A couple of weeks ago, I paid a visit to several entertainment-based shops including HMV and Gamestation with the intention of looking to see what there was for the PSP. In my honest opinion, I think that the PSP has been treated pretty poorly in this country, and the absolute lack of games on offer in both of these specific shops speaks volumes.Gamestation were only selling pre-owned games for the PSP (all at ridiculous "not-much-cheaper-than-new" prices!!) and HMV had a shelf end dedicated to no more than ten titles, all of which were all roughly in the same genre and no real variety.
Skip over to Japan, the reigning country for video gaming, and it couldn't be a more different story, and the fact that a PSP game in the form of Kingdom Hearts, has pushed another PSP game off the top of the Japanese gaming charts shows this quite nicely.
From personal experience, the PSP has the capabilities of offering some really nice games. For evidence just check out Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core or the game this is really about which is Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. So, why don't more companies make games for the console?
The Nintendo DS is of course competition, but gaming is very different between the two consoles. For example, Kingdom Hearts on the DS is always cute, but has terrible gameplay. For me, KH has never quite got the DS right. But, on the PSP, KH games (well game, there's only actually one) look incredible graphically, and there's much more scope for playability.
Nevertheless, I guess there is a little bit of good news, in the fact that sony seem to be really filling the Playstation Network up with tons of old Playstation games to download for the PSP (as well as the PS3), which is really great, because we now have wider access to games like the Final Fantasy series, Grandia, early games in the Persona series and games that weren't released over here.
Unfortunately, there are problems with downloading all the time:
- Buying large enough Memory Sticks gets expensive
- Downloading games isn't necessarily cheap. You have to pay for the game, and some are still close to £20, and then you're eating up your internet too and potentially slowing everything down
- Sometimes you just want to experience a brand new game, and not one that was made over ten years ago (even though it is nice to play them again)
