A week from now I’ll be twelve hours from catching a bus to Heathrow airport to catch a plane to Paris where I’ll catch another plane to Tokyo and spend ridiculous amounts of money. Sitting on my desk right now I have ¥193,000 (£955 in real money) and a clean credit card just waiting to be blown on inordinate amounts of PSPs, games, DVDs, CDs, and alcohol. I’m getting really excited about it now.

We already know that we’re going to be hitting Akihabara almost as soon as we get there early next Thursday, then the next few days are going to be split between TGS, Sony’s PS3 event, and general Tokyo stuff. The Studio Ghibli Museum is booked for the Monday and we’ll probably spend a day in Kyoto (via the bullet train). After seeing the piece on Japan on a budget on BBC Departure Lounge we’re now thinking of visiting Edo Wonderland, which is a kind of a feudal Japan village populated by actors playing the parts like the “living museums” that you find across America. The best part is that if you book in advance you can hire costumes including ninja ones, complete with katana.

If you ever feel the need to complain about the possibility of next generation games costing $55-60 or more, just take a look at this. The prices are Canadian but even so it works out as $80 US for a SNES game and $420 for a Saturn, and even more if you take ten years of inflation into account. It only goes to show that my constant assertions that they’re doing their best to give a decent deal with the current generations and that we pay a lot less to play the latest games are true.

I’m going to be picking up my Xbox 360 launch games (which apparently and sadly might not include PGR3) for £50 each, safe in the knowledge that I’m not having to pay the £60-a-time that I willingly handed over for a new N64 game.

While not quite up there with ClearPlay (seriously, is Ong-Bak even a movie with the violent parts taken out?) in the idiotic-and-secretly-evil stakes, I’ve just seen via Edge Online that there’s another new secure system to do the difficult and tedious things like raising your children for you and stop the kids playing those evil games for more than they should. Game Guardian houses a PStwo console and, through a PIN system, lets you set how long it can run before the system gets powered down, probably without warning.

It’s convenient because even though the kids are still playing GTA, it’s OK when they can only play it for an hour. Edge point out the obvious frustration of being shut off mid-mission, but imagine the fun if it decided to shut down during a save and completely corrupted the memory card, losing all progress from all games. That would make Little Johnny much easier to live with, wouldn’t it?

I really like both the PSP and the DS, but I have to admit that I’d probably choose this over either of them if the price came down a bit.

I remember reading about this guy in EGM (I think) and being impressed by his VCSp and PSp, but playing Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, and Skies of Arcadia away from a TV would rock unbelievably. That and having a portable SNES, of course. Nonetheless, the “portabilizers” (not my term, thankfully) remain an interesting little gaming subculture that’s always worth checking out as they’re getting ever more ambitious and continuing to come out with some seriously ambitious projects. The PSP might be comparable in some ways to the PS2, but these guys actually have portable PS2s! I can’t wait to see how the portable GameCube works out.

Back on the subject of the DC and portability, I know it would be nice to have some good new titles but the PSP seems like the ideal chance for Sega to give some of their underappreciated Dreamcast games a new audience. The power of the DC and PSP seems pretty comparable and when the PSP is crying out for AAA titles Sega have a nice pool ready to go. When it needs a good RPG can you go any better than Skies?

Today, as you may know, was the much-delayed launch of the PSP in the UK and across Europe. To be honest I didn’t see much of it since I was at work and my store saw very little PSP action (four preorders and nothing on the shelves), but I still have a couple of stories to share from what I’ve seen and heard.

The mainstream press is always reliable for a laugh at console launches, and probably the most amusing was on the radio on the way to work when I heard them trying to get their head around the acronyms (they kept calling the movies “UVDs”). They also had a random guy who queued up for one and was ranting about how excited he was to be the first one in the country to have one. That was amusing when I was in the VGC where they’ve sold literally hundreds of machines since the Japanese launch last December.

While I was there I picked up Virtua Tennis and the Transformers The Movie UMD to bolster my burgeoning PSP collection:

A couple of things worth noting about those two: Virtua Tennis contains a forced firmware upgrade to v2.0, so anyone in the US thinking of importing who is holding onto v1.5 for homebrew applications should tread carefully; also the UMD of Transformers The Movie is the cut version with the “oh shit…” line taken out, so don’t throw out those DVD versions just yet.

Unsurprisingly it pretty much sold out everywhere. Both branches of GAME in Bournemouth were already redirecting people to the VGC when I went in there at about 9:45am, and even they only had 16 machines out of their allocation of 40 remaining, so that should show you how quick it happened.

The PSP finally launches officially across Europe at midnight tonight, and there’s already a Sony press release out there engaging in a quick round of autofellatio for a job well done. What they seem to be completely blinkered to is the fact that the late and overpriced launch is a fucking insult, made worse by the fact that they thought it would be a good idea to sue people who were importing it for less than the UK price. Then to top it all off they’re only giving 150,000 units for the whole UK which will inevitably lead to stock shortages.

They’re not exactly flying off the shelves abroad so couldn’t they at least bring us a decent amount? The Xbox sold for £300 at launch and managed 250,000 machines, and if I remember correctly the N64 launched here at £250 and also managed 250,000 units, so 150,000 for a world-standard machine is pitiful – it’s not like they need to manufacture a new PAL version. What the fuck were they doing for the last few months? They certainly weren’t manufacturing them.

Continuing with the “Sony is shit” rant, I’ve just seen the planned prices of PS3 games. That’s completely ridiculous and I hope they end up handing this generation to Microsoft on a plate if they try to pull that shit.