PSP: The New Wave

PSP, no this isn’t some new form of PCP or LSD or new street drug of choice, though it is a huge favorite among teens and college aged kids on the streets. The PSP stands for Play Station Portable. This is the newest hand held gaming system from Sony for their Play Station franchise. This new gaming system is light years evolved ahead of the Nintendo Gameboys that helped to start the whole craze, and PSPs offer far more options than their “ancient” predecessors.

PSPs are gaining strongly in popularity. Many advertisements on television commercials will even mention a movie coming out on PSP as well as DVD. The ability of this consul and portable gaming system to adapt to multi-functional usage is one of the aspects that makes it so appealing. While there were definitely some early detractors to the new PSP model when it was initially introduced (along with a huge number of gaming fans who swore by the Nintendo DS portable system) Sony’s PSP console’s ascent in popularity has been amazing, and remarkably fast, much like the popularity of Apple's iPod.

With the emergence of the console, PSP games have come into much higher demand. The cheaper alternative to buying games in stores is download them online, and the PSP seems to want to encourage these online sites to make downloading of the games and spreading of the game much easier. There are, in fact, over a dozen web sites set up specifically for downloading games. Most of these sites have a membership fee, ranging from a month to a year. A few of the web sites even have the option of life time memberships for a larger one time fee.

The nice thing for Play Station fans who are looking at a PSP is that the controls have not been radically changed. One thing about Nintendo, for example, was how radically the controls changed from the original Nintendo system to the Super Nintendo system, to the N-64, to the Nintendo Game Cube. Fans of the Sony systems won’t have to worry: whatever small changes are made, they are all still based and designed on the original controller that everyone has become familiar with. The PSPs thus have the familiarity of all the previous Sony Play Station features that make them so popular while also adding new benefits and bonuses to the equation, giving the PSPs a great chance at staying in the popular mainstream.