I’ll have to admit it I guess: I’ve played with Twisted Metal on the PSP over the last three days more than I have with Halo 2. Could be because of the move or because it’s new to me – I don’t know which. Halo 2 is still a kick ass game, of course – better than Twisted Metal, in all honesty – but after so many months of it, I think I might have needed a little break. Besides, it’s nice to know that I can suck ass on a completely new platform… but there’s been some unexpected bonuses with PSP play… w00t!

I personally think it’s a combination of device lust, screen awe, and WiFi access.

Ahhhh, device lust. I haven’t had it for a while, but I’m in the throws of it now. The PSP makes you want to touch it. It can’t sit on a table, idle, receiving no attention. It makes you wanna pick it up. Devil with a black dress on, indeed.

Screen awe is self explanatory: I’ve never seen such a great screen on a gaming device, hands down. On notebooks? Sure. On Personal Media Players? Yeah, it’s on par with the Creative and Samsung models, but those aren’t gaming devices in my book. GameBoy Color? Advanced? Advanced SP? DS? They’re all crap. I own three outta the four listed there and have seen the DS many times over, but I’m sorry: crap compared to this.

And then there’s WiFi. The lil guy works with WEP. I gave it my AP’s SSID and WEP key and it went *blOOp* and connected. It also found a bunch of local broadcasting AP’s and even included the strength of signal and ping response times. The kicker here is that Twisted Metal allows online play: AdHoc is from PSP to PSP and then there’s two modes of LAN playing: either local LAN or Internet. I connected to an Internet-based game and battled three other live drivers in a deathmatch arena [Twisted Metal: Head On is a game where you drive and shoot at other cars in a demolition derby type setting].

The downside is that I had to open up about 1000 ports on my firewall to do so, because no one seems to know what the specific ports being used are. And that they aren’t listed in the manual nor on the web site sucks ass, but I attribute that to Early Adopter’s Syndrome. But the game play was peppy on the ‘net. No lag. And fun to boot. Again, I’m saying that it’s just a good gaming device.

The worst thing about it is that if someone beats your ass bad, you can’t throw the controller without hurting the device – a constant danger with mobile devices!