The doorbell at my local Gamestop jangled as two teenaged boys lumbered inside off the street. They gravitated immediately to the PSP display, of course – it’s the hot new thing, the epicenter of a rarely equaled hypestorm, the pearl of great price for this particular month. It was about one week after the system launched in North America.

“Crap, dude,” said the skinny one, his eyes alight, “look at that screen, yo. It’s huge! And check it, it’s got a thumbstick and everything!”

“Yeah, that’s nice.” His friend was what many people think of when they hear the word “Gamer”. Heavyset. Glasses. A sneer in his voice that sounded like either he was sniffing in disapproval or just had a bad cold. “I’m not going to pick one up just yet, though. Not until there’s a killer app.”

Everyone in the store knew that he meant Grand Theft Auto: PSP, the much-awaited super-secret biggest game ever of all time. The game everybody wants but which won’t be available for… a while.

Sony is betting a lot on that game. So are we all.

The PSP erupted onto the scene at the end of March with lackluster sales. Let’s be honest. Sony’s PR department has been doing back flips trying to make 600,000 sales into the second coming, but we all know they were shooting for a cool million. True, they outstripped the Nintendo DS launch by a comfortable margin, but Sony needs this. Deep down in the bone needs this the way a junkie needs a fix. The Nintendo Revolution is going to show up any time now and nobody knows what it will be capable of. Who knows, the Gizmondo might still get Halo and turn into the Xbox of portable gaming systems.

It isn’t just the handheld market Sony needs to beat here, though. The PS3 isn’t ready yet… even as the Xbox 360 is about to get licked on MTV by Ashton Kucher. In the current generation of consoles, Sony has been losing out to Microsoft at every turn – most games are available for both systems now, and they’re always slightly better on the Xbox. Just to stay competitive Sony needs a hit right now. The PSP could be the thing that keeps Sony afloat into the next round of console wars. Or it could go the way of the Dreamcast.

It’s a real shame, then, that the system already has three strikes against it:

1. Proprietary formats. UMDs could be brilliant. As portable video files become ever more prevalent and more compressed there really is a clamor for a minidisc format halfway between the CD and the DVD. Too bad you will never, ever, ever be allowed to buy a UMD burner. Obsessed right now with digital rights management and piracy, Sony has made it very clear that no one will ever be allowed to make their own UMDs. Will there be other products in the future that can play UMDs? Maybe, but they will all be made by Sony. Furthermore, forget about putting ROMs or third-party games on your memory stick despite the fact that the PSP’s own menus say that you can. It will not be permitted. Oh, and if you were one of the five people on Earth who actually owned a Sony memory stick in the past, please be advised that the PSP only uses special new memory sticks that will run you an extra hundred dollars if you want any real capacity. Please also be aware that for video playback, you must convert everything to MP4 files. Oh, and they can’t just be any old kind of MP4s, they have to have a special header that Sony created. Want to put a digital video clip of your daughter’s first birthday party on your PSP so you can show it around the office? Sony will be glad to help, with their Image Converter 2 software. That will be twenty dollars extra, please.
2. Nerfed and missing functionality. Perhaps the best game for the system, Archer McLean’s Mercury, was delayed purportedly because it would come packaged with a tilt-sensor that could be used by other, future games. That idea was scrapped pretty quick. GPS and telephony services have evaporated since the launch and now Sony claims they were never part of the deal. If you live in Korea you can buy a web browser (for fifty bucks extra) but Sony is still monitoring the North American market to see if that’s something people really want (note to Sony – goddamnit, YES! WE WANT IT! We will even hack your system to get it if necessary, and so we have!). Despite the fact that many games come packaged with infrastructure support, the infrastructure itself isn’t there. And going back to the example above, about your daughter’s birthday video – if you want to put videos on your memory stick, you have to manually change the PSP’s folder structure. What the hell? There’s no folder for movies? They couldn’t spend the extra twenty seconds and program in a folder to put your movies in?
3. The launch titles. They kind of, well, you know. They suck. This is the real death knell for the system, potentially. Of the games that are worth getting for the PSP, most are racing games or puzzle games—traditionally steady performers but nothing that sets gamers’ hearts on fire. Lumines, as Gamespot put it so subtly and nicely, should have come bundled with every value pack (instead of the Spiderman 2 UMD, maybe, or maybe hard-wired in). Instead you’re paying forty dollars for the new Tetris. Ridge Racer looks great, but it’s a boring drift racer. Wipeout, excuse me, wipEout Pure is a nice bit of nostalgia (except nobody actually remembers the original Wipeout), but dull as dishwater. Of the action games available, well… what action games? Untold Legends, as Penny Arcade has it, should have remained untold. Ape Escape is a bad port, Twisted Metal Head On is a stripped down version of an old-fashioned game that was kind of fun once, and then there’s Metal Gear Ac!d. It’s not an action game, it’s a collectible card game.

Even for a franchise that loves playing practical jokes on its hardcore user base this is a particularly cruel and unfunny jest played not just on the fans but on Sony itself.

Please do not get me wrong – a lot of very talented people put a lot of hard work into all of these games and it does show. Two years from now we’ll be lucky to get games like this. But as launch titles they all fail. Better games are coming – Death, Jr. looks great, Coded Arms may go a long way to pulling the fat out of the fire. But they’re months away. And so is Grand Theft Auto PSP.

As I mentioned before, GTA:PSP is the game that will save or curse the system. A handheld GTA could sell the other 400,000 units. It could make the PSP the most desirable handheld of all time. Nintendo’s Revolution can come and go, the Gizmondo can eat Sony’s dust if this game is a success. But how can we know in advance if it’s going to be any good?

Well, the key word there is “advance”. As in Grand Theft Auto Advance. The 2D GTA title that came out for the Game Boy Advance last year. It was a flop. The GTA series only ever really took off when it went 3D. There are lots of reasons for that – we could debate them all night – but it’s true. GTA Advance was a ludicrous failure because it assumed people would be so excited about a new GTA game that they would be okay with going back to a top-down view. They weren’t.

Will GTA:PSP be top-down, or will it be full 3D? That’s the question of the hour. If it’s 3D, it will be the Killer App everyone is looking for. PSPs will fly off the shelves and Sony will advance to the next level.

If GTA:PSP is a 2D, top-down game, it will sink without a trace in the ocean of failed games. And the PSP will most likely go down with it.

To date RockStar has refused to even show a single screenshot of GTA:PSP. Are they building hype? Are they being coy, playing it cool? Or are they hiding something? The game’s release date has already been moved back to an indeterminate “Q3 2005″. Hopefully we’ll see it—in beautiful 3D—this year.

“Damn, bro, did you see that, I mean did you see her?” the skinny kid asks, peering out between the ads and promotional bits and pieces that obscure the Gamestop’s front window. An attractive young woman has just walked by and, as easily distracted as most teenaged boys are, the skinny one has already forgotten about the PSP.

His friend, however, the stereotypical gamer, is still looking down over the display of PSPs and lackluster launch titles, as if through sheer willpower alone he can make something appear. Something good, something to validate the hundreds of dollars he so desperately wants to spend. In the absence of mental powers he can only wait, and hope.

About the Author

David Wellington is the author of several horror novels, which you can read at Monster Novel. He lives in New York City.