Shopping for Bargains and Shutting off the Power

Went up town with number one son today. Which was nice. Although I always seem to spend more when he is around. I'm not quite sure why this is, he protests quite strongly when I start to buy something, and definitely sees himself as the voice of reason in this respect.

But I still end up getting stuff. In this case I bought the game Lumines for the PSP. It is rather impressive in a "tetris on acid" kind of way. It never ceases to surprise me how games manufacturers can come up with different takes on falling blocks that need to be jiggled in some way.

I also found out something about the PSP (and also my stupidity I guess). You can just turn it off. In the middle of a game. Previously I've been carefully exiting my games and then shutting down the power. You know, like you do with the PC. However, just to see what happens I turned the PSP off in the middle of a game. And when I turned it back on again the game was still there. Amazing. I suppose that this is all in the thick little book which came with the device (being a thick big person I never read that of course).

Comments

[Willeth]

Yeah, that's the PSP's sleep mode. If you just flick the button up, it pauses the game and goes to sleep, but it's still using battery power (obviously). If you hold it for about three seconds, though, the light flashes in a different way and it actually turns itself off fully. You can hear the UMD whirring after it's turned off, which it doesn't do in sleep mode. Think of it like just closing the DS in the middle of a game.

I used to be really anal about going back to the main menu in games, too, until I realised that they only ever access anything corruptible during saving, and most autosave games have a failsafe against it anyway. So you don't need to bother with going back to the menu every time you turn it off (and with some games, it's not eve possible).