User:Erik the Appreciator/DS vs. PSP

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Primer
I am a regular reader of Electronic Gaming Monthly, though occasionally there are points where I swear I wonder why; They have seriously disgruntled opinions on otherwise well-received industry standards, traditions, and other properties. Examples? Calling Kingdom Hearts 2 a "clumsy juxtaposition of overwrought Final Fantasy-inspired psychobabble and giddy, kiddie high jinks"; Asserting that "there are already too damn many" Ratchet & Clank games; Editor-in-chief Dan Hsu's opinion in issue 202's Final Word that all online gamers who cheat and launch F-bombs should be graphically flayed on a remote island and subsequently be annihilated by a nuclear bomb (in an age where current events might actually involve really large explosions); a lot of "jokes" that offer little humor and lots of plain outrage;  A letters editor who probably immolated some kittens out of sheer, general rage; And on the Pokemon Emerald review, not only do they not give a quarter of a Rattata's posterior about any of the other 450+ Pokemon that is not Pikachu, they can't even spell Pikachu's name right! That is perhaps bias of the most pure sort, and it is stupidiocy at any rate. Ergh.

But nonetheless, their reviews do provide fascinating accounts of a pretty accurate sort. They're certainly "tough" (a full point is automatically deducted from each reviewer's score the moment an exploding barrel and/or a desert, ice, or lava environment is sighted! Eek!), and over the full-year-and-counting that the two Handheld systems Nintendo DS and Sony PSP have been around, I had taken a liking to chronicling the review scores in personal review databases and using them to compare the game and score status of the two machines. The most recently updated version of my investigation is presented below in Wiki-table format.

I own DS. This might make this whole page seem biased against PSP as a consequence, but you just need to know that the data below is merely a complete reprinting of statistics and information found in the pages of EGM. Therefore, this list should be taken as a hopefully-non-biased feature that anyone can look at and decide for themselves whatever they want to make conclusions on. In a sense, I hope this will be used as a reference for which game to get next for owners of either system; it's just a chart. Maybe you'll find your next game here. Actually, the reason why I made this list so long ago (and decided to present it online for everyone to see) is because when the initial DS vs. PSP news stories made their rounds, I wanted to see if PSP really would turn out to be worthy of its clear-favorite-in-the-handheld-wars hype status that built up at launch. After a few months, I thought I would stop making this list for myself, but I never felt like stopping because of the way things were soon turning out for the handhelds, and it continued on to become what you see on this page (and I will update it each time a new issue comes out). Personally, I'm hoping that people who wonder which handheld to buy or form an opinion on will find this page and make their decision based on the information herein.

Enough expositionary blabber. Let the pocket games begin! - Erik Jensen (I appreciate talk!) {|border="1" width="70% style="border:2px solid #a3bfb1; background-color: #EEE8AA; -moz-border-radius:15px" width="100%"
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In the Red Corner: Nintendo DS
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In the Blue Corner: Sony PSP
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Number Crunching
Now for some number crunching: For DS, 63 games have been reviewed, and they have racked up a total of ??? points from EGM Review Crew members. Divide ??? points by 63 games, and then divided the result by three reviewers per game. The result? The average score handed out to a DS game is ????.

For the PSP, 67 games have been reviewed, and a total of ??? points is what they have earned. Do the same division process and the result turns out to be this: The average score an EGM reviewer gives to a PSP game is ???.

DS Average Score: ???.

PSP Average Score: ???.

Erik Jensen (Appreciate 19:15, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
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