I am a superstitious man. I throw salt over my shoulder and knock on wood. I refuse to cross paths with black cats, something that is difficult when you share an apartment with one. When wandering about Manhattan, with its many scaffolding-covered building fronts, I am occasionally paralyzed by an all-consuming fear of the literal hundreds of ladders I pass beneath every day! I also know to not buy videogame consoles on launch day. If I do, I know that I will never play that many games for that device that looked so tempting before I actually had it. It all started with the Dreamcast, a system I adored, but I maybe owned a total of ten games for before its ignoble death (almost all of them published by Sega themselves). Two years out from its release, and it looks like the same is happening with Wii, a system that I turn on to play Gamecube games for more often than actual Wii discs. And then there’s the PSP. Oh, I was excited by that little monster when it came out back in early 2005. So excited, I decided it was a good idea to wake up at 6 AM on release day to pick one up, along with copies of Lumines and Ridge Racer. I played both pretty extensively for a month and then didn’t turn on the machine again until December of 2006.
Now I’m not saying there aren’t good games for the PSP. One of the six games I’ve ever purchased, Zoe Mode’s absolutely astounding Crush would make my top fifty games ever made. But it’s hard to deny that the handheld takes up almost zero space in the collective consciousness of gaming broadly.
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