PSP

Why so serious?

HIGH Getting to be The Joker is probably a dream most comic fans have—Lego Batman allows you to cross it off your list of life goals.

LOW Being stuck in an area for half an hour, unsure of how to progress because the game's awful platforming mechanics had me convinced that the jump I knew I needed to make (and failed at multiple times) wasn't the correct one—and it turns out it was.

WTF Killer Moth? The Mad Hatter? They really scraped the bottom of the barrel for some of these villains.

At the Longwill School for the Deaf in Birmingham, England, students study in both British Sign Language (BSL) and English. According to a Futurelab article, they communicate in these two very different languages with the help of PlayStation Portables.

Last year, the school borrowed some units from the Birmingham East City Learning Centre; the deputy head thought that, among other things, the PSP would be good for teaching sign language to the students' hearing siblings. For instance, an instructor could make sign language videos for the kids to play on their systems, and the kids could practice by signing into their PSPs' integrated video cameras. The PSP has also become a portable notebook for the school's pupils. BSL and English have completely different grammars and sentence structures, and written English is still focused on how words sound. (For a more in-depth analysis of the problems deaf people can have with written English, see What Really Matters in the Early Literacy Development of Deaf Children).

What does the Sony PSP have to do with English literacy? Teachers giving writing assignments can ask students to do a draft of their work by making a video in sign with their PSPs' cameras; then, when they bring their PSPs back to school, they can work on English translation with the teacher's help. As Longwill's deputy head Allison Carter says, "[English writing is] becoming much more manageable for the children and you’re getting a much higher quality of work because they can reflect in their first language." To see more about how Longwill is using technology in the classroom, including images of PSPs in action, see Nathan Monk's Design Diary.

In related (if old) news, you can turn your PSP into a portable Teletype (TTY) device.

A completely new interpretation of classic material, R-Type Command takes the revered side-scrolling space shooter away from its action roots and plants it deeply within the strategy genre. As bizarre as it may seem to rework something based on timing and reflexes into one of the slowest, most methodical styles in videogaming, my hat is off to Irem—it absolutely works.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Animated Blood, Mild Fantasy Violence

Game Description: In R-Type Command players are cast head-first into a desperate war against the mysterious alien race known as the Bydo, humanity sends wave after wave of fighters into Bydo space-none of which are ever heard from again. Mankind’s main hope now resides with a lone commander, sent to lead a small armada on a perilous mission into the heart of the Bydo Empire. Low on fuel and forced to scavenge resources and equipment from his surroundings, the commander must use all his cunning and wits if he hopes to succeed, let alone make it home alive.

Game Description: As Crypto, our loveable alien invader, take on the human race &other enemies once again to harvest valuable human DNA and destroy all humans. Use a devastating arsenal of weapons and mental abilities, take to the sky in your UFO to rain terror from above, or for the first time jump into your Big Willy mechand unleash even more massive destruction.

But I think that the greatest weakness of Big Willy Unleashed is its setting. The first Destroy All Humans! was set in the 1950s: a time when America was still processing what happened in Nazi Germany and the threat of the Cold War, partly by making movies about hostile aliens. In the first game, the humans’ barely-concealed anxiety about a Communist takeover fits perfectly with the alien invasion going on right under their noses. By the 1970s, alien invasions had fallen out of favor in scary movies, and the enemy was much more likely to come from our own ranks.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Alcohol and Tobacco Reference, Crude Humor, Mild Language, Sexual Themes, Violence