Economy of Effort

I’ve been playing Baseball Stars. On my PSP.

And frankly, that’s just cool.

Thanks to some dedicated PSP hackers, owners of PSP with 1.50 firmware or older can execute unsigned code that has been copied to a memory stick. Emulator developers jumped all over that and have released their emulators for the PSP.

So far, I have tried NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Super NES emulation (I’ll be giving the Sega stuff a shot too soon, once I get my 1GB memory stick in the mail – and if some older consoles get emulators released for the PSP, I’ll load them up too). Super NES and GBA emulation isn’t there yet – both ran too slow to play. NES emulation, however, is great. The emulator I’m using is called NesterJ (as far as I know, the only one available on the PSP). I’ve had great success with many games (Baseball Stars, Zelda, SMB2, Tecmo Bowl, Ring King, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, etc). Some games do not yet work correctly – sadly, NES Play Action Football is one of these, as is SMB3 and Dr. Mario. A few games refuse to load at all, but I’m not 100% certain if they are good ROM dumps or not.

Game Boy / Game Boy Color emulation appears flawless. Nothing that I tried had any sort of failure or glitch whatsoever, although I did not exactly run the gamut of testing. I did spend some good time with Tetris and Final Fantasy Adventure, both running great and colorized (and FAR more pleasing to look at on a PSP screen than on their original hardware!)

I also played with some non-emulation PSP homebrew software – specifically, a work-in-progress version of a Bejeweled port. It isn’t much more than a half-working game right now, but when it’s finished, it will be a nice little game to have stored on the PSP. And it can’t be long before someone ports a Rogue-like game like Nethack to the system, right? I’m waiting patiently.

All of this has made the PSP, a treasure of a toy already in and of itself, even more valuable to me. It’s one thing to emulate old games while chained to your PC. It’s quite another to do so on a light portable handheld system with a knockout of a screen. I don’t care to sit at my laptop and play Baseball Stars, but I’ll do so on a plane or on a long car ride.

(I’d be remiss to fail to mention that Sony is throwing up roadblocks to PSP homebrew software in the form of new firmware updates, which serve little purpose other than to close the holes that the “exploits” use to execute the unsigned software. But make no mistake, any firmware Sony releases is going to be cracked – it just takes time, and avoidance of the newer firmwares until then).

When they said Lumines was addicting, they weren’t kidding.

I bought a PSP yesterday, along with Lumines. I enjoy the game, but can keep my use in control. I made the grave mistake, however, of letting my girlfriend play the game in the car today.

They say you can become addicted to crack as soon as the first time you take it. Well, I think Lumines might need to carry a similar cautionary tale. My girlfriend played Lumines in the 10 minutes it took us to get to our lunchtime destination, and the 10 minutes after lunch for the drive to drop her off back at her place.

As we pulled up to her place, there were no signs of her preparing to stop.

Try as I might, the PSP could not be separated from her hands. Any begging or pleading was met with a sharp, “shut up”. You see, by talking, I was distracting her, and that’s just plain not allowed.

It wasn’t until she “died” that I was able to get the system back. And that was after she attempted to start a new game.

Tonight, I receive an IM, asking if she can come over after work tomorrow night “and play with the PSP?”.

20 minutes to addiction. Q? Entertainment, it would seem, has succeeded in making the new Tetris.

Her: “It’s like candy”
Me: “How so?”
Her: “You just want more and more”.