Is The PSP Really All It's Cracked Up To Be?

In the realm of handheld video game systems, people seem to forget that Nintendo isn't the only company that participates in the market. Sony is out there, too, with its own handheld that always seems to be overshadowed by the Nintendo DS. Of course I'm talking about the PlayStation Portable, or PSP.

The system has been kicking around the marketplace for almost five years now in various different hardware iterations and while it does have a very strong following in the gaming community, it always seems to play second fiddle to the more universally popular Nintendo DS. The PSP itself is a slick machine with various multimedia capabilities like playing movies and music from the Memory Stick that is used as the PSP memory card or the Universal Media Disc (UMD) that the system's architecture supports.

The hardware comes in four different versions so far. These include the original PSP-1000, the two slim models, the PSP-2000 and PSP-3000, and the most recent redesign, the PSP Go. From the 1000 to 2000 series, Sony shaved off a bit of weight and made the PSP even more slim and sexy than the original design. The 2000 to 3000 change over didn't change much. They added a microphone and gave the system a better LCD screen, but it wasn't the huge leap most people were looking for. From the 3000 series to the Go the changes were phenomenally dramatic.

In this iteration Sony decided to drop physical media altogether and cut out the UMD drive for games. Instead of buying games on disc you download them from the Internet over Sony's game system wide PlayStation Network and saving them to the Memory Stick. They also dramatically changed the physical construction of the system by reshaping the entire system for more portability. The problem with this is that the game community consumers have kind of turned their back on the PSP Go because of the radical hardware changes, the lack of physical media, and the price, which was set at $249.

This may seem like a bad thing, and for Sony it probably is, but for the consumer this means the other, older models are going to be cheap. You can hit any online gaming community and find guides on where to buy PSP slim, cheap games, and even a PSP memory card for a fraction of the cost of just the PSP Go system. What's also great about this is that a lot of companies had things scheduled to release some of the best PSP games 2009/2010.

These titles include a portable version of Assassin's Creed, Tekken 6, and another SOCOM, which is always a huge hit at retail. How's that for some PSP games 2009/2010 scheduling? You will be able to pick them up cheap, too, if you're still into spinning some UMD discs. Sony really shot themselves in the foot with the release of so many different hardware iterations in such a short time period, but who cares? Find where to buy PSP slim, video game accessories and used video games and soak up the rewards with some cheap gaming on the go.

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