Sunday, May 16, 2004
I'm heading for Tokyo in the morning, and will blog accordingly (I have my laptop, an Ethernet connection in the room, and a list of Tokyo's free Wi-Fi hotspots!). Until then, two things on my mind...
Firstly, Sony's PSP versus Nintendo's DS. Naturally, this is not the perspective of someone who was at the show and played with the product, but an outside (albeit an outsider who watched both press conferences live thanks to GameSpot's wonderfully stable T1 stream!). I have to say I was rather let down by both handhelds -- and at the same time I was totally surprised by both.
The PSP was shown first, so let me go over that first. It is MUCH more powerful than I thought it'd be. I really didn't think it would approach the PS2 in power, but it did. It looks fantastic, the screen is huge, and it has a big lineup of games, some of which look like direct PS2 ports. But that's the main problem: I'm excited about playing all my PS2 games on the go... but it's still all your PS2 games...on the go. I've played these before. Except now I get to play them on the go. Which is cool and all, but nothing spectacularly new and innovative. What really bugged me was that there was word of some "connectivity" between PSP and PS2, along the lines of transferring your game so you can continue playing on the go (for instance, racing in GT4 Mobile... then uploading the results and prize money to GT4 on PS2). Nintendo brought this up years ago with their GameCube to Game Boy link, but the difference in power between the systems meant it wasn't workable. It is now with PSP and PS2, but we didn't hear anything of it. My other PSP concern is battery life -- which Sony themselves didn't help by saying it'll last for anywhere between 2 to 10 hours (uh, thanks). Look, I know I won't use it for 10 hours at a time (I NEVER hit the iPod's 8 hour limit, and I listen to music more than I play with handheld systems), but anything under 4-5 hours is just unacceptable. Still, it'll have Winning Eleven, so I'm buying it.
The DS, on the other hand, surprised me with its power (N64-level) and with the cool uses for the touchscreen, as well as Wi-Fi (which PSP has too). But the biggest selling point of the DS is, naturally, the dual screens. When Nintendo announced it, I figured they'd have tons of great uses for it that they were keeping under wraps (their initial example was... "two angles of a tackle in a soccer game", which is retarded). Guess what? They didn't show a SINGLE game that showed off a good use for two screens. Not a single one. Sorry, but I don't consider a map a good use of a second screen -- especially when it's a bare-bones vector map like in Metroid Prime Hunters (which otherwise looked great, graphically anyway). I also have reservations about the specific ergonomics of the stylus: Yes, PDAs use a stylus, but you're never pecking at the screen while holding the d-pad on one side of the unit, so it seems like it might be a bit hard to grip. Still, like the PSP I'm definitely buying it (for Wario Ware/Made in Wario and Mario Kart at the very least, though whatever New Super Mario Bros and Super Mario 64x4 are they look cool).
The second thing on my mind is football, but not Liverpool this time. Instead, my favourite player of all time, Roberto Baggio, has officially retired from the game. Baggio's had both an amazing and unfortunate career. On the one hand, he's scored more World Cup goals than any other Italian (9 in 3 seperate World Cups, another record), played for Italy's three biggest clubs (Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan), and became only the fifth player to hit more than 200 Serie A goals. On the other hand, he's been blighted by severe injuries and fell out of favour with many Italian coaches, who see his type of "fantasy player" (ie, all attack and no defence) as a luxury in the modern game... and at what should have been his greatest triumph -- the 1994 World Cup, where he came in as European and World Footballer of the year and fired five goals that took Italy to the final -- he missed the deciding penalty in the final and sealed most foreigners' enduring image of him. To Italians though he was legendary. I think what sealed THAT for Italians was when he dropped down to lesser clubs like Bologna and Brescia and became even better. In 2002 he made a late run at the World Cup squad by starting the season scoring 8 goals from 8 games before suffering a "season-ending" injury. He was back within two months. Then with two months to go, he had ANOTHER "career-threatening" injury. He made it back with three weeks to spare AND scored in his comeback game. In the end, Trapattoni decided not to take him to Japan, and not surprisingly it was a very unpopular decision...
Incidentally: I had my hair cut today by the same woman who used to cut Steven Gerrard's hair. Gerrard!
Posted at 9:41 AM
