Next Generation Portable: the PSP2

Sony recently revealed the PlayStation Portable 2 which they have curiously called the Next Generation Portable, or NGP. My only guess is that Sony feels that the PSP name has a reputation for being "the newest thing that Nintendo chewed up and spit onto the street before taking a leak on it" so they decided that a name change was in order.

I've never own a PSP, though many of the games that have been released for it have intrigued me. Ultimately, Sony made many of the same mistakes early on that have been made with every single other non-Nintendo hand held. Too much power which leads to a short battery life and trying to bring the console experience to a hand held. It looks like Sony has not learned from these mistakes and has decided to add a third big mistake, which they have also made in the past: too expensive.

The NGP is one powerful beast. Sony claims that the NGP will be capable of graphics on par with a PS3 hooked up to a standard definition screen. Of course, they haven't proved this yet, so I'll wait before judging that statement. I sure you all remember when it was discovered that nearly all of Sony's pre-release PS3 footage was pre-rendered. Sony was eventually able to silence their critics once developers became familiar with the hardware, but that doesn't make me any less skeptical of their claims.

In a way, the NGP is to the Nintendo DS what PlayStation Move is to Nintendo's Wii. The hugely successful Wii uses a motion controller. The PlayStation Move is a motion controller for the PS3. The widely popular NDS uses a touch screen. Sony made the NGP's only screen a touch screen. However, the NGP goes one step further and adds a pressure sensitive pad on the underside of the device. I haven't the slightest idea how this is going to improve the experience, but I'm not a developer.

Another way in which the NGP takes a cue from the NDS (the NDSi and N3DS to be exact) is the stream lined user interface. Nintendo has tweeked the DS UI to resemble that of the Wii more closely and has added a shop channel to the DS. There's been a virtual shop for the PSP for some time now, but the UI's for the PS3 and the PSP were unique to each other. Sony sees the value in their being consistency across all of it's platforms and has announced that the NGP will run a portable version of the PS3's XMB UI. It's very possible that this was Sony's plan all along and that Nintendo just got around to announcing their plans first.

Sony is adding a second analog slider to the NGP. This, once again, is to be able to facilitate that console experience that has failed time and time again. Portable gaming needs to be a unique experience. The GameBoy and the NDS hand held have all been extremely successful because the game's are very pick and up and put down friendly. Call of Duty is not portable friendly. God of War is not portable friendly. These games require long sessions of play time to make any progress. With most NDS games, I can start the game and stop the game all with the span of 5 minutes and not worry about losing the little progress that I made.

Sony also announced that the NGP would come with the same six axis technology that is in the PS3 controller. This never took off when Nintendo tried it on a hand held via WarioWare Twist. People hate it in the PS3 controller. Why are we now putting it the NGP? As far as I'm concerned, this technology will largely be ignored by developers and only serve to increase the price.

The push to have lots of horsepower is also a huge concern. The more horsepower you have, the more energy you're going to consume. The more energy you consume, the more likely you'll be tethered to a wall charger. Sony hasn't announced how well the battery performs, but things don't look good for it. PS3-like graphics, a touch screen, a pressure sensitive pad, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, Wi-Fi, 3G, and Bluetooth, is going to be very demanding.

Big horsepower means big price. Nintendo slap a $250 price tag on the N3DS. That's plenty steep enough to keep me from being an early adopter, but it's not crippling. Sony's $600 price tag for the PS3 had me declaring that the PS3 was Sony's Dreamcast. I was wrong, but I was right about it giving the market leader a wound so big that they fell from a strong first to a dead last in a matter of months. Sony hasn't announced the price for the NGP. I'll be surprised if it's sub $400, shocked if it's sub $350, and dumbfounded if it's sub $300.

Sony has an uphill battle to fight in both the hand held market and the console market. Despite my disdain for Sony as a games developer, I'm excited to see what they do with the NGP (please ditch this name. the more I type it the more I hate it.). And competition pushes Nintendo out of that comfort zone that they've been sitting in since they single handedly created the hand held market in 1989. When Sony pushed Nintendo, Nintendo pushed back in a big way. Recently, Sony has started pushing back with some impressive software. I hope that Sony doesn't fall back into old habits and wait for the hardware to sell itself. If they do, we're going to see the PSP/NDS battle repeat itself.