A Take-Two representative reveals, “We continue to stand behind this extraordinary game. We believe in freedom of creative expression, as well as responsible marketing, both of which are essential to our business of making great entertainment.”

Lets just hope this game will be on our shelves soon.

Someone from Acid Mods has created an ingenious PSP battery pack mod that allows you to use standard AAA batteries with your PSP. The tutorial covers how take out the innards of a standard PSP battery pack and solder on positive and negative battery contacts to allow for three AAA batteries to used. This would definitely be useful for those long plane trips.

I must say, this is one of Sony’s better ad campeigns. Their last advertisement wasn’t exactly been well received. Surely the cute and cuddly benign LocoRoco characters are not carrying out their advertising crusade with malevolent intentions?

It must have been an interesting spectacle as PSP gamers from all over New York City meet a subway. Judging by the pictures, they had a lot of fun as well. :)

While The PSP Nation regularly hosts weekly PSP meetups in New York, we decided to spread the love this week by taking the group on a ride south towards Coney Island in Brooklyn via the MTA’s D train, right in the middle of rush hour. We hoped that if anyone happened to be using their own PSP on the ride that they would join right in. We began by gathering up in the late afternoon at the Manhattan Mall, on 34th Street.

The PlayStation Portable (PSP) was released in the US on March 24, 2005, and was the first system that seemed poised to threaten Nintendo’s dominant Game Boy franchise in the handheld market.

The system doubles as a portable multimedia device allowing people to view pictures, music, and video–depending, of course, on the size of their memory stick. Sony has been using the system to support the UMD video format, for both movies and video games, although the UMD movies have been notoriously unsuccessful in the year since the PSP’s release.

A little more than a year after the system’s release, the GameSpot editors take a look back at what games they’ve enjoyed on the PSP, what they’re doing with their PSPs right now, and what they’d like to see out of the PSP’s future, either for the current hardware, or the next.

As with most of their other video features (NES Retrospective comes to mind), it is very enjoyable so give it a watch even if it does start out with a negative slant.

Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) have confirmed their support as a sponsor for this years Handheld Learning 2006, joining Fujitsu-Siemens Computers and Palm.

Handheld learning is an annual conference and exhibition, about how handheld and mobile devices (such as PSP :p)can be used to enhance the learning experience. It had a huge turnout lastyear and is now officially associated with the UK governments Department for Education and Skills (DfES), who will be supporting this years event.

This year gaming is high on the agenda, see below for an extract;

During the past year more handheld gaming consoles such as the Leapster, Sony PSP and Nintendo DS were sold globally than handheld computers. These devices are highly powered with rich feature sets including video, wireless and Internet access. They are highly desirable amongst the young where they are often the “gadget of choice”. What can we learn from this sector and can these technologies be embraced to deliver educational experiences?

Chris Deering, the former Chairman and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment (and now Chairman of Handheld Learning) will be chairing the industry panel during the Conference in October.

This is an exciting turn of events as it demonstrates the overlap between gaming and learning in the home and at School/Uni using the capability of a powerful entertainment device in a learning context. The latest firmware upgrade for the PSP means that its built-in web browser now supports Flash media plus there’s a GPS and camera upgrade just around the corner. It’ll be interesting to see which establishments begin to embrace entertainment devices first and which software developers start to tap into the potential of the education sector.

Joystiq has posted an interesting picture for us all to look at. It’s a picture of a “Zoom Shop” they found at an airport. Apparently, its a vending machine that offers some some really neat gadgets including iPods, accessories, Nintendo Game Boys Advance SP’s, and Sony PSP’s. The PSP is sold at $249.99 so there isn’t really any advantage to buying it through a Zoom Shop other than convenience, but it is kind of interesting to see.

Games
NBA Ballers: Rebound

UMD Movies
Family Guy: The Freakin Sweet Collection
X-Men
X-2: X-Men United
Grandma’s Boy

As you can see, there is not much in the way of games this week but it is a decent movie week. Also not much in either department next week.

However, that all changes in two weeks with the release of number of games such as Field Commander and Lemmings.

Gamespot has also posted a video interview with Associate Producer Ryan Eames, as well as three gameplay movies.

Lastly, both IGN and Gamespot have posted new screenshots of the game.

Gangs of London is being developed by SCEE’s own London Studio, and is an all-new spin-off title taking the setting of the Getaway franchise and tweaking them to provide a new gameplay experience. In the game, you play as one of five gangs as you attempt to take over the underworld.

Gangs has a Q4 2006 release date for both Europe and the US.

The game looks really nice and it appears that it should be a great port of the arcade version. Considering the fact that Tekken is my personal favorite fighting series, I cannot wait to find out. Too bad I and everyone else will have to wait until June 26.

For more information on this game, check out our previous coverage.

Super Monkey Ball Adventure has a tentative release date of July 11th 2006 in North America and December 31, 2006 in Europe.

• PSP With Firmware v2.60
• Networked XP Home/Pro Comp.
• WiFi (802.11b) Network Router
• Apple iTunes v6.0.4 Installed
• Songs in iTunes Music Library
• At Least 1 Playlist With Music

If you have all those things, have fun streaming! From what I read, the process is pretty simple and the results are quite rewarding.

Goto the tutorial

Two of the videos are gameplay movies while the third is an interview.

There are many people who are eagerly anticipating this collection which consists of Power Stone 1 and 2 which are cult classics on the (dead too early) Dreamcast. You can read the full press release here.

Games
World Poker Tour
World Rally Championship

Movies
Hostel

Misc
PSP FM Power Tuner

As you can see, game wise there isn’t much this week. However, this is ok considering the recent deluge of great titles to come out recently. This way we will all have time to catch up before the new crop of awesome titles hit.

On the movie side, there were two Warner UMD’s listed previously (NBA: Furious Finishes and NBA Hardwood Classics: Michael Jordan – His Airness) but both have been put on a Moratorium due to the recent announcement that studios are pulling UMD support. Hostel is still apparently on though which is Eli Roth’s gory follow up to Cabin Fever.

In this episode the following topics are covered:

- Alpha release of their own homebrew PSP Hacking 101 LUA Game
- Location Free Video for 1.5 PSP with PiMPStreamer
- Change the System font with FontHacker & Reghacks