Sony wants your soul.

 While I would love to heap reviews upon the Demon's Souls, the most recent addition to my stack of "in progress" RPG's, I'm sadly seven hours into it with still no sense of direction or accomplishment as of yet. In other words, I need a little time to process this monstrosity. I'll give it this much: the game is hard. Damn hard. This is the equivalent of Burnout for RPG's. It demands your absolute perfection or it will crush you.

 Speaking of souls, however, Sony is looking to put a price on yours. As mentioned previously, the PSP Go has arrived and things are not looking good. On IGN, there was a poll asking who might be interested in buying said handheld, and over 80% said "no" last I checked. Of the rest, more than half said they were waiting for a price drop.

 That's the first sign I got of the Go's lukewarm reception, and that's being generous. Amongst my gaming friends, the general idea was that the Go was nothing special and just an overpriced social accessory. Their interest was solely based on looks and portability with no mention of hardware merit along the way. Most impressions from the net is that this luxury item is simply a middle-finger to GameStop.

 Oh, but that's not all. Sony isn't simply packaging its venom into PSP's. No sir. The rumor going around based off of some media leaks, specifically Sega (though I doubt that document ended up being real), is that PS2 emulation is on the way back into the picture. Actually, the rumor is sort of old. It was first brought up a few months ago that Sony was working on a more cost effective emulator so that they could bring back PS2 gaming, but very recently that idea was refined to include charging you for it.

 Yes, that is correct; it is entirely possible that Sony will resort to charging you for backwards compatibility despite originally marketing the system as being that way already. Granted, they did remove this feature, but their reasoning isn't very justified. They actually have the capital to invest in an emulation project, and they actually did for a while. Originally, the backwards compatibility derived from the Emotion Engine actually being in the PS3. Later, an emulator was introduced, which keeps the overall costs down on producing a model since there is no extra hardware to add. If Sony attempts to charge customers for bringing back a service that was already supposed to be there, then there will most likely be a bigger backlash than the straight-up removal of the feature.

 The final piece of the overall Sony puzzle is back to the PSP, but not the Go. Instead, when I popped Persona into the handheld, I was greeted to yet another firmware update. This was almost infuriating, but I'll defend Sony first on this one. It's for piracy, duh. Sony doesn't want you to steal potential new titles they will be releasing, and any chance to fuzz over previous successful hacks is a bonus to game sales. I get that.

 That doesn't change the fact that it's annoying. I hate updating the thing. I hate having to installing additional software to play a game that doesn't need the software at all, I hate that Sony is constantly reminding you that they don't trust you, and I hate that I can't use the PSP for all of the cool things it SHOULD be able to do. I didn't buy a PSP to play PSP games. OK, so I bought it to play two PSP games, but that's it. I was hoping to get some NES games on there someday. I bought it for the hardware, plain and simple. Sony even knows this. Even if they kept their game releases to a minimal, people would still buy the damned thing as long as it was left open for hacking. If I knew that I could get that handheld to play everything I have on other systems, I might actually consider dropping $250 on it, ensuring that Sony made money. Lots of people would. Those who wouldn't don't know how, and would be spending money on the games without pirating them anyway. Win all around.

 What gets me most of all about Sony is that it sounds like they may be on the road to alienating every single one of their customers who know anything about gaming. I own a nice collection of PSX RPG's, and I would love to play them on the PSP, but I can't. I have to buy them again. I would love to play PSP games through my PS3, but I can't, even though the technology is there. I have to buy the component cables. I have PSP games that I would like play on the PSP Go I won't be buying, but I can't. Sony asks that I buy them again, too, and they even have the balls to ask that you upgrade your PSP to the Go, knowing that you will lose the ability to play these games. I want to play PS2 games on my PS3, but I can't, because Sony screwed up their marketing plan when they launched the console. Instead, I might just have to pay for that, too, so that Sony can make it's money back that it flushed away in the first place. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit