So why the hell isn't it on my PS3 yet?

I can't disagree with him. The PSPGo isn't a hardware upgrade, it's just a form factor change. It isn't going to open the door for a new generation of better looking, faster playing portable games. At the same time, it's locking out the PSPs entire back catalog of UMD games. On top of that it's a lousy PMP with a horrible browser.

Sony's basically killed any market that may have existed for the device. There's nothing new to capture the attention of anyone who's not already vested in the platform. The lack of a UMD drive or conversion method means that anyone who IS vested in the platform will just stick with their existing hardware. No-one looking for a PMP that also plays games is going to buy a PSP when an iPod Touch is cheaper and has arguably better games. Who's left to buy the thing?

Sony should have just held off another year and pushed out a full on PSP2. The concept of download to local storage games is great (and arguably should have been done with the original PSP), but if you're going to kill off the UMD drive you should have done it on brand new hardware and had a reasonable number of launch titles ready to go.

There's a reason IL-2 was a commercial success while none of the lightweight games seem to amount to much.

Flight sims are HARD to do well. However, there's a big community of older flight-sim buffs, so the few high-fidelity sims that actually get released tend to sell lots of copies.

The trouble is, there's a really large lead time and up front development cost on good sims, and most of the big publishers aren't interested in anything but quick turn arounds anymore unless it's a top tier game (Halo, GTA, etc). The only reason Blackshark got made is that Eagle Dynamics was able to adapt the game from the mil-spec version that Kamov had already paid them to develop. 1c:Maddox has basically been co-opted by Ubisoft into doing other shorter term projects, so who knows when Battle of Britain is going to be finished. Microsoft laid off the entire Aces team last year too, so I'd suspect there's not going to be an FS11 in the near future...

Here's hoping some of the smaller devs will be able to sneak a couple of decent Sims through in the next few years and keep my rudder pedals moving.

Has anyone thought about adding a robust barcode scanner to this and hooking it up to a UPC database? Print Braile labels automatically for anything with a UPC code on it...

Ok, Carmak and Michael Abrash are *the* fathers of basically all current 3d rendering engines (I haven't seen any voxel or ray tracing engines lately). With the possible exception of certain engineers at Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, there is NOBODY with a better low level understanding of graphics hardware than John Carmak.

Also, if super monkey ball isn't enough of a demonstration of what the phone can do... pwn your iPhone and install Quake4iPhone. It's on the featured list for Cydia. Runs better on my phone that it did on the Pentium 90 I first ran it on anyway =)

...and I for one, welcome our new peep eating robot overlords!