Have PSP: Will travel
A guide to getting a move on with Sony's handheld
One key advantage of pocket gaming is you needn't be stuck inside the house all day. The PSP is a portable handheld device – a little more overly taxing on the wrists than most perhaps, but handheld nevertheless. As such, it would be a waste not to abuse its simple and accessible portability whilst on your travels, which is where the following handy software and hardware additions come in.
Have Passport To, will travel
The joint Lonely Planet and Sony Computer Entertainment Australia Passport To series (originally called Planet PSP) offers fully interactive city guides, which provide you with instant travel information delivered via a dynamic mix of film, audio, photography, and travel content.
The guides offer in-depth city listings for the hottest bars and clubs, as well as the best hotels, shops, services, and must-see attractions. They also offer interactive road and other transport maps, location plans, and extensive itinerary listings for everything from art tours to gastronomic adventures.
There are even 'off-the-beaten-track' audio tours for those unwilling to pay a human guide or clamber onto an open-top bus, as well as a language phrase guide for those inopportune moments when you're bursting for the lavatory, hunting down contraceptives, or craving a bowl of peppered onion soup.
The Passport To series for the PlayStation Portable went on sale across 110 countries in September 2006, and is now priced at £17.99 from Play.com. Current city editions of Passport To include Amsterdam, Barcelona, London, Paris, Prague, and Rome.
Play tongue twisters with Talkman
Once armed with Passport To for your city trips across Europe, why not extend your sudden access to interactive foreign tongues beyond arbitrary gestures, monkey grunts, eye roles, and shouting "Egg and chips, Luigi!" at perplexed waiters?
Talkman from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe is an odd educational 'non-game game' that – theoretically – functions as an interactive translator and language tutor to assist (in our case English-speaking) users when conversing with Johnny Foreigner in French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Japanese.
Talkman puts a brave face on speaking a foreign
Select one of Talkman's pre-recorded basic travel scenarios (for example, in a restaurant or at the train station) and the PSP displays a list of context relevant questions such as "How much is the fare for the express?" or "Which platform will this train leave from?" in the desired language, before then reading the question aloud for the benefit of the bemused clerk behind the ticket desk.
By handing the PSP to the person you're interacting with, they can then get Talkman to respond back in your native tongue and hey presto, in principle you're holding an interactive conversation.
Sounds good? Sadly, despite being told that multi-lingual tests reveal the accuracy of Talkman's 3,000 basic phrases, our Talkman review wasn't exactly favourable. As well as Talkman very often not understanding what you've said to it – let alone the fellow opposite you – the PSP's often arduous load times only increase those awkward pauses, adding to the general level of discomfort.
Still, it's something different, vaguely charming, and at £29.99 from Play.com it might be cheaper as well as more entertaining than a backpack full of cumbersome phrase books. Unsheathing a PSP may well inspire looks of perplexed technological terror from the poor unfortunate local you're attempting to converse with though, so be warned.
Channel hopping
The PSP's get up-and-go appeal doesn't end with a dodgy talking duck. Those gamers wanting travel access to their favourite TV shows (and who have a little extra cash to splash on their pixelated substitute partner) can opt to reap the multimedia benefits of Sony's LocationFree TV device.
With sufficiently moneyed employers/parents/relatives, it's hard to fight the draw of turning the PSP into a wireless TV/DVD/DVR player. And with LocationFree TV that can become a £230-£250 reality.
The LocationFree TV device hooks up to your PC at home, and then grabs TV, DVD, or recorded programs and beams them directly to your on-screen remote-controlled PSP via its wi-fi connectivity, which abruptly makes the PSP as cool as it is geeky.
Where wi-fi access is concerned, using the PSP while on-the-go to watch your favourite TV and cable shows is dependent on where you are on the planet and your knowledge of the gradually expanding – yet presently somewhat limited – wi-fi hotspot network, which you need to be connected to. But if you're on a big university campus all day, say, it could prove just the ticket (a market VOIP companies are targeting with Skype-enabled Internet mobile phones, after all).
While the rest of us wait for wi-fi to become ubiquitous, even simply using LocationFree's 100-foot local transmission radius to watch the football or a film while relaxing in your garden or being indisposed in the bathroom is a tantalising temptation.
GPS homes in on PSP
Finally, should you find yourself lost in a strange city after prolonged immersion with LocationFree TV, with Passport To unable to offer appropriate city guidance and the local lingo inaccessible through Talkman, then perhaps the PSP's imminent GPS add-on is what you need. Particularly if you're lost in Japan.
Revealed officially at the recent Tokyo Game Show, the PlayStation Portable GPS Receiver is sized at a mere 45mm x 41mm x 17mm, and weighs approximately 16 grams (0.56oz). It will be released in Japan on December 7th, and is likely to be priced at around £30-35 should it ever find its way to Europe.
The Receiver is so far known to support four upcoming PSP software titles:
Navigation Soft will arrive a day before the PSP GPS hardware on December 6th, and will serve as standard car-navigation software. Featuring every available roadmap in Japan, the GPS software can also be used to locate shops and other services and facilities. The PSP's network function will periodically update Navigation Soft's maps and information database.
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops will utilise the GPS system to locate and collect new characters that can then be recruited as soldiers within Konami's latest PSP action adventure title.
Minou no Golf-jou is an extension of the Hot Shots Golf series. It will function as a GPS map utility for all domestic Japanese golf courses, enabling you to gauge the distance to the green as well as outlying obstacles, and to keep track of score data. Sadly, it won't find your balls for you.
Finally, Sega's Planetarium Creator (Home Star Portable) is an odd product perhaps best labelled 'Only in Japan'. It's a constellation navigator – yes, really – that will use the GPS receiver to enable you to determine your location and then see an exact star map display of what you should be able to see in the (clear) night sky above you. Fascinatingly banal – though at least one journalist has already used it a dating tool.
So, there you have it, folks, all the PSP travel accessories you'll need while navigating the biggest game world of all. Just don't forget to look up from the screen every once in a while...