Sony has really made a smart move releasing a portable model of their successful home video console Playstation. While the PSP has the focus clearly on mobility another aspect that the designers of the console had in mind was bringing to the streets what used to be the domain of home video gaming for years: 3D-games.



True three-dimensional games need computing power and for years it seemed it would be too expensive to make a mobile version of any high-end 3D-gaming engine. Too expensive and too fragile were the components needed for it. One has to consider that mobile devices must be able to withstand weather conditions, humidity, sand, dust and will be dropped once in a while by their owners.

When you look at the latest generation of PSP games you can clearly see that not only the screen format of mobile gaming has changed (from square to wide-screen) but also the type of games played on mobile devices are different nowadays than they used to be 3 years ago.

During the times of the Game Boy the games were not only mainly targeted towards kids concerning themes and graphics but games were designed in a way to allow for a shorter playing time: The typical use for a mobile game was not to study manuals, tutorials and then spend hours configuring characters and understanding complex action in a movie-type environment. The trend was: short games, quick learning curve, quick rewards.

The PSP has now introduced more complex types of games to the mobile gaming world. Some games are being designed for the PS2 but then just ported with only minor modifications. So yes, not only the hardware has changed but also the games themselves. No more quick and easy gaming.

Video gamers seem to reward this trend. In general the complex games sell better than the simple ones.

The PSP has also introduced other factors not previously seen in the mobile gaming world: You can play with other people over wireless LAN and you can download games and other types of software and store them on the memory stick of your PSP. The memory stick which replaces a hard drive was actually intended to store saved games but by now entire games downloaded form the Internet and even movies are stored in the PSP.

Maybe the PSP is about to become the universal mobile multimedia machine that many cell phone manufacturers have always dreamed of.