Stanfords Finest

We are judged on our actions rather than our words. I can tell you about what I intended to do when I moved here and how I was going to learn the language, play Mahjong and take up Dragon Boat racing but it’s all just yada yada yada. One of the first things I actually did after being here for a week or so was to track down the surprisingly hard to find video game ground zero of Hong Kong. Next to food, water and housing seemingly the most important thing on my priority list was to find out where all the computer games be at. I was under the illusion that when I got here that I would be surrounded by games all of the night and all of the day but it wasn’t to be and there are only a very small amount of stores selling a very small amount of games in the shopping areas of Hong Kong. I knew that there had to be somewhere where I could find better product and judging by the amount of people playing PSPs on the MTR there was obviously a market out there so where did they go?

I won’t bore you with the details but it took me a couple of weekends of detective work to find the area I will refer to as Mecca. On entering Mecca I was amazed by the amount of tiny shops and stalls selling thousands upon millions of games. There wasn’t much pre-PSX but as I have enough old games I wasn’t fussed. I won’t go into detail but I will tell the you as a result of my visit to Mecca my PSP now has OS 1.50 as opposed to the 2.7 version I had previously and with this version I can run emulators which has added a whole new dimension to my small white beast. I now have SNES, a Megadrive, NES and PC Engine PSP emulators with all the roms on a DVD which can upload onto my PSP at will. Further to this I can download any US or European rom from the interweb and drag and drop onto the PSP via my PC. Naughtily I also found some ISO’s on the memory stick, the stand outs being Ridge Racer and Coded Arms. Both games are quality releases that I would not have purchased had they not been on there but seeing as they were I had a go and I like both titles a lot thank you very much. Coded Arms is an excellent FPS and Ridge Racer is done very well and plays like a dream. Obviously this leads the way open for piracy which is not good and all titles were available in Mecca as ISOs on DVDs ready to be cut and pasted onto the memory stick. One upside to this situation is that the UMD is completely bypassed therefore loading times are lightning fast plus the battery lasts for a good 8 hours which is great for long journeys. Somehow my PSP feels liberated and it has a new lease of life but I am torn between thinking that the developers of good titles are now being ripped off by this piracy and will not see any reward for their hard work. Still there are more than enough punters in the UK, such as I was, that pay over inflated prices that subsidise the rest of the world.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.