AIBO Euthanized

As part of large scale restructuring in a bid to swing around the company's financial struggles, Sony has announced that they have discontinued new product research into entertainment robots. AIBO, the popular robot dog that retails for around $1700 and it's lesser known humanoid cousin, the QRIO, will no longer be produced.



The AIBO is probably the single most recognized consumer robot on the market, and it's a real pity to see it go. The little guy seemed to be an indicator that all sorts of other consumer robot pets and helpers might be just around the corner, but perhaps that's not true.

Of course I nvy anyone that has an AIBO or two stashed away, I could imagine the eBay price on an AIBO will skyrocket within the next few months..

See no ****, hear no ****, speak no ****?

The web was abuzz last week with discussions about Google's decision to release a localized version of it's search service in China. The service itself is not the big news, but rather the fact that it will be censored to remove certain entries that the Chinese government deems inappropriate. This move seems to clash directly with Google's don't be evil mantra, as well as with their supposed mission of organizing the world's information and making it easily available to everyone.

Speaking in defense of this move on the Official Google Blog Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel said that this decision was made as they (Google) felt it was better to provide the Chinese population with a limited service, than with no service at all. While I understand their point of view, as well as the need for a business like Google to do what it needs to get into a market as important as China, I find it really worrying that even this angelic company is willing to sacrifice their supposed scruples for a piece of the pie in this country, especially considering the results of recent similar activity by other companies/products in the same space, Microsoft's MSN, and Yahoo. While China is undoubtedly well on it's way to being the single most important economic force on earth, allowing it to dictate the way business is conducted, to the detriment of free speech is extremely irresponsible. If China is allowed to establish such standards, what is stopping other governments for using them as an example and employing similar tactics? I am not typically one to throw around phrases like 'The Greedy Corporations', but in this case I think such labels are appropriate, and moves like this by such entities could quite conceivably spell doom for the information freedom that has developed over the last few decades thanks to the internet.

PC Gaming sucks

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fanboi or anything. I have had my fair share of fun with PC gaming especially playing RTSs (which is the one genre I have yet to see properly implemented on a console), but fun can only cost so much in time, effort and money before it stops being fun. Let me explain: Last week one of the guys at work downloaded 3DMark 06 which, for the uninformed, is the latest version of benchmarking company Futuremark's 'gamers benchmark'. It is the de-facto standard in PC stats bragging, basically the tool of choice in the hardware pissing contest that PC gamers are so fond of. It runs a series of tests on your machine that place the same kind of strain on it as a current-technology game would, determining how well your various PC components live up to the task and providing you with a single, all-encompassing '3DMark score'. This single score is used on forums, at LANs and in any other gamer meeting place you can think of to illustrate how much more powerful one person's machine is than everyone else's. It's the digital age version of bicep-flexing or arm-wresteling.



Anyway, I ran this benchmark on both my home machine (a Mecer notebook with a P4 2.8GHz processor, 1Gb of system RAM and a Radeon 9700 Mobility with 128 Mb of onboard RAM) as well as on my work PC (a 3.2GHz machine with 1Gb RAM and a GeForce 7800 GT with 256Mb RAM). These machines earned scores of 347 and 3411 respectively. Now these scores alone mean very little to me, what does matter is that my notebook (which is not that underpowered) gets 0-1 fps on each of the tests and my work PC gets between 8 and 20 fps. The level of hardware needed to run this benchmark properly is apparently a system with a dual-core CPU, two high end graphics cards and a (yet to be released) physics processing card. All that adds up to about a R15000 machine (at least). How many people can really afford to spend that on a gaming machine.. especially considering that it will be outdated within 8-10 months (my work PC would have been a top end rig 8 months ago)!? It really is rediculous.

Thanks, but at that kind of cost, I would much rather 'invest' in one of the new consoles coming out, enjoy games at the same quality level (or higher) as current-generation PCs, and know that for the next five or so years I will be able to play games as they were intended to be played, on exactly the same hardware that the developers tested them on. No setting down detail levels just to be able to run the game at a steady framerate on my year old machine, no worrying about whether a machine will even run on my rig, just pop in te disk and play!

Less is More..

Now this is what an IM client should be like! Not some nasty, clunky, supersized eexample of bad design, but small, clean and functional! This is what Miranda can be with a bit of TLC and tweaking. This really is the most awesome IM client. Tabbed windows, ability to remove everything superfluous (with a plugin or two), transparency support, and easily transportable. I love it!

