TRMK: What are some of the unique strengths of the Sony PlayStation Portable hardware that you are able to harness?

JB: I love the screen. Whilst it presented its own technical challenges, everything looks amazing on it. Of course, you can guarantee the quality of the display; you can tailor the rendering for that particular display without having to worry about whether the unit is being connected to a regular TV, a plasma or LCD, or HDTV or even a black and white telly in someone's bedroom. Also, having guaranteed wireless capability meant that we could spend a lot of development effort on the networked games knowing that everyone would be able to use them, instead of worrying whether they have a network card in their PC, or broadband or an account for some online service.

Sony PSP is one sexy machine.

JB: I'll say it again - I love that screen. The obvious situation we had to deal with was that the original games never even knew what widescreen was, so we did tweak the aspect ratio of some of them to fill the screen.

TRMK: Tell us how you support the wireless features of the Sony PSP. How easy will it be to connect to my friends?

KT: You will need one UMD per PSP. We've gone with Ad Hoc, which means while you may need to be within a decent distance to the people you are playing, it opens up the opportunity for face to face trash talking. ;) Connecting to, playing against, and beating your friends at games from MK2 to Arch Rivals is simple and easy. When you're ready to start a game, just press O to get to the wireless menu. From there, one person selects Host, and the rest select Join. Choose which player you want to be and you're ready. It's easy, quick, and definitely fun.

Everyone will need a UMD, but
wireless 4 player Gauntlet is sweet!

JB: No. These games are pure twitch, and they never expected to be played over a WAN, we are making great things happen with the ad hoc mode, and spent our time focusing on that rather than expanding our brief to include significantly more complex infrastructure.