When I first saw and held the new handheld gaming console from Sony, I loved it. It was in L.A. in July at E3, one of those times when any chance to shed some weight – off my kit, not my body – appeals to me.

Dubbed the PSP Go, Sony’s latest revision to the Playstation Portable is smaller, lighter, and slides open to hide/reveal the main controls, which have good response. Bluetooth and Wi-fi are built-in, and closing the slide screen with the Go power on turns it into an analogue clock.

While the new device, which will retail for $249.99, becomes available on Oct. 1, I got my hands on one of the black units (the other colour choice is white) last weekend.

The 16 gigabyte Go is definitely lighter than its predecessors, about the same weight as an iPhone or Blackberry. The 3.8-inch LCD screen is crisp and bright, ideal for close-up video watching, and the sliding feature makes the Go more appealing as a media device. Skype and Internet radio functionality is pre-installed.

But when it was time to see how the Go was for playing games, I found myself in a bit of a hitch. As slick as the new handheld is, I can’t play any of my existing PSP games on it, because the Go was designed without a UMD drive. The UMD, Universal Media Disc, is Sony’s proprietary disc format. In fact, one of the reasons the Go is smaller and lighter is because it is UMD free.

I’m in favour of scrapping the UMD, especially as more of our entertainment content becomes available by digital download. In the past year, games and movies for the PSP have been available digitally, but the majority of the PSP catalogue is still on UMD.

So existing PSP owners with libraries of games on UMD are like all those kids who started buying CDs four years ago. Their UMDs have become irrelevant and useless.

Sony had been working on a “conversion program” for those with UMDs, but a Sony Computer Entertainment of America spokesperson told Kotaku the program has been scrapped “due to legal and technical reasons”.

So the Go may look beautiful, and be nice to hold in my hand, but it isn’t immediately useful until there is content available to use.

That will change with great rapidity, however, as all content becomes available for digital download. Because the Go was designed for the future where content is loaded directly onto our devices, and all discs become irrelevant.

Sony expects that 16,000 pieces of digital content will be available on Oct. 1, including 225 games.

Games for the PSP can already be downloaded from the online PlayStation Store, and the Go can access those titles in one of three ways.

First is using a Windows XP, Vista, or 7 enabled computer running Sony’s Media Go software, which is provided free.

Games can also be downloaded onto a PS3 console. Titles purchased in either of those ways are then transferred onto the Go with a USB cable.

The third way to get content onto the Go is to download directly to the device. It’s wireless enabled, so doing so requires only that you connect to an available wireless network.

If you want to move media off the Go, you’ll need to use a Memory Stick Micro (M2), the new removable media format used by the device. This is the other characteristic of the Go that is a bit frustrating for existing PSP owners, who likely already have a selection of the slightly larger Memory Stick Pro Duos lying around.

But because the future of our entertainment and media – a future that is anticipated by the Go – makes discs and flash cards largely inconsequential.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

One of the hallmarks of the Halo series of video games has been the story being told. Not just of the adventures of Master Chief, super soldier, but the bigger, far reaching story about humanity’s struggle against a covenant of alien races bent on genocide.

But the Halo games are successful because while there is an epic tale being told on one level, the games themselves are telling smaller, personal stories within that larger narrative. Halo 3: ODST is no exception, as it tells the very intimate tale of what happens to a squad of six Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, soldiers of the United Nations Space Command.

The game is set on Earth in the year 2552, the same time the events of Halo 2 and Halo 3 occur. The city of New Mombasa has been assaulted by the alien alliance known as the Covenant. The story starts with the aforementioned squad – consisting of an intelligence officer, four veterans, and a rookie – being deployed from a low orbit. Their intended target is a massive enemy space craft hovering over New Mombasa, but as they descend, the ship escapes through a wormhole, scattering the squad’s drop pods.

When you awaken, as the Rookie, six hours have passed since the drop. New Mombasa is nearly deserted. In this first hour of the game, ODST is eerie and melancholy – a requiem. Moving through the streets and fighting off scattered enemies, the Rookie searches for the other squad members and tries to make sense of what’s happened.

When the Rookie finds the squad members’ drop pods, your perspective shifts. You find yourself in New Mombasa six hours previous, immediately after the drop, and you embody the veteran soldiers as they attempt to regroup. These chapters are the more traditional Halo combat sequences that will have you taking the fight to the Covenant troops, using a variety of weapons and vehicles in an attempt to take back the city.

It’s a complex structure to tell the story, moving back and forth between real time, as the Rookie unravels the mystery of what happened to the squad, and events as they unfolded after the botched drop. There’s an additional plot, too, about a girl named Sadie who got caught up in events during the initial attack on New Mombasa. Sadie’s story is told through audio files that are collected from the environment by the Rookie.

But the atypical structure works beautifully. The slower segments when you’re playing as the Rookie are perfect pauses during which you can process the information you’ve collected, and feel a connection to the characters you’ve been playing.

The story is aided by excellent sound design – the Rookie’s segments are accompanied by a slow, jazzy soundtrack that borrows from noir mystery films – and exceptional voice acting by the likes of Alberta natives Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer, as well as Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk.

While the campaign mode of ODST is smaller and less ambitious than the trilogy of Halo shooters that preceded it, you’ll find there is plenty of play left with Firefight, a multiplayer mode that has you and up to three friends defending yourselves against a larger number of increasingly difficult enemies. The objective is simple: survive for as long as you can.

Despite how much fun it may be to team up with friends and see how well you can hold your own in Firefight, though, the reason I spent a full day with this game as soon as it arrived was to play the campaign. Halo 3: ODST is further evidence that the developers at Bungie are much more than simply skilled game designers. They are master storytellers.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

The big video game news last week came from Nintendo in the form of two announcements at the Tokyo Game Show.

The first was that the price of the Wii was being reduced, to Cdn$219.95.

The second was that New Super Mario Bros. Wii will hit shelves on November 15.

Get the full details in my article over at the Georgia Straight.

In August, I decided it was high time for me to visit some of the places in the Lower Mainland where people can get together to play games. Not the hardcore LAN parties that pop up and now then, but simple cafes with decent computer systems where people can go to play World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike.

This week’s “Best of Vancouver” edition of the Georgia Straight contains the results of my survey, which took me to Coquitlam, Abbotsford, Langley, and Richmond.

You don’t have to look very hard in the Lower Mainland to find an Internet café. Less common are gaming centres—not to be confused with bingo halls or joints with banks of video lottery terminals—which offer patrons a place to play video games on PCs.

Essayist and programmer Paul Graham has a great article he’s headlined Post-Medium Publishing.

In it he articulates that, “Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. . . . Now that the medium is evaporating, publishers have nothing left to sell.”

Graham’s uses some examples of modern content models – iTunes and digital books – as a way of demonstrating that consumers aren’t actually paying for the content, but are paying a tax, a toll, in order to access that content. Being able to successfully monetize that model, though, requires that you own the channel, as Apple does with iTunes.

Because a toll can’t be too expensive. “Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that’s pretty easy with digital content,” writes Graham.

He ends optimistically, suggesting that change like this creates more than it destroys. “Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.”

Thanks to Bruce Sterling for tweeting the citation.