It's been a rough little life for the PSP. Besides introducing and subsequently retiring the doomed UMD format, Sony's sleek portable has been the focus of more than a few advertising gaffes. In 2005, Sony received a good talking to from several major American cities for using graffiti artists to tag buildings with stylized PSP imagery. The following year, a racially charged billboard for a new PSP color appeared in The Netherlands. How'd they try to get their message across? A photo of a white person violently grabbing a black person, of course. Still more, a few months later Sony took to the Internet with a series of viral videos made by thoroughly fake bloggers who wanted a PSP for Christmas. A shame, really, when you consider how great the system actually is.

After all this, I figured Sony would be done with the guerrilla marketing that's earned them so much criticism over the past few years. Then I saw this:

I snapped this photo from the roof of the building I was staying in last week in Berlin's Mitte neighborhood. What is it, exactly? Here's a closer look, condensed below:

If you're still a little uncertain, that's a picture of a Godzilla-like creature battling PSP-headed robots in front of a skyline dominated by two massive PS3s. It's a little on the abstract side, but the products depicted here are unmistakeably Sony. Seeing this got me wondering whether Sony's up to their old tricks in distant corners of the world (like the former Eastern Bloc), or if this is authentic urban artwork.

There are a few ways of looking at it. The quality of the artwork is excellent, the size is massive (that's probably a 4 story building), and the whole thing just has a professional sheen that makes you think big advertising dollars are behind this. But on the other side of the coin, Berlin is an artistic hotspot where random sightings of strikingly well-done artwork are fairly common. And it's not as if the mural is telling you how awesome PSPs and PS3s are. Those robots look pretty disgusting and you really have to know what the vents and inputs on the back of a PS3 look like to even tell what those two things in the background are.

I'm not sure either way. At the very least, it's a visually pleasing piece of design work that doesn't insult anyone's intelligence with its desire to be edgy and viral like some of Sony's earlier advertising work. It's just a nice looking mural that's currently serving as my desktop image. But still: the fact that I'm even talking about it means it could very well be a viral (and therefore successful) piece of marketing.

What do you guys think? Sony advertising or random, abstract urban graffiti?

Star Wars Battlefront Renegade Squadron for PSP is worth a second look at $17.99 from EB and with a score of 8.0 from GameSpot. This titles single player campaign takes place during the original trilogy and revolves around a band of rogues struggling to keep the Alliance alive. Renegade squadron allows you to customize your character in unique ways, for example creating a Wookie from the Black Sun crime syndicate. The first few missions throw you directly into the action and you'll find yourself trading hot plasma, on the ground and in space, with the likes of Boba Fett , IG-88, and Darth Vader.

What's incredible about Renegade Squadron is just how many ways you can prosecute missions. This is a continuation of the Battlefront series meaning weapon loadouts are customizable and combat non-linear. Just when you think your Blaster Rifle, Grenade Launcher, Wrist Rocket, Personal Shield combo is the ACME of Storm Trooper stomping, you'll run into a mission where a Sniper Rifle and Remote Rocket Gun will give you twice the bang with half the effort.

Layered over the ground combat is space combat, which will leave you excited in ways you haven't been since the original X-Wing. You'll enjoy missions such as retrieving a Holocron from the exploded remains of Alderaan, or destroying the gravity well generators of an Interdictor Cruiser so the Alliance can escape. Flight controls are dumbed down for the PSP, but you could never land in a Star Destroyers hanger and assault on foot after blowing up its shield generators in the original space sim. Each ship class, A-Wing, X-Wing, Y-Wing, and Transport have different flight characteristics reminiscent of older X-Wing titles.

Last but not least, the cut-scenes in Renegade Squadron are excellent. Each sequence is presented web comic style with beautiful concept art conveying the gritty Star Wars universe from dusty backwater bars to high tech briefing rooms on capital ships. These cut-scenes are something to look forward to because they add to the Star Wars Cannon while setting up each mission.

Renegade Squadron is a step closer to my Star Wars dream game which would be a GTA/X-Wing/Freelancer/KOTR mash up. I want to be able to pickup a mission in a bar, fly from ground to space, eject and board someone else's ship, shoot my way to the bridge, and fly that ship to another solar system. George, you can have my idea for free, or hell, I will pay you to make my game. In the meantime, on your way to work, everyone should check out Renegade Squadron, you'll enjoy it a hell of a lot more than pretending to check your Iphone.

In its effort to make me feel right back home in San Francisco, Berlin has decided to introduce itself with a nice bout of terrible weather. In this case, pouring rain. I went and walked around the city for a bit last night when I first got in, and even moreso this morning, but now I'm soaking wet and need to take a little break. So what better time than now to curl up next to a warm laptop and recap my trip to Germany and the Leipzig Games Convention?

After a ten hour flight in which I slept little more than 30 minutes, myself, Brian Ekberg, and our cameramen Tyler and Jan arrived in Frankfurt last Sunday. We crossed through the customs checkpoint from the international gate to to domestic gate so we could wait for our flight to Leipzig. But with a three hour layover, we decided to get some food. It's a tradition that the group flying to Leipzig (my first time, but Tyler's been doing it for years) get some beer and sausage in the airport. So we did! But we had to cross back into the international gate to get to the traditional place, which got us some dirty looks from customs and a pair of useless stamps in our passports. But neverhteless we dined on delicious processed pork(-like substance) and felt good.

The flight to Leipzig was a little less than an hour, and much to my surprise, it didn't take place in a Piper Cub or a Cessna. It was in a decent-sized plane--one where the wings were above the windows, but still a decent-sized plane. We got to the Leipzig airport safely just the same.