One of the most useful plugins I have found is one called Metacontact, it actually groups together aliases from different protocols into a single contact, so you can transparently use MSN, GTalk, whatever, to contact them. This is great when you're having trouble with one of the protocols. Lovely!

IM ME

Now how's that for a misleading title? It may seem like a really silly, obvious, and self obsessed statement, but it's actually all about Instant Messaging, clever eh? Ok, so it really is silly and pointless. Anyway, the point of this post is that today I tried a new IM program called Miranda, it's an open source app-which really means nothing to me, I couldn't care less as long as it's free! It also supports all the IM systems I use. Up till now I have been running both Trillian (for MSN, YIM and ICQ) and GoogleTalk, and the inefficiency of that just bothers me! Now I have an app that supports all those supported by Trillian, as well as GoogleTalk, without having to pay for a 'pro' version. Yay :)

This is also my first 'Blog this' post from the google taskbar. It's not exactly a big deal.. but maybe this system will let me display images without logging into the blogspot site?

Finally, just in case you were wondering, yes I'm still EXTREMELY pissed off at that cow that took our house. Had to say it. Bleh!

People suck.

You know, I'm generally a very diplomatic and friendly person. I go out of my way to help people and make others happy. Yes, I'm a pleaser, so it really hits me hard whenever I am faced with inconsiderate and selfish people. I also don't get angry very easily and I often field a joke or too about the way I speak (my choice of words and avoidance of swearwords. Well, this morning someone managed to really dent my faith in humanity, get me fuming, and get me swearing profusely (only in emails and IMs mind you).
A little while ago, I posted about the fact that Natalie and I had found the perfect place for use to stay. She was due to move in early in Feb (after her Birthday-her mother couldn't bare to not have her at home for one last Birthday) and that I would move in after the wedding (and honeymoon) in April. Well that plan has been shattered by the evil BITCH (there, I said it) that is the current tenant. She informed the landlord this morning that she no longer wants to move out, and will be staying on. That's right, 5 days before she'd due to month, this schizo chick screws Natalie and I over in one fell swoop! What am I going to do about it, you ask? Well sadly there isn't a whole lot I can do. I signed the lease agreement and paid the deposit a week ago, but it turns out that the owner hasn’t signed the agreement yet, so it's not binding! And he and the estate agent (Pam Golding in Menlyn, in case anyone from any consumer activism group happens to be reading this by some miracle) didn't dot their 'I's and cross their 'T's and ensure that there was paperwork confirming she would move out. They accepted lease offers without any formal written intent by the woman to move out! I have thrown my toys as far out of the cot I can, and told the agent that she and the owner need to make every reasonable effort to get that tenant out, but there's really not much else I can do. Just when everything seems to be going so damn well, this sort of CRAP happens.
Wow. Count the swear words in that post!

Since I'm already pissed about this and feel like knocking on someone, I may as well pick the closest target-blogger. The service is free, and there are some awesome tools, but one or two little irritations really bugged me more than usual today because of the circumstances.. For one, why cant I MoBlog from South Africa? It really sucks that it's exclusive to American networks! Couldn't they set up a number that any MMS could be sent to from overseas? The other irritation is the lack of image support in Mail-To-Blog. That's why all my posts are so bland, I like the convenience of posting by just sending an email, it gives me the freedom to use a nice editor and spellchecker, and I can slowly add bits and pieces between compiles and so on. I am now trying my luck by writing this post in plain text, in the hope that I can just add html tags and blogger will ignore them. Lets see:

Finally, I added a few more userbars, these things are strangely addictive, I even used userbarmaker.com to create some custom ones. I moved all the bars down a bit-I don't want to go hiding my archives from the droves of interested readers.. Ok, you can stop laughing now! And I added a 'Wallpaper of the day' script from gamewallpapers.com.

[EDIT]
Oh well, it didn;t work, I had to go onto plogspot and manually edit the damned thing after all..
[/EDIT]

New skin.. and clutter

Revamp

I have (once again) changed my blog skin (template), I just wish Blogger had a wider variety of the damned things. I did go googling to find some, but it wasn’t particularly productive, so as you can see I’m stuck with another (bland) out-the-box blogger.com template. As much as I could probably put together my own template easily enough, I really don’t have the time. I’ll at least try and do a custom title bar some time in the future.

