KATAMARI PSP!

Been an eventful week. I made up with a friend that I've been estranged from for about 10 months and I totally missed Amanda Bynes when she came into town last friday. I suppose the latter was Karma for the former. That's OK, though. Amanda and I will meet up someday in the future. I can't wait for the restrainning order :lol:

I love my PSP. Did I mention I had a PSP? Well, I do and I love it. I didn't always, however. I initially bought it solely to play "Me and My Katamari". I know, $150 bucks to play ONE game? Well, I had some liquid cash at the time and I'm a rabid Katamari fan. So, after I conquered it, in, oh, like a week,it began to sit there gathering dust, so I went out and bought "Lumines". I had the demo and I was hooked on that, so I figures since it's an older game, I could get it on the cheap. I played and played that into oblivion and the PSP sat there once again, gathering oh-so-much dust. I had been considering hacking it since I bought it, but stories of "Bricking", that is, ruining the machine and turning it into nothing more than a brick and already having upgraded to the latest firmware had discouraged me.

Then the "Lumines" exploit came along. Not to go into any major detail, but someone discovered that the "Lumines" UMD could be used to hack the PSP down into the original firmware so as to be upgraded to a custom firmware. I was extremely wary, but I took the plunge. Lo and behold, I was soon running my PSP on what was called Dark_Alex's OE 3.40-B. It was a Godsend. I could play Nintendo and Sega System games via a console emulator. I could rip my Game UMDs to my memory stick so they ran faster. I could read comic books and PDF files and ebooks. All restrictions from SONY were removed and I had, not just a simple game machine, but a handheld personal computer at my disposal. Since that day, the PSP has never left my side. It's become my personal assistant. It's become a PDA and an address book. I surf the internet regularly (I could do that with the original firmware, granted, but it was never worth it before).

The thing is, SONY should let the owners do what they wish with their PSPs. Sure, these exploits definitely lead to piracy, but that should leave them with the options to be more creative, and I don't mean patching up exploits and going to war with the very supported who bought their machines. Obviously, If these people wanted a simple game machine, they'd have bought a Nintendo DS. These people (I include myself, so WE) know and understand the machine they have. I don't think SONY understands this or even knows what they have in their product.

It's up to SONY to circumvent piracy by offering games and applications that A) buyers want B) at a price they can afford and C) with add ons to the products that exist outside of the electronic realm. Look at INFOCOM in the 80's. I had every on of their games. They were text based adventures, but the box included lots of stuff: Buttons, balloons, charts, maps iron on transfers... a lot of these things were used to finish the game since the clues were on the additional stuff. INFOCOM really made the consumer feel like they were buying into the game; that they were somehow closer to those games moreso than other games from other, less creative companies.

SONY also has to become closer to the consumers around the world. Japan is a gadget oriented society and they really don't mind the cold relationship between the company and the consumer, but most of the rest of the world isn't like that. People in America, for example, would benefit greatly from a close company/consumer relationship from SONY. Simply SONY needs to wake up. They sold us the system, we now OWN the system. They should be exstatic the consumers are taking the product and running with it.