Sony PSP Vs. Nintendo DS: A Parent’s Perspective

I had some quality time this weekend with my Sony PlayStation Portable, because we took a long weekend off away from the house. I got my PSP about four or five months ago, mainly with the excuse that since it has a web browser, I’d need to have one to keep an eye out on how search develops within it. Plus, I figured “daddy” deserved a “grown up” games machine to make him happy while the boys played with their wonderful Nintendo DS machines. While I’m not a games expert by far, I thought I’d share some impressions on both, especially from the game loving parent versus parent of game loving kids perspective.

I’ll hit the negatives first. The PSP is obviously more expensive. I think it currently runs around $250 versus the Nintendo at around $125. You’ll also want a much larger memory card for the PSP – and naturally it has to be of the Sony Memory Stick Duo type, so don’t plan on using that extra SD Card you’ve got lying around. The games are more expensive, as well. I can get great Nintendo DS games typically from $20 to $35. PSP games generally run $35 to $50.

The games also have generally not thrilled me much until now. There seems to be no end to race car games, golf games, first person shooters – none of which I find gripping. That’s just me. When I got the PSP, I picked up Wipeout Pure which is a hovercraft-style racing game, mainly because it was one of the few games out there at the time. It’s OK – had legions of fans, I know, but nothing I wanted to spend hours at. I also got Ape Escape: On The Loose mainly so the kids would have something to try, on the special occasions when I actually allow them to use the PSP They like it well enough, but they find the Nintendo games I’ll talk about below far better.

On to the positives. The screen is wonderful. Why, oh why, didn’t Nintendo make the DS with much larger screens? The PSP has a nice, big viewing area where you can really see what’s going on. If you rip video to watch, it’s easily viewable. I used PSP Video 9 to convert some cartoons like Rescue Heroes and Transformers I’d grabbed off the air, and it did a great job – made converting a snap. These are all written to the 1 GB Memory Stick Duo that I have in the machine.

I’ve not yet tried to see how easy it is to get video off a commercial DVD. Another parent friend I know told me he’s got software to do this, so I’m sure it’s possible. I’ve also not yet bought any of the UMD discs you can get with prerecorded movies. Frankly, I hesitate to purchase a $20 movie DVD because we simply tend not to watch movies that much. The big exception is for movies the kids know I love. But to pay that amount for a UMD that I’m only going to be able to use in this machine? Nah – to date, I’ve just figured I’ll eventually get around to ripping any DVD I think the kids might want and putting it on a memory card.

This is a good time to mention some regional issues. I bought my unit in the US, since I’m back there fairly regularly and they were on sale there months before they finally came to the UK. But this means I can’t buy UMDs sold here in the UK. They won’t run in my machine. Not a big issue, since I don’t buy them in either country, but how sucky to have regional coding in a device you know is going to be crossing those stupid regional systems in the first place. There’s probably some type of homebrew way around this, but it hasn’t been an issue I’ve needed to explore.

As for games, regional coding is a non-issue. US games work in a UK machine and vice versa. But keep in mind that if you want to resell or trade US games in the UK, many commercial shops might not take them. I found that out when I tried to trade in some Nintendo DS games the kids no longer played. Reason? They aren’t using the UK parental guidance ratings system, so the shops can’t take them. So head to eBay or Amazon’s Marketplace, where you’ll easily find buyers.

So being able to watch video period, not to mention on a big screen, is a real plus. Yep, you can bring music and photos over, but that’s not been a big deal for me so far. And yep, there’s web access, which is clunky and a pain to use, I find. I’m waiting until the cool PSP keyboard comes out like you’ll see here. Then it will be a different story.

Back to games, Star Wars Battlefront II came out at the beginning of November, and I snapped it up when on a trip out to the US at the same time. Awesome. I’d played Battlefront on our Xbox a bit, but it’s always hard to find time. If it’s the weekend, and we’re going to have some Xbox time, it’s really the kids who get to have fun – and moreover, I’m not inclined to have them watching me killing things right and left. Also, I found the space gameplay lacking. I really wanted to climb into an X-Wing and do a Death Star run, and that just wasn’t happening in Battlefront, as much as I could find. That’s one reason I picked up a used Nintendo GameCube, so we could do exactly this and more in the very awesome Rogue Squadron 3.

Battlefront II has more space action, though to be honest, so far I’ve found it to be the same thing each time to win. Leave the hangar, shoot the key critical area the same way, bang you win. But while that’s been disappointing, I’ve gotten into the land based battles. It’s much easier to grab a little PSP time away from the boys now and then to have fun doing this.

