Sunday, May 21, 2006
On Friday I am planning to take the A+ certification test, for computer software, the second half of a two part exam to get my A+ computer certification. So with some cash in the near future I looked in to the hand held market, I did some research on the two big competitors in the market, the Nintendo DS Lite and the Sony PSP; I pit the Lite vs the PSP because it will be the newest one out and at the same price it is worth the wait. There were a huge amount of site pitting the two against each other, each with their own fan boys arguing and fighting each other over which is better. I am one of the fortunate ones that have had the unique experience to play both systems and spend a large amount of time with each. The DS I got to play Yoshi touch and go, with the objective to guide Yoshi with the stylus drawing clouds, and the microphone to blow them away, it had an entertaining net feature to play against other players in the area. The battery life was extraordinary as I played for hours on end on the bus ride back, but the system was a tad heavy because it was unbalanced with a center of gravity near the fold causing my hands to hurt holding it at certain angle, yet the DS was entertaining as a portable gaming platform and seemly indestructible as a brick just like the previous Nintendo handhelds as my friend would tell me about the numerous times that he had dropped his DS.
Later I got to play another friend's PSP, he had a number of titles for his system and I got to try out alot of them, the screen was the sexiest hand held screen I had ever seen, the sleekness and just the sheer size of it was beautiful. On the main screen was a list of icons games, movies, music and so on, but as my friend said that putting music on the system was space consuming and with the memory cards extremely expensive he was reluctant to waste too much space - rather using his iPod to hold music, this was much the same for the movies with the UMD versions of the movies nearing the same price or higher than their DVD counterparts, it was as my friend said not worth it especially on such a small screen. In fact it was better just to use a portable DVD player this knocks out the two most enticing features for the PSP, and the so renown analog joystick is in my opinion not in the right place - I was trying to play an RPG in the PSP and with the analog stick were it was it made the game hard to move, this is not to say that I don't like it - I believe that the analog stick will revolutionize handhelds but the thing is it needs two of them to be affective in moving around in 3D environments. Not to mention that the PSP was as fragile as glass, my friend had it in a shatter proof case with impact resistant padding, making it nearly 50% bigger, not exactly yelling handheld. But when I asked him he said that he would not trade his PSP for anything - and with long road trips home that it would be invaluable. Summing everything up the PSP and the DS Lite are both formidable gaming systems but if you are planning to by a PSP also plan to spend nearly $350 - $400 to get a game or two and the protection it needs to prevent it from getting damaged. I did not have that much money to indulge and I also wanted something with good games, battery life and finally durability. So my choice is more than likely going to be the Nintendo DS Lite.
Following the Halo craze that is going on many people are reading the books and replaying the games in anticipation for the release of Halo 3, no doubt the trailer prove that 360 can dish it out and with the release of Halo 3 people are going to be all over it, I plan to actually play through all the games all the way to actually understand the story all the way. Along with getting the A+ test over with I plan to custom build a motor bike transforming my mountain bike into a motorized bike through using a bike motor kit on the Internet. I need to make quite some money if I am to finish all my goals, such upgrading my computer RAM and video card, buy a digital camera and TV tuner. Might as well get studying for the A+ test.