That's when I got my first taste of the autobahn. I had my eyes stuck on the speedometer of our beige Mercedes taxi cab, and the driver topped out at about 210 kilometers per hour, or approximately 130 miles per hour. That's about 30 more than I've ever taken a car in my entire life. So that was fun! I doubt the plane went much faster than that.

We wound up staying in the Westin Leipzig, if not the nicest hotel in the city, the definitely the biggest. But... that's not saying so much. Much as I enjoyed Leipzig's unique charm, it's sort of the city that time forgot. Lots of abandoned buildings covered in graffiti, hotels boarded up and turned to public parking lots, and so on. It hits you pretty hard that you're in East Germany when you first get into town.

We spent the night before the first day of the show exploring the city. There was a relatively famous church Brian wanted to find, the one where Back is buried, and we wound up picking out about four steeples in the skyline and walking to them only to discover they were the wrong ones. We eventually found it, but by then the sun was setting and jetlag was wrapping its hands around us--so we went to bed.

The next two days were spent covering the Games Convention Developers Conference. It's sort of the show before the show, a chance for developers to get together and talk their craft before the show goes public and the focus turns to the products rather than the process of creating. We wound up posting a lot of really interesting write-ups in the Previews Blog, and one extremely intersting flowchart in Brian's blog.

That was Monday and Tuesday. The next day, the show floor and business centers opened up--but only to press. We spent the day scrambling from meeting to meeting, bouncing between the glitzy show floor and quartered off meeting rooms. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun. The work continued on Thursday and Friday, but by then the floor was open to the public, which meant dealing with throngs of people if you wanted to cover a game that wasn't being shown ina private session in the business centers. Having never been to the Old E3, it was a lot of fun for me seeing the madness of the show floor. But I still managed to have a lot of fun in the more reserved business center meeting rooms. Some of the highlights included seeing a beardless Alex Navarro doing his PR thing in the Harmonix room at EA's suite, telling Ben Judd he has a girly phone after an interview with him (he laughed it off as I'd hoped), and getting my first chance to play Mirror's Edge, which is instantly my most anticpated game after Fallout 3.

There's a ton of great conent available to check out on the Leipzig page. I'm saying you should read every article and watch every video, but you know, I'm strongly recommending it.

On our last night in Leipzig, a bunch of us went out and took in some authentic German cuisine by going to a tapas restaurant called Cafe Madrid. The food was great, and so was rolling through the streets of Leipzig with such a hilariously diverse brigade of international English speakers. There was the Brit (Guy Cocker), the Aussie (Luke Anderson), and the Americans (all of of us from GameSpot US, and me, an American who gew up an hour from Canada). We even randomly met a fan of GameSpot who recgonized Luke on the street, and added him into our posse for dinner. (Shout out to Mark!)

All in all, it was a great trip. Despite its shortcomings, I really liked Leipzig, and part of me will be a little sad if they wind up moving it Cologne next year.

And what do you know, I'm starting to dry up quite a bit. I guess that's what happens when you type a long-winded travelogue with a warm latptop on you. I've still got another week to go here in Berlin and Amsterdam, so look forward to a recap on those cities soon.

So I was online preordering Rock Band 2 and NHL 09 today when I ran into a couple things on Amazon.com. First off, there's this Gears of War action figure that depicts a Locust soldier in the process of suffering a head shot. I just thought you should know.

The other thing is the new cover art for NHL 09, which proudly proclaims the game is the "Winner of seven sports video game of the year awards." This bugs me, since it was last year's NHL 08 that won those awards. Even though everybody gripes about how these annual sports installments often add up to little more than roster updates, things still go wrong from time to time and some years we wind up with crappy follow-ups to great games. So unless EA wants to come out and say that what people are buying in the box is the exact same game that won all those accolades last year, I wish they'd take that off there. Or at least have the decency to rephrase it as the "highest-rated hockey video game series" or something.

Even if EA is eventually proven right and the game does win seven such awards--and it might, considering what a great base they had to work off with NHL 08--I can't help but feel this is flat-out lying to consumers in the meantime. Then again, I seem to be the only guy who thinks Madden should have a "mild violence" ESRB content descriptor on it.

Anyone else care about EA selling NHL 09 based on the accolades of a different game?

Apparently, people are still making Dreamcast games. I found this game--Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles--on the show floor of the Leipzig Games Convention today, tucked away into a corner of Hall 4. It's coming to Europe from publisher Redspot Games and developer Yuan Works.

It's a pretty standard little puzzle game, playing a lot like Hexic but with Chinese characters on the blocks and cute little anime characters. According to the rep who was telling me about the game, fans can go to the Wind & Water web site and make their own custom avatars which will then be featured in the game when it's released this summer, though it doesn't look like a U.S. release is planned.

Not really my type of game but it's just nice to see the Dreamcast still in action. *Sniff*, I miss 1999.

Now that your hands aren't at ten and six due to gas prices, food prices, and the pay cut you take every year from inflation, you owe it to yourself to get your hands on something to make your commute enjoyable. The underrated PSP is now as low as $170 and the bargain bin at GameStop is your friend. Since I deal with gameplay at GameSpot, I thought I'd go back and dig up a game or two that we loved but previously didn't have footage for. Also, if you haven't played God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP), that should be your first stop.

First Game

Chili Con Carnage is a shooter focused on one thing, slow motion blasting fools. The action is spicy and so is the south of the border humor. The targeting system is elegant for the PSP, right bumper plus trigger kills people, left bumper plus trigger kills objects. There are a number of highly entertaining special moves that do anything from stacking your hands with guns like a Looney tunes character, to giving you machine gun guitar cases much like Desperado, to a bull attack that lets you run around at high speed smashing dudes. The music goes in tune with your killing streak so by the tenth body you'll be feeling it. Watch me tornado some fools.

Next I'm playing Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron (PSP)