Bars and Stripes

In lieu of a more interesting or customized template that reflects me and my interest, I identified a whack-load of userbars that suit me and what I like doing and using, and plastered them along the sidebar. I also added my (default) tesig.com BF2 signature. The cool thing about the tesig images is that they are dynamically updated as I play and my stats change (not that I play as much these days.. too busy!). I know they’re to wide for the template, and all cluttered, I’ll deal with that another time. At least now (for once) the damn page has something non-standard on it J

Console wars

It’s about that time in the games industry again, when PC enthusiasts start fearing the demise of their beloved gaming platform, when irrational arguments are had between loyal ‘fanbois’ (and girls) of every age, race and creed regarding which flashy new piece of gaming hardware best deserves to grace their living rooms (despite never having played on any of these machines). Yes, it’s time for the ‘next gen’ of game consoles to hit the market and become the ‘current gen’. The truly ridiculous thing about these argument is that they tend to be extremely subjective, and based mostly on the individuals’ experience with currently available systems from the same manufacturers. I am in the same boat as most of these gamers, having not had the privilege of playing on an Xbox 360 or on a PS3 or Revolution mockup or devkit, so in many way’s I am in no better position to argue than they are, however I like to think I’m a little bit more objective. Whatever the case, I feel like ranting about the impending next gen, which is partially current gen, since Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has now been on the market and available (in theory) since November last year. I will look at it from a uniquely South African view, since that is what I know and what affects me.

The Here and Now

First off, let me summarize my experience of the current generation of consoles in South Africa. Officially there are two competitors in the market - the Nintendo GameCube and the Sony Playstation 2 – since Microsoft did not deem the South African market ready for another competitor and chose not to release the Xbox here. In reality, the picture is somewhat different: it is true that one can only buy the GameCube or PS2 from major retailers, but the Xbox is actually readily available from importers for those that really want to get their hands on it, and games can either be bought from these retailers (at an exorbitant markup) or import them directly from websites such as cdwow.com (at prices lower than what console games retail for in South Africa!). In addition to this ‘underground’ availability of the Xbox, the marketing and advertising of Nintendo’s GameCube is considered by many to be something of a joke, which has kept the ‘Cube from ever becoming a serious contender in this country and is in stark contrast to the aggressive marketing employed by Ster Kinekor, the sole official distributor of PlayStation products in South Africa. As a result, the PlayStation 2 has an even higher percentage of the console market share in this country than it’s already high share in most other countries, with both Xbox and GameCube scrabbling for scraps (and I would not be entirely surprised if the Xbox market is actually larger than the GameCube one).

Having owned both a PS2 and Xbox, played quite a bit on a GameCube, and having developed for all three, I would personally choose the Xbox as my favorite machine of this generation. The limited library on the GameCube, as well as a controller that I don’t enjoy and the absolute lack of any multimedia capabilities would put it on the bottom of my list. There have certainly been some sterling titles for the machine, such as Zelda: Wind Walker and Super Smash Brothers: Melee, but not enough to win me over. The PlayStation 2 offers a much wider variety of games, including a massive number of platform exclusives, and has (in my opinion) a very good design in the Dual Shock controller. The fact that the system doubles as a DVD player, and has some great peripheral titles such as the EyeToy and SingStar series really do add to the appeal, especially if the machine will be used by children as well. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I do not have to share my console with children, and the only peripheral gaming I really enjoy is that involving dance mats-ie titles such as Dance Dance Revolution. As such the library of games offered by the Xbox (which very obviously aimed at an older audience and is short on ‘younger’ titles) suits me just fine, and the technical superiority of the machine appeals to me with generally better graphical and audio quality. I also find the S Controller to be the most comfortable controller device of the three. I have unfortunately not experienced Xbox Live, since I do not have a broadband connection, so I can’t let that influence my choice, but the Xbox’s additional media capabilities such as recording CDs direct to the hard-drive and using them in some games is great, and the incredible simplicity of setting up multiplayer LAN sessions is great! The machine obviously also offers great additional functionality, if you are willing to ‘chip’ it.

Tomorrow, tomorrow..

On to the next generation of consoles, and what I think about them, and their chance for success in this country. I will discuss elements I consider important in the discussion, and mention my guess for a ‘winner’ for each element. I will not discuss hardware or games at this point, since it is futile to discuss either before all three systems are on the market.

