That’s terrible that the button could die already. I mean, NES paddles from 1980 still work great, if they’re not dirtied up by slimy hands.

The reason it super sucks is nostalgia. What’s to happen in 10 years when you want to play it again for old time’s sake, but another, or the same button won’t work? Is Nintendo going to want to repair it? You, and millions of others will be left with this wonderful bit of bricked nostalgia, like me and my stupid Atari Lynx, whose games I would love to play again, but can’t, because one of the most important buttons is stuck "always on," and has been since the early 90s.

I’m sorry, but the warranty doesn’t please me. I’m quite disappointed in Nintendo if this is because of shoddy workmanship, or cheap build practices.

Haha. Lynx near the end of the warranty :)

I think I did open it up once. I haven’t given up all hope, but I believe the problem is actually a fried component, and nothing to do with the button, or its contact. If so, that’s sad.

Your right finger might be like my jaw. It bugged my mom all this past vacation, and I vaguely remember it from last year, that I apparently bite really hard when I chew, so you can hear a "clunk" with every bite. That sucks for people near me, but I don’t really feel anything, nor do I hear it, and it’s almost like I can’t tell how else to chew. Biting slower, or with less force would suck for me, as it’s the most comfortable way to eat for me.

I’m just a rabid carnivore, and I like to make sure even wholly cooked food isn’t going to get away.

Oh, and I always make a stink about the poor quality of Sony goods. The PSP has that launching problem, where a slight twist makes the thing eject. I also always feel like I have to be so prissy around their stuff. The PSP is a fingerprint whore, and the screen seems begging to be cracked by the first misplaced backpack, or foot. I’m not so big anymore on black consoles or peripherals (except keyboards), because they always look so dusty to me, and of all the controllers I’ve taken apart, the only one that had a piece crack inside was the PS2 paddle.

They love to make things out of more brittle plastics, instead of Nintendo’s more rubbery plastics that can take much higher impacts without wear. You can hear this when you open an empty PSP, too. It has such a higher pitch clickety-clack rattle than I expected up front, because the plastics are less giving – they seem to me like the kind of plastics that would dry out completely, warp, and crack all on their own if stored up in my parents’ attic, whereas I would trust Nintendo’s junk up there.

Also, when I think of N64 analog sticks, or Gamecube’s, I’ve never seen a really mangled up controller, but I’ve seen a large number of PS2 analog sticks on the default controllers that look so ratty. Being in the industry, I see paddles that are used all day every day (and at EA – 7 days at week with their crazy schedules), and the rubber on the thumb sticks is gross. It gets all full of black finger grease, and the rubber deteriorates away, making it look all pocked and "moon-surfacey."

I don’t much like the PSP design. The analog stick really hurts my thumb in short order, and it’s very hard to get to, or press all the buttons on the bottom row. The screen is gorgeous – I must concede that. Still, it feels like some fancy thing I must always be cleaning, and caring for, like owning a Ferrari, rather than the knock-about fun of something like a GBA SP, or the DS lites.

I must apologize. My panties are all in a bunch over Sony. I haven’t liked the look of any of their consoles or peripherals in so long (The PS2 is a dust-collecting nightmare that shreds paper towels in its many, nearly-uncleanable "fins"), and then this whole PS3 mess, and of course their suing, and subsequent elimination of one of my favorite Japanese vendors, Lik-Sang, which really upset the hard-core gaming community (which I’m not part of, but I’m still bugged).

They can just quietly go away like Sega, for all I care. That’s not to say I didn’t miss Sega. I had some good times with their SMS, and the Genesis.

Have you heard of Korean made Game Park? It’s a totally FOSS handheld with pretty decent specs. They give out the SDK and everything. I was really hankering for the GP32, which was their answer to the GBA back in those days. The newer XGP I believe was in answer to the PSP, though of course not as good, but still nicely FOSS. Then the XGP Mini seems to have been built with the idea of unseating the GameBoy Micro, which was unnecessary, as it unseated itself pretty quickly.

They had nice options, and could play video and mp3s, without any DRM crap. Also, there was a big collection of crappy, though probably sometimes fun FOSS games from its many users, kind of as is the case with the XGameStation.

If you look in the top bar of the site under Support, they had developer support for the common programmer, and under Downloads, they had the SDK available to all. For whatever reason, all links in both sections seem down now. I hope it’s not getting all locked up.

If I knew C++ well enough to make anything worthwhile, I would’ve snagged the GP32 when I first saw it a few years ago, and probably XGP when that came out. I could do a lot with something like that, especially taking it apart, and using it in things like Halloween costumes, or as interfaces to projects, or embedded in my wall, or whatever. I love the concept still.

Could be that the PSP will have more homebrew, but now I wonder. Most people with a PSP just want to choose from the myriad retail selections, or do something like get Linux running on it, whereas I’m guessing a respectable percentage of people who buy the XGP do so because it already has Linux on it, and because they’d like to do some homebrew. We need a poll from a trusted source.

I think they might even be worse than Microsoft. Oh, and we forgot all about their myriad proprietary memory formats. They seem to be the most closed up, fearful tech company.

Then there was that recent story on them trying to make a hip and trendy website, supposedly by a guy who wanted a PSP for Christmas, but they got caught out by too many people who didn’t think it sounded realistic, and had to publicly admit that it was all viral marketing, and apologize. They’re just losing all over.

I’m glad the hax0rs have fixed things, but it still sucks that they even had to. Now everyone will crack it, instead of many buying it for a reasonable fee.