This weekend, it was all about Sims 2. I last played Sims when it was The Sims and only The Sims all those years ago on the PC. The new version’s got me gripped, and I might do a longer review in the future. Why I’m spending time helping my Sims character do all the things in his life and not doing the stuff I should be in my own, I don’t know. Neither does my wife. But we were all relaxing this weekend, so she let me at it. I’m hoping we’ll see more simulation games. I’d love to play Pirates or Civilization, but these don’t seem to be in the near future, according to the release schedule.

I should also mention Namco Museum Battle Collection. I spend untold numbers of quarters on Ms. Pacman and Galaga when I was a teenager and coin machines were how you played games. Nostalgia won’t die. I have these games now on one of those standalone cheap plug in game consoles, then we got the Xbox, so I got it for that as well, then we got the Nintendo DSs, so I got it for those and now stupidly, idiotically, needlessly, I’ve got the more the PSP. But hey, they’re awesome on the PSP! One of the coolest things is that they’re smart enough to let you change the orientation, so you play with the PSP pointed so you’ve got one long vertical screen. And the “arrangements” or updated versions of the games are pretty cool, though purist I am, I go back to old school.

So what about those Nintendos DSs? Got small kids? I’d say go for these. First of all, lest I sound like a terrible parent, our kids don’t play them that much. We’ve got two boys, 6 and 4. I mainly got them so that if I’ve got to take them out for a haircut or some place that’s incredibly boring, I can get them out of my backpack and they can play a bit. My wife tends to let them play either to or from the trip to school, about 1/2 hour, and I do the same when they go to football / soccer practice on the weekends. They have different classes one right after another, so they each get a little time on their own.

What I’ve realized is that Nintendo games, especially the characters like Mario, are wonderful for kids. The boys love them. I bought the machines with Super Mario 64 not really thinking we’d do that much with them, but that was about all there was when they came out. The kids dived right in, going back to it over and over while more lame games like Robots didn’t capture their attention.

And while the Nintendo has small screens, it also has a touch screen that is superb. Honestly, if you’ve played any game that makes use of this well, you’ll wish Sony had done the same.

Yoshi Touch And Go is one good touchscreen game. In it, the kids can use the stylus to help Yoshi run on little clouds that they draw, and they love doing it. It’s also easy to use for doing the built in Pictochat game, though they rarely use this. And the Nintendogs game – once you “pick up” a Frisbee and throw it to your dog in the touch screen, it’s amazing.

Another nice thing about the Nintendos is that they can talk to each other and even download limited games. For example, Super Mario has mini games that two players can do, even if only one has the actual game on a card. The other one just gets the mini game downloaded. You can do the same with Mario Kart DS, though it’s more fun and more functional if both players have cards. And it’s super cool to be able to race each other but not have to deal with the usual split screen stuff you have with a regular console.

More pluses for the Nintendo DS? It takes all the old GameBoy Advance games. In fact, it can hold both a Game Boy Advance game and a Nintendo DS game at the same time. So, if the kids get bored of one game, there’s another one they can try, ready to go. There’s a huge, huge library of these games out there, plus they’re cheap.

Video? The easy thing is to spend $15 to $20 and buy some of the commercial GameBoy Advance Videos like you’ll find here. The quality isn’t super, but you get three different cartoons that look pretty good on the small screen. And for little kids, they’re easy to use and get going with.

Want to rip your own? I’ll get into that process more in the future. But I got one of these plug-in cards from Lik-Sang and converted some cartoons recorded from TV for the kids, written onto an old Compact Flash card I had. They work fine, plus you can also do movies and pictures if you want. The downside is the card sticks out and the controlling of it could be better.

Even more pluses in terms of kids? The units are tough. Both have been accidentally dropped before I got smart and bought protective cases, yet they survived just fine. Plus, at half the price of a PSP, you aren’t going to feel nearly as bad if they don’t survive.

Overall, even an adult will find plenty to love about the Nintendo DS, but the PSP certainly is more appealing for adults for various reason. But for young kids, hands down, I’d go with the Nintendo.

One last exception I’ll make is for fans of Missile Command. The most frustrating thing I’ve found about playing Missile Command on games machines is that I miss having a trackball for accuracy. I wasn’t a Missile Command ace, but I’d get up to level six or seven, and fast moves with that trackball made all the difference.

The Nintendo DS is awesome for Missile Command because of the touchscreen. Using it is the closest I’ve ever come to recreating the speed and accuracy of the trackball. It’s a real pleasure to play, very satisfying.

Missile Command is part of the Retro Atari Classics pack. Also great to play in that is Lunar Lander, bringing me once again into nostalgic joy as I land – or more often crash – my megabuck lander. Asteroids is OK, Centipede the same, Tempest – sorry, still too hard to do without the original twist control. Breakout’s still fun and then there’s Pong. It should have been a download play, meaning with one card, two people could play. I’ve even read a review that says it is, but that’s not what I’ve found. Want to play a two player game? Both need to have an actual game card. That’s a lot of money to play Pong, and sad – because it would have been fun.