We’re still months away from the PlayStation Vita’s launch date and Sony’s still trying to sell us a PSP. Here’s what they announced during their turn at Gamescom: A “new” handheld called the PSP E-1000. In a nutshell, it’s basically a stripped-down PSP that comes without a Wi-fi connection, but still comes with a UMD drive for loading anything from the existing PSP catalogue. Not a bad deal if you don’t really need the network connectivity and you just want to game-on-the-go: the E-1000 is set to cost 99 euros, or around $140. The dollar price is just there for reference though, Sony said that they’re going to sell the E-1000 in Europe, and won’t be available in the US.
Just like “what goes up must come down,” the phrase “too much of a good thing could be bad for you” is like a law of nature. And like the good stuff you get from nature like sugar, salt, alcohol and tobacco, eating up the 3D content from Nintendo’s latest handheld console apparently won’t be good for you. A lot of players have complained about getting headaches after spending some gaming time with the 3DS lately, so Nintendo had some explaining to do.
Sony gave a little more insight into their upcoming NGP handheld console at the Game Developer’s Conference. During his time on stage, Sony platform research manager David Coombes talked performance, mentioning that it’s going to run on a quad-core ARM based processor and quad-core graphics, but it still won’t be specced to match the PS3 in terms of performance. Theoretically, they could push the NGP’s chip up to 2GHz if they really wanted to, but they won’t on the final product. “Some people in the press have said wow, this thing… could be as powerful as PS3. Well, it’s not going to run at 2GHz because the battery would last five minutes… and it would probably set fire to your pants.”
Remember the Jungle, Panasonic’s net-connected handheld gaming console that was supposed to take on Sony and Nintendo’s portable market with portable MMO games? You don’t? Maybe it’s because Panasonic didn’t formally launch it. If you’ve heard of it when news about it first came out late last year, you might have taken note since the concept is certainly interesting. Or maybe you’re just a Battlestar Galactica fan who was excited about duking it out MMO-style with other BG geeks. Bit of bad news for you: Panasonic just said that they’ll be canceling the Jungle project before most people even know it existed.
The Sony Next Generation Portable (or NGP) is still a number of months away from being released (it’s due out in late 2011 in Japan), but apparently, Sony’s already starting to clear their stocks. They’ve now lowered the base kit’s price down from $170 to $129.99, which should also keep it competitive in a year that’s expected to be filled with a number of next-gen portable gaming devices—smartphones and tablets included. Prices for the PSP’s other bundles have also been slashed, with the Entertainment Pack now down to $160 from $200. Video ad filled with kids thanking Sony for, well, apparently being all kinds of awesome for coming up with the PSP, after the break.