First to market

One of Microsoft’s trump cards in this generation has been their massive head-start on the competition (this was also one of the things that worked to Sony’s advantage in the previous generation), with the Xbox 360 almost simultaneously released in all three major regions, and projections of the PS3’s release estimating that it may appear as late as 2007 in some major regions, there is a huge amount of time in which Microsoft can push it’s product to consumers, and weaken the PlayStation brand. The Revolution is rumored to be due for release as early as the second quarter of 2006, and this may further help to loosen the grip that the magic PS logo has on consumers’ minds. How will South Africa be affected by this? Well, until the release of the PSP in this country (a few short days after the system’s release in Europe), PlayStation products typically only got released here 6-12 months after their release in other territories, if the PSP release is an indication of future treatment, we may be lucky enough to see the PS3 in stores about the same time it appears in London high street retailers. Microsoft has already indicated that it intends to release the Xbox 360 in South Africa, and it appears that discussions are already well underway with potential distributors. Estimates place the release of the system around the middle of 2006. The only total unknown here is the Revolution. Since Nintendo products are typically released here significantly later than anywhere else, we can only assume that the same will happen this time around. My guess would be that if it is released here, it will be at least six months after it hits Europe, so let’s say about the same time as the PS3.

Winner: Xbox

Brand recognition

This is an easy one to call. As far as the majority of South Africans are concerned, gaming is synonymous with PlayStation. There simply is no other console that has an established marketing presence in this country. What little reputation Nintendo has is marred by stories of bad after-sale service, difficult to get hold of software and ridiculously expensive game pricing. Unfortunately the big ‘N’ is a big ‘No’ in SA. Microsoft on the other hand is unknown to the broader public as a console gaming competitor, but extremely well known as a PC brand. Just as PlayStation has a hold on console gaming here, Microsoft has an almost absolute monopoly on home and business computing, with Mac being all but unknown here. This brand could be built on to push the 360, much as it was to push the original Xbox in other territories.

Winner: PS3

Price

South Africans are underpaid, that is to say they earn far less relative to their peers in developed countries. Basic necessities in South Africa are also often far cheaper than in other countries. These factors, combined with high distributor and retailer markup (relative to international standards) and the sensitivity of luxury prices to currency fluctuation make gaming a far less accessible pastime than in many other countries. Whereas a $40 game in the US is a small percentage of an average salary, a R500 game in South Africa is a significant chunk of an above average salary. If we then consider the pricing brackets aimed for by the various manufacturers, the most expensive products will obviously suffer. Hardest hit by this would appear to be the PS3, which is estimated to be coming in at about $465, with the Xbox not far behind, with a price tag of $399 and $299 for the full and budget packs respectively. The revolution on the other hand is rumoured to be coming in at a very low price point, possibly in the region of $200-$250 which would give it a distinct advantage in this country (especially if the games are cheaper than the absurd $60 being charged for Xbox 360 titles).

Winner: Revolution

Audience

Gaming in South Africa is not at the same level as elsewhere in the world, especially console gaming. The audience for games in this country is decidedly younger than in the US, UK or other major markets. This is made painfully clear by the shelves of unsold copies of GTA:San Andreas for the PS2 to be found last year in any South African retailer, at a time when the game was impossible to find in retailers In other territories. As such, systems that appeal to a younger audience may well have an advantage in this audience. The Xbox 360 seems to be taking the same road this generation as it’s predecessor did, with the focus firmly on more mature titles, if this continues I suspect that may play against it. The PS3, as with the PS2, has the support of a wide variety of developers and will most likely have a fair selection of younger titles, though I get the impression that there will be more mature titles on it than in the previous generation. In this category, I expect Nintendo to win hands down. Not only do they typically appeal to a younger audience, they are actively trying to attract a new market of casual gamers, rather than depending on an established hardcore (and casual-turned-hardcore) base.

Winner: Revolution

Additional functionality

While this is difficult to discuss, since the multimedia functionality for the unreleased Revolution and PlayStation 3 are uncertain, it’s worth trying. Microsoft has ushered in a new era of living room integration for consoles with the multimedia and networked interaction of the Xbox 360. Besides compatibility with just about any media gadget on the market as well as Windows XP Media Centre Edition, the Xbox brings with it an easy-to-use online service that allows users to communicate, compete and buy services and additional items. Unfortunately, South Africa’s dismal broadband infrastructure may make this functionality impossible to access for all but the most affluent of consumers. Media devices such as iPods are also less common in this country than elsewhere, rendering that particular functionality useless as well. The Revolution will apparently include the ability to download games originally released on older Nintendo systems through a Live-like service, again, this may well be marred by a lack of broadband connectivity in the country. While the PS3 is not known to offer any online services at this point, this may well be made available later. The system will also play the new Blu-Ray media format, which might make it an attractive buy if the format ever becomes successful in this country.

