Giga pack: game for anything

By Raina Kelsey

Any video gaming enthusiast is aware of the Sony PSP – the portable playstation. The Sony PSP gained its popularity because it gives its user the same quality of graphics and sound quality as any other gaming console but could be carried anywhere. For mobile devices like this, memory becomes very important. Therefore, its manufacturers decided to bundle up a 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo card so that a gamer is never short of memory to load any game he wants. This new offering that includes a Sony PSP, a 1GB memory card and an all new PSP stand apart from other regular goodies like USB cable is collectively called as the Sony PSP Giga pack.

The Sony PSP Giga Pack, otherwise known as the PSP-1000G1 is first launched in Japan – Sony's home ground, to closely monitor customer's reaction and feedback. Later on the Sony PSP Giga Pack was released in America and Canada after favorable feedback from its initial launch in Japan and then subsequently, the portable gaming console was made available in Europe and Australia.

Gaming experience with the Sony PSP is comparable to the best of 'fixed' gaming consoles. It features a TFT LCD screen capable of producing 16.77 million colours. The main microprocessor used in the PSP Giga Pack is a multi-functional device that can boast of multimedia decoding, R4000 based CPU and a vector unit named as Virtual Mobile Engine. Clock speed of the CPU was initially capped at 222 MHz. However, recently Sony Computer Entertainment confirmed that their latest firmware release would allow game to run at the full speed of 333MHz so that gamers get higher frame rates thereby enjoy their games more.

A gamer can select from the exhaustible games that could be played on the Sony PSP. Demos for commercial PSP games can be easily downloaded from the PSP homepage and booted directly to the memory card of the PSP Giga Pack. Demos and full version of games could also be obtained in UMD format from any outlet.