PSP: A UI Nightmare

I was recently excited to see that NIS America was dropping the price on Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Have I Done To Deserve This? and Prinny: Can I Be The Hero? through Sony’s PSN store. I had been meaning to pick up both games, but just never bothered to dig out my PSP and boot it up to at least download the former, which was downloadable-only to begin with. Now that they were much cheaper, I figured it was time for me to finally bite the bullet and buy both.

I grabbed my PSP before work on Thursday, figuring I could reacquaint myself with the system by continuing my save of the PSP port of Disgaea, which was a brilliantly addictive game that was perfect to port to a portable system. I’ve been mostly listening to podcasts and music on my commute, though, so the PSP had been sitting in a drawer for 3-4 months. When I hopped on the train, I realized that the battery had drained itself over the summer, so I wouldn’t be able to play that morning. Oh well, no problem— when I got to work I could just charge it using my work computer’s USB port.

What I didn’t realize was that to charge the PSP over the USB port, you need to first power the PSP on and put it in “USB Mode”. I’m sure there’s some electrical engineer’s explanation for this, but it’s certainly a far cry from what I’m used to with years of iPod and iPhone ownership. So I wasn’t going to play the PSP on the commute home either. I did want to make sure to get those games while they were on sale and before I forgot, though, so I made a point to plug the PSP in when I got home and download the games.

That night, I plugged the PSP in and booted it up. Since the battery had drained and it doesn’t keep a separate battery for the clock, I had to tell the PSP exactly what time, day, month, and year it was, something I’ve done far more times on that system than any other handheld device of mine combined. I proceeded to open the Playstation Store, at which point the PSP informed me that there was a system update I would need to install before I could shop. Oh. Um, okay.

I walked away for a while because I knew downloading the update would take a while on my slow DSL connection. When I came back, it had finished downloading the update and… was just sitting there on the home screen. Why would I want it to do anything other than update my system? I found the option under the “Game” section of the crossbar (which is kind of weird), then paged through a number of pages of legalese before initiating the update. Or, at least, trying to.

At this point the PSP informed me that it could tell it was plugged into an outlet, but the battery was not charged fully enough to update the system. I would need to wait until the battery had been charged to a satisfactory level until the update could begin. Apparently Sony is concerned that I’m going to unplug the system during this update and they’re not going to allow me to even try updating until they’re sure I won’t unplug it during the update.

I walked away from the console for a while (again). Later that evening, I came back and found the update complete, so I finally entered the PSN Store to purchase the games I had intended to get during my lunch hour. At about 8pm. The purchasing process was relatively smooth, and when I completed the transaction it had a convenient “download all” button in the cart. I clicked it, pleased with how nicely that had been set up. Of course, nothing could go this smoothly, because at this point I was informed that my Memory Stick was too full for these games. I exited the store and deleted some MP3s that I had synced over to the PSP on a whim when I first bought a Memory Stick, then went back into the store, eager to download the three games (I picked up Um Jammer Lammy from the PS1 Store as well, since it was $5.99 and Masaya Matsura is awesome). But alas, my “download all” button was gone. The three games were in my “Downloads” bucket, a single list of all 10-15 games and demos I had rights to download, with no way to queue them up. Defeated once again, I resigned myself to starting one download, walking away for a while, coming back and starting another download, and so on. An entire evening of potential PSP playing lost to the ridiculous UI of the Playstation.

Oh, one more interesting note: in between my first and second game downloads, I decided to boot up my roommate’s PS3, a recent purchase, and finally try out the Pixeljunk Eden demo that I had downloaded onto his console the weekend after he bought it. I had played Eden before but I was interested to see how much I could play on the demo version so that I could try to convince my roommate to pick up the full thing. I started the demo up while feeling pretty angry at Sony only to be greeted by literally 12 pages of User Agreement and Terms of Service that I had to page through. To play a time-limited six minute demo. It’s at this point that I decided that Sony must be doing this on purpose.