Winner: Xbox

While the above may seem to indicate that the PS3 will be the loser in this war, one must realize that the strength of the PlayStation brand in this country is incredible, and I personally believe that while the other two systems will make a massive dent in it’s market share (more so than in other territories) it will remain the king of the hill for the next generation.

I'm stressed? Tell me something I DONT know!

In yesterday’s Tai Chi session (that’s right, I do Tai Chi- at this point I think it’s one of the things that helps keep me sane!) we did a new Qigong exercise that doubles as a stress test. My instructor was quick to inform me that I’m the most stressed individual in the group. Thanks, I kinda could have guessed that-I’m only in a new job, getting married, renting a new place and had an accident with my car (that is service due) on Tesday. Somehow, I think I kind of have a right to be stressed, don’t you?

This really has been one of the roughest weeks I remember. Besides being extremely busy implementing a speech recognition requirement in the project I’m assigned to at work (with Microsoft Speech API 5.1), I have been running around all week like a headless chicken. I have finalized our honeymoon itinerary (can’t say any more she might be reading this ;)), finalized the lease on our new place-including paying in the rather hefty deposit and contract fee (can you believe a lease contract costs R400 to execute!?) and renewed my car’s licence, not to mention getting a good amount of work in on our latest cellphone game. Whew! Am I looking forward to the weekend (though that will be busy too-organizing a suit, seeing the photographer, filling up the wedding registry).

Anyway, to actually make this post more than just a pointless bitch-session, how about I go a bit further into the Tai Chi thing? Tai Chi is a martial art that is practiced in western society mostly for holistic reasons. There are a number of styles, and it is made up of a number of forms. I practice the Wu style (I think :-p), and am busy learning the 24 movement form, and the Sabre form. I don’t subscribe to any of the associated philosophies, but I do accept and understand the importance relaxation and physical strengthening and training hold in attempting to lead a balanced life. I find the slow, controlled movements and concentration involved in Tai Chi extremely calming and refreshing, and sitting at a PC all day long at work, any exercise can only be a good thing! Anyway, while I have been doing it for a couple of months now, I am far from being knowledgable about the subject, however there are some great websites out there discussing the art, for example the Yang Style Tai Chi homepage, which covers most of the forms and many of the styles.

If you are looking for something to relax and focus you, without requiring you to be some kind of super-athlete, I would highly suggest Tai Chi J

EVIL forums!

(Enter Matt from right, approaches podium and clears throught)

“Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m a forumholic.”

(Applause)

Yup, It’s true. I’m addicted to forums. If I had to take the typical list of items used to check for alcoholism and apply it to forums, there would be no doubt-I would probably answer ‘yes’ to ninety percent of the questions! It’s a really terrible affliction, I find myself wasting ridiculous amounts of time checking threads that I have ‘contributed to’ for responses, and occasionally browsing new topics to add my 2c. I don’t know whether it’s the sense of ‘community’ or a morbid obsession with correcting ‘fanbois’ and other misguided gamers in their skewed knowledge and assumptions regarding gaming and the games industry that draws me back to my regular ‘haunts’ again and again. It’s probably a combination of the two.

The site I waste the most time on (and make no mistake it is wasted time) is www.nag.co.za. Or should that be wasted. The site has recently been revamped, and for some bizarre reason, instead of just changing the look and feel of the site and sticking with the existing technology, the webmaster has (rather misguidedly in my opinion) chosen to use a totally new forum technology. This would be great, except that the new technology seems to have less built in functionality than the previous one, and all the functionality customizations that he made on that technology have now been lost. Of course the flip side of this is that I find it a whole lot easier to resist checking on the forum, now that the (comforting?) familiarity is gone, and the new format is such a pain to use. So in that respect, thank you Mr. Webmaster, you have done me a great justice.

The other sites I occasionally visit have far less traffic and in some cases are far more focused or less interesting, which means there is less of a risk of spending too much time on them. Apparently you need only do something (or not do something) 12 days consecutively to make it habit, so in two weeks I should be ‘clean’. Yay! Now I’ll have more time for blogging :p

Grip that doomed shift, Homeboy!

