LAS VEGAS – I’ve seen the future of mobile entertainment, and it’s the PlayStation Portable.
When Sony said it was going to challenge Nintendo in the portable gaming market last year, analysts were guarded about how well it would do against a company whose Game Boy franchise has dominated hand-held gaming for more than a decade.
While Sony’s PSP possessed impressive features and technical specifications – including the ability to play digital music and video – the prevailing opinion was that runaway success would depend on the games that developers and publishers created for it.
During the 2005 International Consumer Electronics Show last week, Electronic Arts showed off early versions of several games that will be available when the PSP goes on sale in the United States in late March.
After trying out a handful of launch titles, my attitude toward the PSP surged from optimistic to foaming-at-the-mouth excited. If other publishers release games matching the style and quality I saw from Electronic Arts, the PSP will be the hottest high-tech toy of 2005.
The launch lineup for PSP games from Electronic Arts includes: “Need for Speed Underground Rivals,” “NBA Street,” “FIFA Soccer,” “NFL Street,” “MVP Baseball” and “Tiger Woods PGA Tour.”
Need For Speed’
It’s hard to imagine you could have a cinematic experience on a 4.3-inch screen. But in “Need For Speed Underground Rivals,” the street racing game takes advantage of the PSP’s high-resolution, 16:9 widescreen liquid crystal display to create something that looks like a tiny version of the movie “The Fast and the Furious.”
The visuals in “Need For Speed” looked amazingly sharp and colorful, and the engrossing illusion of velocity the game generates as you blaze down city streets is completely convincing.
Game designers from Electronic Arts were quick to stress that “Need For Speed” and their other PSP games with similar titles already available for PlayStation 2 are not just ports of old games to the new platform.
The PSP’s controls are similar to its PlayStation predecessors, so PSP games are intuitive for anyone who has played one of the older systems.
Extra features
All of the games Electronic Arts showed at the Consumer Electronics Show also let two players compete head-to-head wirelessly using the PSP’s built-in Wi-Fi technology.
Other game modes are designed to give players a quick fix for situations when they might only have a few minutes to play.
Instead of running a complete circuit race in “Need for Speed,” for example, a game mode called “drift” allows players to try to quickly navigate an obstacle course by taking sharp turns yet avoid skidding into pillars spread throughout the track.
Another notable feature for Electronic Arts’ coming PSP games is a system called EA Pocket Trax, which lets players listen to music or watch videos linked to the games they are playing. In “Need For Speed,” for instance, you can watch music videos for bands that provided music for that game. You also can just listen to 40 or so songs in soundtrack without playing the game.
Sony has not announced a price for the system in the United States., but it now costs about $190 in Japan.
Since the PSP became available in Japan on Dec. 2, more than 510,000 of the devices were sold before the end of 2004, Kaz Hirai, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, said last week at the Consumer Electronics Show.
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AP-NY-01-19-05 0629EST
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