplate and extended battery door

Gundam Vs Gundam 3000 Limited

A few memory cards, but a noteworthy CR-5400 dual-microSD adapter that helps me have as much memory as I want and not waste money on ProDuo cards I can’t use in anything else.

Of my most favorite games over the years- Guilty Gear Accent Core + Portable, Monster Hunter series, all of the Gundam and Gundam Vs series, Juiced, The Con, Syphon Filter series, Metal Gear Solid (psp game was my actual 1st MGS game ever), Tekken 5 and 6, Soul Calibur Portable, Initial D Street Stage, Wangan Midnight Portable, Shutoku Battle, and a few others. I have played a good MOST games for this thing and don’t remember a lot of them at this point because of that.