Geared to Game: The Beginning and Some Thoughts on the PSP2

Since this is my first blog here and I want to hit the ground running, I decided that I should give some background information about myself and the new blog that I’ve started today to my incredibly large readership of two or three people (all of whom most likely stumbled upon my dark little corner of the internet by pure accident). First off, I would like to say, welcome to the future most popular video game blog in the world. Yes, it will be that awesome. How do I know this? Well, besides my overwhelming urge to mumble in a cool menacing voice that “I have foreseen it”, I’m just generally talking out of my ass.

My ass has foreseen it

However, I can honestly say that I do have passion for video games and also the ability to string together fandabulously-complex-sounding sentences (now with 50% more words that I actually didn’t make up). These skills tell my highly-developed ape brain that I will be an incredibly successful video game blogger/journalist. What is a video game blogger/journalist, you ask? Well, I’m pretty sure that they’re awesomely successful people who write about things that tend to make you somewhat fat and amazingly charismatic (in my case, anyway).

The topics that I cover will mostly, as I have said about four times now, revolve around current news stories in video games. I might sometimes rant about a topic that’s annoying me, but generally I will keep to my regular format.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, welcome to the future of awesome – and don’t forget to mark this day down on your calendars.

The PSP 2: Why Sony Is On the Right Track

Recently there’s been a shitstorm of rumors that a new PSP is in the works. Now, when most people hear the word “rumors” they also hear a little whisper in the back of their head that says something like: “unreliable” or, if your inner voice is a little slower than most: “OMG SO FAKE”. In this case, however, we have not just a couple of rumors coming from the big-black-stupid-place-filled-with-idiots, but also an assortment of video game publishers that have gotten tired of having jobs and thus feel the intense urge to break company policy – an urge that I have felt many times. So what’s the result? Deliciously rumor filled articles like this, apparently.

For those of you who have an aversion to reading more than one article a day, the article above basically pointed to the release date of the PSP 2 to be around Q4 (around March of next year). The changes we can expect to see, if Sony isn’t comprised of pants-on-head-retards, will be a better form factor, another analog stick for FPS shooters, the removal of the UMD (though the Kotaku article said that they may keep it in), and hopefully a few others.

Normally, I think that releasing new hardware this early in a race is fucking retarded, especially if your competitor is outselling you like mad. Why would you give up what sales you have accumulated and the fan base that you’ve kicked your ass to make? It usually isn’t worth it. But this is by no means a usual case.

Sony has proved over and over again that it isn’t afraid of selling the same system with a few minor changes. And I do mean minor. What were the results? People bought them. A lot of people in fact. What does that mean? It means that people apparently have lost all concepts of the value of money. Oh yeah, it also means that Sony’s fan base isn’t afraid of spending large amounts of Republic Credits on a system that has a couple more pixels on its six-inch screen. For Sony, this means that selling a brand new system is a win/win situation. The current owners of the original PSP will have no issues with buying a new shinier PSP, and the people who have graduated from the “DS School of Baby-Gamers” will want to buy the newer, sparkling, black, more mature-looking system in droves.

Sony cannot possibly lose. As long as they position themselves as the more adult system they will always have a place in the industry. That is, unless they sell it for 599 US dollars.