We have a home!!

Well Natz and I finally found our ‘home’ on Friday. Ok, so it’s a rented place, but with the uncertainty over her community service placement next year, and the generally effed up high cost of housing lately in South Africa, it just doesn’t make sense for us to buy right now. It’s actually a nice big place, a duplex with three bedrooms and two full bathrooms upstairs, and a full kitchen, guest toilet and dining/living area downstairs. We have a nice little garden (ok, so it’s huge by today’s townhouse standards..), a courtyard and a lock up garage and carport! Compared to the rabbit hutches we’ve been looking at buying, this is a mansion! We’ll have place for a spare bedroom and a study for the two of us. It’s in Monument Park in Pretoria, which is a bit further from work than I am now, but it’s really close for Natz, which is awesome, and it’s a nice area-quiet, but close to the highway which’ll make getting to work a cinch. And it’s way, WAY better than living in Pretoria North, which we might have had to do if Natz’ internship had ended up being at Garankua. That place is too damned hot for words, and miles from any decent entertainment-not to mention getting to work from there would have been hell!



Of course, I won’t be able to move in just yet, Natz will move in next month, and I’ll move in after the wedding (and honeymoon) so it’ll be well over two months before I start living there-but I can hardly wait! Of course furnishing the place will be quite an ordeal, her folks have been really generous with some of their older furniture, as has my dad, but we’ll still need to invest in some stuff (not that I mind, it’ll be nice to have some new furniture of our own J). I wish I could go large and buy everything new, but I’m not made of money yet.. That’ll just have to wait until I win the Lottery..



And more new games!

Last week I finally got hold of Doom 3 for the Xbox (I was going to buy it from cdwow, but I found someone here selling a copy secondhand). I’ve seen it before briefly on a friend’s Xbox, but it’s only in playing it for a while that you really appreciate what id achieved with it. Now I’m by no means an id fan boy-far from it, I generally don’t enjoy their games. They tend to make great engines, and forget all about the game play ;)

Anyway, in this case they actually did quite a good job on the game play side. I wouldn’t say it feels like the old Doom games, not by a long shot (the closest modern games to that feeling IMHO is actually the Serious Sam ones), but it really has great atmosphere, and it’s obvious a lot of work went into slowing down and fine tuning the gameplay to take full advantage of that atmosphere. I’ll post my full impressions on DESCONOCIDO when I’ve played further-preferably when I’ve finished it.



Another new one (which I picked up yesterday) is GripShift for the PSP. I’ve been eyeing this for a while, partially because of all the critical praise it received and partially because of the relatively low price tag :P

GripShift is, well it’s difficult to describe. It’s a driving game, in which you have a number of play modes, and a number of objectives to achieve per track in each mode. Most are pretty standard stuff-collect x stars, complete the track in a set time, find a hidden marker, etc. What makes this different is the nature of the tracks and cars, and the psycho physics they employ. A puzzle element is introduced by adding everything from moving platforms to really powerful fans to the tracks. The result is a great (and bloody difficult) puzzle-driving game. Again, final verdict on DESCONOCIDO.

Fight!

Yeah I know, I just posted, but I forgot that I wanted to post the definitive results in the Battle of the Handhelds. Yes, I’m talking about the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Well the verdict is in, the PSP wins 297000000 to 26900000! Huh!? You say?

Well this link will answer all J

Wi-Fi game sharing on the PSP

Wow! The PSP amazes me again! This has to be one of the most incredible marketing tools I have ever seen for a games platform.

Yesterday one of the guys I work with got a PSP on his new cell contract. He had not yet bought any games, but I had MediEvil in my PSP, and I suggested we try out the game sharing functionality. Once again, wow! It took a little over 30 seconds to copy the WipeOut Pure demo from my PSP to his over WiFi, and minutes later we were taking each other on in a 1-on-1 WiFi match.

This has to be one of the coolest ways to demo a new game-taking someone on that has it already-he's already looking at getting WipeOut so we can multiplay (I have the full version already). I believe at the Tokyo Games Show, there were 'game sharing stations' as well, allowing attendees to try out demos on their own PSPs. Never mind having a single demo machine showing off one game, imagine the potential this has for helping you to pick a new game in-store! If the store just has a game share station with demos of all the games they stock, you can try each one and really make an informed decision, no rental necessary!