God of War: Chains of Olympus Update #1

I just finished off the Basilisk, first real boss of the game. So far, so good. The controls do get very natural, and even dodging isn't horrible although it does require a slightly higher level of concentration than it did on the PS2.

This game should have been distributed on the PlayStation Store. The win for Sony would be (a) big name game on the store and (b) sell more memory stick hardware. Seriously, that would have been a huge hit.

Graphics are beautiful. There is a bit of glitchiness when you sleep the PSP, mostly in the sound, but that's mostly understandable.

Going to play this on the HDTV in a bit with the PSP-2000 component cable. Hoping to see how well it looks on the "big" screen.

PS3 God of War can't get here soon enough.

DJ Max Portable 2 Demo

I'd always wondered why people were ga-ga over DJ Portable Max for the PSP. Now that there's a demo of DJ Portable Max 2, I was able to try it for myself.

What kind of masochists play this garbage? It's like sight reading at double time for a custom-made piano keyboard. I can imagine that once you put in the days figuring it out, you feel godlike in your mastery, but I've got better things to do.

Monster Hunter Freedom

I picked up Monster Hunter Freedom for the PSP recently. I like the premise: hunt huge fantasy animals. I don't like the implementation.

• Reading pages and pages of in-game info
• Jumping through little hoops to get to the real game
• Wandering from tiny are to tiny area, loading for too long between them

What I hate most is that despite having "freedom" in the name, the game itself is anything but free wandering (at least where I am now). I'd have preferred the "throw the player in the big bad world, let him figure it out" approach of the GTA series. But perhaps that's just too ambitious for the PSP...