According to developer talk recounted by Edge at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Sony’s next PSP iteration will include a UMD drive, despite the company’s renewed focus on digital distribution. It was originally assumed by many that the PSPgo was Sony’s first step towards moving to a digital only platform but recent murmurs out of Tokyo suggest that this is not the case. more »

By way of a Famitsu report, it has been confirmed that Capcom is continuing its Monster Hunter development efforts on PSP, this time in the form of a spinoff rather than a main entry.

The game’s title loosely translates to “Monster Hunter Diary Poka Poka Airu Village.” While details are scant, a brief teaser was shown at the Monster Hunter finals event in Japan, seemingly indicating an art style shift as evidenced by the creature shown on-screen. Although official details from Capcom are still forthcoming, this could very well be an entirely new take on the franchise — more casual friendly perhaps?

Hot off the heels of his initial release, homebrew developer Zack is back with an update to his performance-tuned SNES emulator SNES9X Euphoria. In addition to resolving compatibility issues with GEN firmware, build R2.1 is focused largely on bug fixes and code cleanup, which Zack notes may have resulted in a slight speedup. Catch the full changelog past the break. more »

Prinny’s heroic efforts have not gone unrewarded. Developer Nippon Ichi announced today that the lovable penguin mascot, formerly only known as a secondary character in the Disgaea series, will continue his road to stardom and return in a second outing on PSP.

Unfortunately, Nippon Ichi is staying coy on details for the time being, revealing only a portion of the game’s title as pictured above. For whatever reason, part of it is covered in question marks. We’d expect the sequel to expand on the simplistic yet addictive gameplay of the original while keeping the difficulty meter high to the point of frustration. That’s how we like it, dood. more »

Headlining this week’s PlayStation Store is Frozenbyte’s enchanting fantasy-action puzzler Trine. Joing that is a couplet of PSOne classics, namely Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe’s Exodus. For those looking to test-drive some PSN titles, Ratchet And Clank Future: A Crack In Time, Critter Crunch, and Dragon Ball: Raging Blast are all available in demo form.

For the frugal deal hunters among us, Lumines Supernova has been permanently marked down to $9.99 while Burnout Paradise and Siren Halloween have received a temporary reduction down to $14.99 and $29.99 respectively.

With 18 newly added UMD legacy titles, portable offerings are also in surplus this week, which should put a grin on the faces of early PSPgo adopters. See the complete list past the break. more »

While Sony seems relatively pleased with the retail performance of PSPgo in Europe and the US, things seem to be moving at a snails pace in Australia. In a week following the handheld’s debut, industry sources say that slightly more than 1000 units were shifted. By contrast, the PS3 Slim moved more than 10,000 units in a week. more »

Piracy is dampening Q Games’ faith in the PSP as a viable platform, with company founder Dylan Cuthbert expressing intent to drop support for the handheld entirely in a Twitter tweet.

Apparently, sales of their latest offering – PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe – an enhanced port of the cult hit PS3 classic on PSP, aren’t up to par. However, BitTorrent downloads are depressingly sky high, which is leading Q Games as a whole to question the value of investing further in PSP projects.

I don’t think we’ll port anything else to the PSP, we have to see how PJMD does as there’s a *lot* of piracy.

It’s a shame, but not entirely unexpected. As a platform, the PSP has been hit hard by piracy over the years, and with subsequent firmware updates doing little to alleviate the problem, it doesn’t look like Sony will ever be able to pull through and topple the pirates. Until PSP2, that is. more »

The NPD numbers for September are in and for the first time ever, PS3 is leading the pack in console hardware sales. This is no doubt thanks to the price cut and introduction of a slim model. While the Nintendo DS took reign as the top selling platform, this is still a significant victory for Sony, having outsold both the Xbox 360 and Wii by a fairly large margin.

See it all after the break. more »

SNES emulation on PSP is back in the limelight as homebrew developer Zack has announced the release of his latest project, SNES9X Euphoria R1. Building off the already robust codebase of SNES9xTYL, it is focused on pure optimization, aiming to increase overall emulation performance.

Zack reports of significant frame rate gains in Kirby Super Star, one of the more demanding SNES titles, recording 50 FPS average. The previous Ruka build usually managed 30 FPS or less on the same title. That’s quite a substantial increase and should push most games into the playable category, even at lower frameskip values. more »

It has come to light that Sony is not mandating that third-party development studios release their UMD titles on PlayStation Network. According to PSN director Eric Lempel, Sony is merely encouraging studios to go digital. While most are on board, it’s a little nerve-wracking to invest in a PSPgo and not have the assurance that all titles going forward will be made available digitally. more »