Sony’s Next Portable Generation is the Next Generation Portable
As promised, here’s a run down of what was announced at the Playstation meeting tonight.
So the PSP2 is a thing…but its not called the PSP2, its called the Next Generation Portable (NGP). I believe that’s a codename, but either way, its terrible and needs to be changed before launch. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Sony wasted no time jumping into exactly what the public wanted, Portable Playstation news. After briefly talking about the Playstation Suite, a Playstation platform designed for Android devices, they pulled out the mammoth sized Next Generation Portable. Here’s the hardware bullet points pulled from the press event.
Next Generation Portable features:
- Two Micro Analog sticks
- Six-axis Controls
- Front and Rear Cameras
- Large 5 Inch Touch Pad On Back of Device
- 5 Inch 960×544 Resolution OLED Front Touch Screen
- 3G Capabilities
- PS3 Quality Graphics
- An all new Flash Based Card Format Similar to the DS
That’s a monster list of specs. Not many of them are surprising though. The most surprising thing is probably the addition of proper analog sticks, not nubs. Everything else had been assumed/confirmed by media outlets weeks/months ago. The size of the rear touch pad is surprising and the uses displayed at the show were interesting. The most exciting thing about the NGP has got to be the gaming applications displayed tonight by the hardware.
In addition to a laundry list of titles that reads like a who’s who of Sony’s software library, they gave a demo of how that absurdly large touch pad can be used. Here’s the announced titles (some may not actually be games in development, many games were ported from the PS3 as demos). Also, expect alot of these to be working titles.
- Hots Shots Golf
- Gravity Daze
- Killzone
- Hustle Kings
- Reality Fighters
- Smart As
- Broken
- Littlebigplanet
- Little Deviants
- Wipeout
- Uncharted
- Resistance
- Monter Hunter Tri
- Lost Planet
- Yakuza
- Dynasty Warriors
- Dungeon Defenders
- Call of Duty
The most interesting hardware specific game shown was probably Little Deviants. The player will use the touch pad on the back of the NGP to interact with that exact spot on the screen above it, almost like you’re pushing up through the system. This has my mind exploding with possible games. The DS’s touch pad is very straight forward and vanilla, but this provides an ability to be finger deep IN the game you are playing. Congrats Sony…I’m on the hook…now don’t mess this up.
Hot Shots Golf was also shown to have a Sixaxis feature that puts your golfer in a 1st person perspective. From that perspective, the player can rotate their body and the NGP to see in every direction the golfer would see if they turned. The 3DS has shown similar software for its camera and motion sensing capabilities, but either way its cool.
Uncharted was shown with a grip of touch and motion features, but that doesn’t excite me too terribly much. I don’t need weird input methods to enjoy Uncharted.
Other features were touched on as well. The XMB is out and LiveArea is in. It seems to be more user friendly than the XMB and it looks like it wants to be touched. Livearea will have all the connectivity that you have come accustomed to on the home platforms and it allow for a surprising amount of backward compatibility. Downloadable PSP games will play on the NGP (so the creation of the PSPgo library wasn’t in vain, and Playstation Suite content will play as well (which has already been confirmed will include classic PS1 games) Naturally, the NGP will have its own download store.
“Near” is a the Sony equivilent of the 3DS’s tag feature. It seems to be a significantly more fleshed out with more info being shared about gameplay trends and user info, but I don’t see this catching on in the States. Maybe in big cities, but in the vast rural areas in the south, this will go widely unused.
Closer to the end of the show it became obvious that alot of the 3rd party “games” that were being shown were not games, but more demonstrations of the porting tech available to the NGP developers. The idea is that PS3 games can be easily ported to the NGP in a matter of months, minimalizing the cost and time in development. Hideo Kojima mentioned some compelling cloud computing ideas but said nothing definitive. However, the idea of playing a game on PS3, saving your progress and picking it back up on the road with you NGP is mindblowing.
The NGP is slated to hits stores this holiday…yeah within the calendar year. Sony is taking a kitchen sink approach to the NGP and that could mean an insane price point, but no price announcements were made. Color me interested. I have really enjoyed my PSP, with its only real problem being a lack of quality titles. Maybe the innovation built into the NGP, will spur serious creativity.
PS…Brian Ashcroft of Kotaku could be the best live blogger in the gaming industry. 1up’s coverage was good but full of technical and battery problems, and Joystiq had a blog going but it took forever to get the live update to work. I did however, find the Joystiq editorializing pretty funny.
