Easter PSP Impressions

First, happy Easter! Nice and rainy here in Georgia, but still a wonderful day.

I got to put in a decent amount of time yesterday and this morning with my PSP. If you have a GBA:SP (or a GBA) you know how great the graphics and screen look when in direct sunlight. Not so with the PSP. I let my wife drive since she was hauling us over to her parent’s house. The PSP just did not look good in the sun. Not sure why, but it was darn near impossible to see Twisted Metal in the sunlight.

On the other hand, the PSP looked wonderful brilliant in a dark room – very impressive. I image that school children all over the country are going to be staying up much past their bed times until their parents wise up and realize that the PSP works extremely well in darkness. The only problem with playing in the dark, was that I do not have the various buttons (volume, screen brightness, etc) memorized, so I could not find them, but that is a small price to play for excellent night gaming.

I am having little luck with network connectivity with Twisted Metal. I can connect at my house, but 9 times out of 10 I get kicked out due to “network issues.” It could be my cable modem (or more likely my b-band wireless router) is just not keeping pace with the game. At my in-law’s house, I easily connected to their g-band router, and had better connectivity results. Problem was that in almost every game I attempted to play, I ended up being the only one in the gaming room. I guess people do not want to play an “unknown” person, but I never have this problem with Twisted Metal Black on the PS2. Or maybe other gamers are also suffering from connectivity issues. This requires further watching to see if this is a trend or if everyone is just trying to figure out how to work their PSPs.

Speaking of Twisted Metal Head-On, I am starting to adapt better to the game. Once I got the hang of the analog nub stick, things started to improve. I am sure it will get even better once I decide to read the manual to look at the control settings.

The analog stick does take some adjustment to get comfortable with its unique control, but after a while, it is actually pretty solid. I have switched from using the d-pad with Ridge Racer to using the analog stick, with little to no difficulties.

It is almost time for Easter lunch (homemade seafood lasagna, yum-yum) so I will wrap this up by saying that Ridge Racer and Wipeout: Pure are great racing titles. Lumines is extremely well made, and should satisfy any puzzle fan. I think (key word is think) that Twisted Metal Head-On will also prove to be a solid game for fans of the series, or fans of blowing up stuff.

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