me so geeky: believe the hype!

Damn it, I can't believe I'm blogging yet again about the PSP. I honestly haven't been this excited about a gadget since my first Palm Pilot. I'm imagining all the possibilities for a little gizmo like this and I can imagine quite a bit.

After reading a few reviews (and quickly dismissing them) I figured that hockey game that was bundled with it was okay and the people in general were just exagerrating. Everybody was saying how crappy it was - but I'd just spent the last weekend wasting my time with it - how bad is my taste in game sensibilities that I couldn't tell?

Well, tonight for fun I stopped by EB to ask about whether or not they had any plans on carrying 1Gb sized Memory Sticks (they didn't but the guy was fairly knowledgeable and said in his opinion, with a gadget like the PSP in the mainstream market, it wouldn't be long before 1Gb-sizes would become common-place). He admitted that he wished his store could carrying bigger sticks than 256... I had better news over at Best Buy where the sales guy enthusiastically told me that not only was there a 1Gb stick that hit the market last week from Sony (and Sandisk as well) but that Sony was hyping the development of a 2Gb stick too....

But since I was out and about (and had spent the gas already driving into the west-end)... oh... erm... what the hell. Screw my budget: I picked up Ridge Racer for my PSP. And I don't regret it... except...

I now understand what all those other PSP fans were talking about. Having seen the light, I now see all the shortcomings of Gretzky-NHL glaring up at me.

1) game load-time is way too long. Ridge Racer loads itself into the PSP's RAM in seconds.

2) saved data is too big. Ridge Racer's save data is less than 1Mb...

3) too many "glitches" - I'm often seeing little graphical-processing like "white-space" when a polygon is clashing with another polygon leaving dead space in the overlap that isn't rendered.

4) why is the music breaking up when accessing the memory stick for saves and loads? That's just sloppy programming.

These little things that I didn't take seriously before... Ugh... Ridge Racer has spoiled me.