So tomorrow is the big day. Stores are opening at 8 am to sell the PSP. Of course, here in eastern Ma. we’re supposed to get a pretty big snowstorm. Um, I thought it was spring now? Well anyway…

I wonder if that’ll have any impact on launch day. For once I won’t be looking out at the snow and thinking “Maybe I can justify not going to the office today” (since I reserved my PSP at an EB near my office). But why couldn’t the storm have come on FRIDAY so I could’ve stayed home to play with my new toy.

I’ve also got deposits down on Metal Gear Acid, Untold Legends, and Ridge Racer. And I’m hearing enough good about the puzzle game Lumines that I might pick it up too.

In other gaming news, The Matrix Online should have hit stores today. I played a bit of the beta and have been playing during the ‘pre-order’ phase and its pretty compelling. There’re some visual glitches where fighting doesn’t seem to work right, but as far as I can tell its just visual and the numbers behind the combat are flowing nicely.

I was seriously lukewarm about The Matrix Online until just recently; the guys at Monolith really pulled things together in a big way just in the past couple of months. It’s like a totally different game from what was out there earlier in the beta…

NY Times has an article about drugs starting to appear in videogames. Read that first…

My initial reaction to these games was 100% negative but the more I think about it… I mean, they have a point that a ton of games have some kind of ‘power-up’ that enhances performance or whatever. Essentially those power-ups ARE drugs in that they have a short term impact on the body or the mind (and let’s face it, if they were real people would seek them out).

So in a way, I can see these games as forcing us to consider the kind of moral implications of using power-ups in games… and these power-ups have a downside, which also makes using them a strategic decision.

I still think games are becoming a bit too realistic for my personal tastes; I won’t play Narc, I don’t think. But I still support the right for developers to make these games; adult gamers should have access to adult games, if that’s the genre they choose.

Will Wright (y’know, the dude who created SimCity and The Sims) has announced his next game, Spore. Ambitious, to say the least. Read about it here: Spore PC Preview from 1UP.COM

Nintendo may introduce next-generation Game Boy in 2005 – Feb. 28, 2005

Nintendo seems to want to put itself out of its misery, launching yet another hardware platform for developers to support.

I spent the weekend sucked into Vendetta Online, a MM-Space Sim. It falls somewhere between EVE-Online and the classic single player game, Elite. You can sign up for a free trial (8 hours of gameplay) and after that it costs $10/month. There’re clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linus. I’ve been playing it under Linux and it works flawlessly.

The developers are really active and take player comments seriously. I’m not sure its quite worth $10/month yet, but I may sign up just to help support them, since the game has a lot of potential and I want to see them make it.

Battle for Wesnoth is a pretty nice open source, turn-based fantasy strategy game. Yeah, its a little old school, but I’m finding it incredibly addictive. It’ll run on just about any contemporary OS (Windows, OS X, Linux and a slew of others) and its released under the GPL (meaning, its free). Very much worth checking out if you have fond memories of Warlords, Miltary Madness or Age of Wonder.

The New York Times > Technology> Review> Chess Players Give ‘Check’ a New Meaning

An interesting read from a little while back.

EA teams up with ESPN, Madden on the way out? – Jan. 17, 2005

Crazy stuff. First EA grabs the 5 year NFL & NFLPA license, now they snag a 15 year agreement with ESPN!

Say goodbye to competition in the sports game genre (pun sortof intended).

Today I went into the local EB and put $20 down on a Sony PSP. What I found odd was that I had to kind of convince them to let me do it. They weren’t promoting the system, and the clerk had to really dig around in the system to find a SKU to use.

If this gizmo is really launching in March, it seems odd that Sony doesn’t have the hype machine cranked up.