My friend Seppo from work bought a PSP this morning, and I went to check it out. Even though I should’ve known my “just checking out” a shiny new piece of personal electronics would be like Robert Downey Jr. “just taking one hit” off a crack pipe. I became like a man possessed.

I finally found one at the Best Buy in Palo Alto. I had to get the bundle, which is what I’d been trying to avoid, but in the end I don’t think I got screwed too badly. I would’ve bought a game anyway (I got Tony Hawk Underground), and I figure paying too much for useless pieces of plastic in the form of a screen guard and a clunky cover is just a fine for my having no patience. The whole escapade took two hours, so I had to stay late at work, but it was worth it.

After using it for a few minutes, I was like Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona. “I love this thing so mu-u-u-u-ch.” The screen is what sells it; it’s just astounding. And the whole thing is just slick and, for lack of a better word, futuristic. They tried to go for the whole “We are Sony. Welcome to the 21st Century.” thing with the PS2 front-end, but it really works on the PSP. It feels like using a tricorder, but without all the nerdy connotations. It’s just damn cool.

They include Spider-Man 2 with it, which was a nice touch because I would’ve written off its potential as a movie player otherwise. Again, the screen is what makes it worthwhile. The picture is remarkably clear, and it’s as easy to navigate as a DVD player. I might even build up a little UMD movie collection, although it’ll never be more than a novelty.

I really hope that Sony’s not serious about its being a “Walkman for the 21st Century,” because its potential as a media center has all kinds of problems. It’ll never take the place of the iPod, because it doesn’t have a hard drive and you can’t fit that much data on a memory stick. It’s too large and heavy to replace a Flash-based MP3 player, so the iPod Shuffle is safe there. Movies are fine, but again, UMDs are never going to replace DVDs. And I thought at least I’d be able to pop pictures from my Sony camera onto my Sony PSP as a little novelty, but I can’t even do that because the memory stick format is completely incompatible. That was a spectacularly boneheaded move on Sony’s part.

So it’s a game machine, and that’s fine, because the games are already the best available for a handheld, ever. The other game I got is Lumines, a Rez-meets-Tetris game which is so good at showing off the PSP that it should come standard. It’s just a fairly simple 2D puzzle game, but it’s insidiously addictive and presented extremely well — music and visuals and multiplayer capability and it’s aimed right at their target market.

And speaking of Lumines, the song they use on the first level sounds a lot like “Star Guitar” by the Chemical Brothers. The video of that song happens to be by Michel Gondry, I found out, because I bought a DVD of his videos the other night. I think it’s overtaken “Weapon of Choice” by Fatboy Slim/Spike Jonez as my favorite video ever, partly because I have no idea how it was made. Watching the rest of the videos on that DVD was neat but a little depressing, because I couldn’t stop thinking, “I will never ever have that much imagination.”

The Game Developers Conference is going on in San Francisco this week, and what with the weather all nice and the deadline at work looming at end of day today, I’m feeling like the kid stuck inside with violin practice watching all the other kids outside playing. Thanks to action man Bret and his surfeit of passes, I did get to go to the Sony party at the Metreon last night, and that was a hoot and a half. I got to see a bunch of people I haven’t seen in months or even years. It sounds like the game “industry” is going through another expansion phase as people get fed up with (or fired from) the big companies and starting their own, so there was a lot of “let’s get the band back together.”

But then again, I’ve got an etrade account. And it turns out I can put a price on job satisfaction and creative fulfillment, and that price, apparently, is $70 per share.

Finally some good weather this weekend. I was starting to get the Seattle Depression. I went to Fort Point and took some pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge before my camera battery went dead. The old Chuck would’ve planned a big page of San Francisco pictures for this website, but I’m more mature now and won’t show such hubris. Still a good weekend, although it went by way too fast.

I finished Half-Life 2 a few nights ago, and I still say it’s just about the best videogame ever made. I’ve been waiting for when we could talk about games in terms of story and setting and plot instead of just filtering and antialiasing and how much stuff you get to blow up. This game does it for me; it’s one of the few games I’ve ever seen (the You Don’t Know Jack series is the only other one that comes to mind immediately) that just assumes you’re intelligent and that you’ll “get it.” Now that I’ve finished, though, I’ve just got to find another game to fill the void.

At least World of Warcraft will never leave me.