I have yet to mention the PSP 3000 for a couple of reasons. 1) It isn’t that big of a deal. And 2) It isn’t that big of a deal.

What the PSP 3000 does bring is a brighter and more crisp screen, an onboard microphone, a PS button (for other-than-Sony-fanboys, think of this as the “Jewel” button), a thinner and lighter profile, and um, that’s about it. No new form factor. No playing of holographic games yet. There’s nothing 3000 about it.

What the PSP 3000 also seems to have snuck in is decreased battery life and a possible higher price. These are pretty substantial rumors at this point, but if realized it would appear that Sony is taking two steps backwards to take one step forward.

The PSP 3000 will ship in Europe on October 15th in a game bundle for £149.99 and in the UK on October 17th at €199. It will drop in Japan in between the European launches on October 16th for 19800 YEN .

The US, Australia, and the rest of the world has yet to get any official announcement of pricing or street dates.

As I watch the trailer for PictoImage, I can’t help but get the feeling that “this is lame”. Now I’m going to stress that this is just from watching the trailer. I have yet to review the game, and I probably never will.

The concept is sound. Utilize the DS touchpad and wifi experience to create a party game for up to 8 players off one cartridge. Then everyone sits down and plays a micro version of “Pictionary”?

I’m sorry. I just can’t see this happening with anyone over the age of 13. You may gain some new features by using fancy gadgets and software, but you simply can’t replace the classic. You lose out on the gestures, the interactions, the competitiveness, the foul language, the speed drawing, the pointing at the board and grunting “uh” hoping your team understands you, and all the other joys that you get from the classic group game. Sit everyone down, have them concentrate on a two 3-inch LCD squares, and see if the formula still works. I doubt it will.

The only reason I blog about this is because I decided to look at what is coming down the pipeline for new DS games. There’s some great looking games that are a month or two away still, but this week I’d say go blow your weekly DS budget on Apple applications. Unless you have a pre-teen daughter, then by all means go grab PictoImage for her and all her friends.

Time to voice up Portagamers…

You’ve probably seen the SLOOOOOOW transition we are making to a new site. We still have a new template underway, but we are running fine and dandy on this new WordPress install. (WordPress is so hawt!) Now we need to start considering a mascot. A brand. Someone or something that our readers will associate with. So, please either vote using the Poll or leave a comment on this post (rss junkies click here because your reader sucks and won’t support javascritpt).

Pocket Ninja’s kick ass! I wish I would have had a pocket ninja when I went through middle school. Not many kids messed with me because I wore camouflage, but knowing I had a pocket ninja on me would be enough to boost my self confidence through that horrible stage of life. I’d get the girls. I’d be able to climb the rope in gym. I’d be a rockstar in home economics! (do they still have that?) My braces would be invisible. My mid-class farts would be silent…and deadly…and mysteriously seem to come from the kid next me. School would be everything I remembered it to be, minus all the embarrassment.

Kids these days are lucky. They DO have pocket ninjas! Just in time for back-to-school too. Now kids (of all ages) will have the self-esteem kick they need to get them through the daily 8 to 3 (or 8 to 5 if you’re the adult kind of kid). The very addictive, and very fun N+ is coming to both the DS and PSP on August 26th. And get ready for this ninjas: both versions are only $19.99! (suggest retail price) Perfect for any lunch money budget.

N+ is a platformer starring, surprise, a ninja. You must run and jump through various levels of mazes full of traps and baddies. The portable version comes from the cult favorite flash game of the same title for the web.

There are some flash games that are worthy of console versions, and N+ is absolutely one of them. Being published by Atari, N+ isn’t just a run-of-mill cut version from the web either. Silverbirch, the producers of the game, added a good dose of extras to give a little extra umph to your pocket ninja. The single player mode has over 200 homework-avoiding levels, and the co-op mode has over 100 levels to keep those library study sessions productive. And in case you wanna pick a fight such as: “my pocket ninja is better than your pocket ninja”, there’s a new versus mode too! Over 50 levels of ninja-vs-ninja action to prove your pocket ninja is nothing to be messed with.

A huge feature I’m looking forward to is the included level editor. Yeah, N+ levels aren’t anything extravagant. Some walls, blocks, spikes, dangerous pits, robots, etc. They all look like they were drawn by Napoleon Dynamite. But that’s the beauty of it! These levels are so simple that even *I* would feel confident creating a few. I swear I have notebooks full of similar line drawings from my school days. I wonder if I can find them, they’d be perfect N+ levels! My first level will basically be a picture of a liger.

So, kids, get your pocket ninja in time for school. As I mentioned above it goes on sale August 26th for both the DS and PSP.

Black was too generic. Silver was lame. White was too much of a fashion victim. Red was… well ok, red was cool. But all those are the PSP colors of yesteryear.

Welcome to Generation Blue!

It’s blue! And we’re excited like Christmas. We’ve waited and waited, and finally Sony is releasing a blue PSP much to our joy. It’s officially being called the “Limited Edition Madden NFL 09 PSP Entertainment Pack“, but we all know it as the “Blue PSP”. The official title is just another example of marketers trying to be not cool.

The Blue PSP pack comes with Madden NFL 09 (of course), a 1 GB Memory Stick DUO, a UMD video called “NFL: In Just One Play”, and a Beats game download voucher.

