PSP poised to be legit video player

You’re about to be able to watch more palm-sized movies. People who buy Sony’s new PlayStation Portable handheld gaming package when it goes on sale March 24 for $249 will get “Spider-Man 2” in the bundle, distributed in the PSP’s Universal Media Disc (UMD) format.

Less than a month later, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will follow up with four other movies: “XXX,” “Hellboy,” “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.” The company is in talks with other studios to release movies on UMD discs as well.

Unlike Sony’s Memory Sticks, the UMD disc structure will be publicly available to other companies, so others can make UMD players and the discs themselves. That gives the discs a halfway decent chance of becoming the format of choice for portable videos.

‘Matrix’ mimics matrix

If you’ve been waiting to dive into “The Matrix Online,” you’ve got only got a few weeks left to wait. After a few delays, the game makes its formal debut.

This online world game is different from some others on the market because it dynamically generates the locations and people that you get missions from as you’re playing. You or your group is sent to a type of building in the virtual city that makes up the game – a hotel room or a bar, for example – but which one you’re sent to and who you talk to when you get there is generated on the fly, much like the Matrix in the movies.

Creating missions on the fly supposedly eliminates quest bottlenecks, because multiple groups of players will never be trying for the same objectives at the same time. That’s the theory, anyway.

We’ll have a detailed preview of the game here in the next few weeks.

And if you’re not a PC gamer, take heart: Atari has announced a new Matrix game for both consoles and PCs called “The Matrix: Path of Neo,” which hopefully won’t stink as much as “Enter the Matrix” did.