By Carl Laron on October 8, 2009 in
The Sony PSP Go (*Est. $250) hand-held gaming console has only been out for a little over a week, but initial reviews and sales reports can't be making the folks at Sony very happy. The best comments say that the PSP Go is sleek and sexy, but almost invariably, reviewers drop the other shoe and say that the PSP Go is also overpriced and underwhelming. Ben Kuchera's review at ArsTechnica.com is harsher than most, but he doesn't really stray all that far from the pack when he opines, "When your older, cheaper hardware is better and more able than your new offering, you need to fire some designers."
One of the big disappointments expressed by reviewers and users is that the PSP Go strips out the UMD drive, making existing libraries of disc-based PSP games worthless. Additionally, while many thought that Sony would provide some way for owners to port those games over to the PSP Go, that never materialized. Porting data and previously downloaded games stored on a Memory Stick is, thankfully, possible, but it's a pain to do since the PSP Go uses a different Memory Stick format than its predecessor.
The selection of downloadable games is good, and as of yesterday, you can buy them from Amazon.com as well as Sony. But as pointed out by USA Today's Brett Molina, the same games can be downloaded by owners of older PSP consoles.
There are some other negatives, too. Though not everyone agrees, CNET and others say that the PSP Go's slimmed-down design, while attractive, also results in some awkward control positioning. The redesign has also reduced the screen size by about a half inch (to 3.8 inches) , but since it retains the same resolution, most say that the screen at least looks sharper.
Given all of that, it's not surprising that the consensus is that the PSP Go is simply a bad deal. Shoppers seem to agree thus far, as the PSP Go isn't exactly flying off of retailers' shelves. According to reports at GameIndustry.biz and elsewhere, some major sellers in the U.K. have already slashed prices by more than 10 percent. On this side of the Atlantic, PC World notes that some U.S. retailers have begun selling the PSP Go at a small discount as well -- something that's basically unheard of in recent years for a gaming device in its first weeks on the market.