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Playing Lumines on the device has been fun and brought back good memories. Once Lumines was released on the Xbox 360, I hadn't played the game again on the PSP because the 360 offered the option of playing on a big screen and also offered additional skins and downloadable content that expands upon the game. With my primary Xbox 360 down with a case of the Red Ring of Death, and fearing that I might wind up having the spare box in the house die a similar death if I over use it, I pulled out the copy of Lumines that I still had and put it in the system so I could play it for a while. Lumines is a nice simple game that plays a bit like Tetris with blocks dropping from the sky that must be lined up so you can eliminate squares before you fill the entire screen. It is a great game for the PSP because it uses a simple control scheme and looks and sounds great when playing on the PSP.
Today, while out and about, I stopped into a Gamestop location and picked up a copy of another favorite from the larger screen - Star Wars Battlefront II. I loved the original Star Wars Battlefront game, and had picked up Star Wars Battlefront II for the PSP before but never played it much. Since the price has dropped significantly for the game, it wasn't too expensive to snag a used copy, so I went for it. After the fact, I'm kind of sorry that I did as the game controls are exactly why I didn't keep the game when I first had it, and are somewhat the reason why I had let my original PSP sit on the shelf for so much of the time I owned it.
I've grown very used to the control layout on the Xbox 360 controllers. While I originally loathed the dual sticks on the Xbox controllers, now I'm used to them and use them all the time and rarely use the analog D-pad any more. On the PSP, there is one joystick to use and it's not really a stick. It's a small stick like button on the lower left side of the unit's screen. A raised button that you move around with your thumb, if your thumb doesn't slide off the button from sweating while holding the unit.
That button just doesn't offer up a comfortable feel and isn't located as logically on the unit as I would like. Worse yet, the lack of a similar button on the right side of the unit really irritates me now. I want the extra stick so I can control games in the manner that I'm used to. I want a stick to control my camera position or targetting, while using other stick to control movement. That missing stick makes a game like Battlefront II a frustrating game to play. Like others (Skittles, of UncleGamer.com comes to mind), I'm definitely feeling that not putting the right side stick on the unit was a big mistake.
Given that Sony basically redesigned the PSP with the PSP 2000 series, it seems somewhat silly that Sony didn't take advantage of the opportunity to go ahead and add that feature to their remodelled unit. I know that older games wouldn't know what to do with the stick if it was added, but at least future games wouldn't suffer from what I'm now considering a seriously handicapped controlled scheme. I guess it won't happen with the current PSP series, and may not happen until the PSP2 series is introduced some period of time from now. Maybe by the then Sony will have figured out how to really get the system right.
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