Historically, I haven’t bothered with handheld/portable gaming – and certainly not since my Atari Lynx was in its heyday. I really did like my Lynx, as bulky and retro as it seems now, despite the fact it sucked up battery power and pretty much confirmed my status as an ultra-geek in the early 90’s.
The more popular Nintendo GameBoy, with it’s plethora of versions and abundance of side–scrolling platform games, left me cold. I’d made my mind up pretty early on that; given the choice of driving racing cars or piloting flying machines, against rescuing princesses as a fat Italian plummer, well, I’d be racing or flying every time. The GameBoy didn’t do those type of games. At least, not with any conviction.
Which meant that, hand held gaming wise, it’s been a bit of a barren spell since the power button on my Lynx stopped latching on and I gave up on it. Then, in September 2005 a PSP fell into my lap, so to speak.
Working in the games industry I’d played one before I owned one, admittedly, and it wasn’t love at first sight, despite how pretty the hardware is. Being someone who prefers practical design over aesthetics, I instantly took a dislike to the sheer disregard for ergonomics in the PSP‘s construction. Hence, in the first ten months of ownership, the only two games I thought worth working my hand into a claw over were Wipeout Pure and GTA Liberty City Stories. As you can imagine, with only two games going for it, my PSP spent a great deal of time gathering dust on the shelf. I figured that maybe handheld gaming just wasn’t for me.
That was until the second wave of PSP games started arriving. In the space of a few weeks back in June I had picked up SOCOM Fireteam Bravo, Worms, and Football Manager Handheld. Those three games alone began to change my gaming habits, with play on the PSP taking the place of my lunchtime PS2 gaming sessions. It’s not that they were ridiculously addictive games – just that they were well suited to the PSP, which in turn made them more playable than some of the early ports.