As we head further and deeper into the digital age, more and more traditional paper based products are finding there way into the binary world of Cyberspace. What is this new comic feature? Find out inside.
As we head further and deeper into the digital age, more and more traditional paper based products are finding there way into the binary world of Cyberspace, Sony have taken this to various levels with their PlayStation Portable machine already but have now found a new way of delivering you a once paper based product into your hands and have set there targets firmly on the world of comics. This new service from Sony is set to hit the PlayStation Network on December the 10th, in Japan at least, with the Western world expected to come shortly afterwards, "mid-december" is the official line from Sony on that at the moment. It comes with a new specially built Firmware, version 6.20, which has already been launched for download on the 19th November.
The update adds a new icon to the XMB, imaginatively titled 'Extras' which contains the option for 'Digital Comics', launching this gives you access to any comics you've downloaded from it's own interface, you can choose to browse through the collection you've got on your current memory stick and easily identify the new ones you've added or not yet read from the main menu which is a handy little thing to have available to you. The final part of the main menu allows you to go into the options screen and tweak your preferences; you can choose how you read the comic or whether or not you want to listen to some music while you're listening.
The comics themselves are pretty much what you would expect; you read the story as you would a normal comic, using your PSP to control your way through the page which is just a case or pressing right on the D-Pad using the default control method. Should a comic panel have writing on it such as speech or something descriptive then the page will pause till you have read it, you can knock it onto the next at your leisure, should you just have a splash page then the screen will pan over the panel to give you an overview in a Ken Burns style effect (although Sony have seen fit to call this the AutoFlow system), should you stumble across an action sequence then the PSP will display this with a rocking effect in an effort to add some excitement to the piece.
Overall, anything that adds to the media capabilities of the PSP in this way can't be seen as a bad thing, but, the comic purists out there aren't going to be impressed to see their favourite medium reduced to this, how will they back up and store their first editions if they are delivered in this way? It's a fun new addition to the ever expanding PSP bag of tricks and one that will see some people getting some use out of it for sure.
Many of the major players in the comic industry are bringing at least some of their action to the table; 2000AD, Disney, IDW, Insomnia, iVerse, Marvel and Titan are all signed up to bring some of their titles to the small screen, hopefully this will inspire some more of the big names to the format, we'll just have to wait to see what awaits us upon the release on the PSN Store.