Oh, we should also mention that 2009 represents the 20th celebration of the Madden Football license. And sure that’s cool. But we don’t really care about the why, we only care about the what. And so if that means that it took Madden 20 years, and Sony 5 years, to team up and give us a Blue PSP, then so be it.

Since this is limited edition, and we expect it to be HOT, you may want to pre-order your Blue PSP now (look around, we left pre-order links all over this post).

We can’t wait to be the first grown-up kids in our office to reach into our pockets and whip out a new, cool, blue PSP. Thank you Sony (finally)!

Our first day back and we couldn’t ask for better news! Apogee has just announced that they are respawning from the dead. Their first creation will be a Duke Nukem Trilogy for handhelds! While we are still geek faithfuls who are still waiting for the Second Coming of DNfrom 3D Realms, mobilized versions of our favorite tactless FPS hero (and sidescrolling platform jumper, for those of us old enough to remember the original DOS game) is truly exciting.

Apogee claims to be the shareware pioneers who originally brought us episodic gaming and online distribution. I think they may be right. I remember waiting by the mailbox for my next levels of Duke Nukem and Commander Keen on 5.25″ floppies and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. Then I remember when I first purchased Duke Nukem 3D, and was able to download the Plutonium Pack directly and connect for multiplayer action with my friends directly through my modem. When I was able to send Duke’s famous oneliners with a single function key after destroying my opponent, Apogee and 3D Realms gained a fan for life.

Now, Apogee is back and will deliver the new Duke Trilogy to the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS platforms with three new episodes: Critical Mass™, Chain Reaction™, and Proving Grounds™. No launch date or screenshots announced yet, but when they do, you can bet we’ll let you know!

Dear Apogee,
Please release a Commander Keen game next, k? thnx.
-Jason

Apogee

Friday we had the iPhone, tomorrow we have E3, so it seemed sense to launch a new and improved Portagame.com this weekend. Well, it’s new as in we use Wordpress now. There’s still a lot of things I want to do to the site, and a custom design was in the works at one point. So, we’ll call this “Portagame 2.0 beta” (which should probably be Portagame 1.9 or something, right?). Anyway, welcome Portagamers! It’s been a while.

Hey everyone,

I’m finally migrating away from b2evolution and onto wordpress. In the process I have to kill the template (temporarily) and also disable comments (more permanent, at least until wordpress is up and running). Migrations are never easy, so wish me luck!

The fellas at the Giz have stumbled upon an interesting patent being developed by Sony Ericsson. Labeled as a “MOBILE INFORMATION TERMINAL APPARATUS” in order to, where guessing here, deter patent crawlers looking for a PSP/Gaming Phone application from Sony (HA! They got you!), the device includes a rotating screen for video playback and camera operation. Yes, there will be a camera built. Let’s just hope they can be more creative than Talkman for a killer app for it.

What’s missing? Well if they want to be an iPhone killer, a touch screen is missing. As lame as it sounds, “touch” is the new pink. iPhone wasn’t the first, but I can guarantee that you’ll see more and more consumer electronics, everything from phones to mp3 players to gaming systems, have touch screens. The DS is already on the bandwagon, will we see a touch-PSP in the future too?

They are also crowding the surface with too many buttons and this may be a fatal flaw for PSP purists. The shoulder buttons, if you could call them that are kinda lame and seem like an after thought. But this might on purpose since the shoulder buttons are very identifiable to the PSP and by showing the shoulder buttons in the patent app it would be a dead give away that this was indeed a PSPhone. Remember, it’s a “MOBILE INFORMATION TERMINAL APPARATUS”, ok?

I hope this isn’t a phantom application honestly. I would love to see the PSP, or PSP compatible mobile information terminal apparatuses, get into more peoples pockets no matter what form factor it is in. If the PSP installed userbase were to increase by double-digit percentages or more, it will catch they eyes and budgets of more game producers–which would hopefully mean a better selection of games for the PSP public!

So, Sony, I say let’s do it. Sign me up for your beta list, I want to be the first to test out the PSPhone!

There are only a few of the big name video sites (Google and GameTrailers yes, but no, not YouTube) that offer their video content in PSP and iPod compatible MP4 format. It’s something we definitely need more of. Have you ever been at a party, or a friends house, or even lunch with your coworkers talking about the latest viral video and wish you had it there, on your perfectly capable PSP or other portable player? Instead, you get to try to deliver the funny parts yourself. Only problem is, you’re not funny, you can’t sing whether in English or in Numa Numa, and definitely don’t sound like the voice of Leroy Jenkins. You’re friends are only laughing at you because you look like a dork as you act out Star Wars Kid.

Avoid the embarrassment. The boys at MP4point are collecting viral videos and making them available in that MP4 flavor you all know and love. What I like about the site is they seem to favor videos about the PSP. Remember that weird PSP commercial? How about the PSP smashers?

The site also features the TMNT LARPer. Which I’m still trying to determine that video is funny or just pathetically sad.

There’s a lot of other great viral vids that you just have to hunt for. The best thing to do, if you’re into mobile video and want lots of it, is to subscribe to their RSS feed.

OK, we know you need your daily YouTube habit but you haven’t figured out how to confert YT to your PSP yet. MP4Point provides us with a quick and dirty list of MP4 converters. They also have a few reviews of PSP movies services and sites.

I’m looking forward to using this site more and more. The fact that the MP4 videos they put out are already pre-formatted for your mobile device holds

If nothing else, at least visit for the Sexy Videos. That should be reason enough to justify a quick look.