IGN Frowns at the PSP

For every article that’s positive about the PSP (like the previous post), you’ll find one that’s negative. Take this interview with a Sony rep at IGN. There’s four pages of optimistic-yet-vague PR speak, then the final page, in which the IGN editors get pretty goddamn negative on the poor ol’ PSP.

In This Reporter’s Opinion? Yeah, Sony is messing a lot of things up. They claim the PSP is a multimedia machine, but getting movies onto it, especially if you’re a Mac user, couldn’t be much harder without requiring you to pitch a perfect game and then split the atom. And frankly, who’s going to want it for that when the iPod experience is so seamless? It has so much potential, but Sony takes months if not years to bring out new features. Meanwhile, homebrew developers run free being all awesome, giving people all the more reason to run custom firmware, and at that point, why would they pay for games? Which just makes software sales worse. The fact that it’s as expensive to develop for as the PS2, without the benefit of the massive install base, must make it even harder to get third party publishers interested.

That said, it has enough great games in its back catalogue to warrant a buy. And it’s great hardware, with a great screen. For most people, I’d recommend a DS, but there are reasons to get the PSP instead. Or hell, get both!

Honestly? I think its troubles get a lot of ink because we can’t pretend any other console has any troubles right now. People especially like giving Sony a hard time, and you can’t really do that over the PS3 at the moment.