I must be getting old

I've been playing video games since I was a sprout, although being on the low side income-wise has usually kept me a system or three behind (and, to be brutally honest, I still prefer Intellivision^TM and Sega Genesis^TM and plain vanilla GameBoy^TM to the newfangled stuff). We've got a PSOne^TM, a Nintendo 64^TM and a couple of GameBoys^TM around the house. I aspire to XBox^TMdom. Eventually.

Thing is, 20 or even ten years ago, I'd have followed reviews and known quite a bit about the new systems that were coming out. Nowadays, I get blind-sided.

I had heard a little bit of buzz about the Sony PSP^TM -- but I didn't pay much attention. For some reason, I just assumed that it was a portable knockoff of the original PlayStation^TM, like the cheap PSOnes^TM -- let the kiddies play their old PlayStation^TM games in the car on an LCD screen. No biggie. So, when I got around to hopping on the web and punching in the code from a McDonald's^TM Big Mac^TM, and found out I'd won one, I was just like, "cool -- hope it gets here in time for the 7-year-old's birthday. He'll really like playing Spyro when we're driving somewhere."

Then I read somewhere that the makers of Grand Theft Auto^TM would be producing a PSP^TM version, and it began to penetrate my pea brain that this was a new gaming platform altogether. So, I finally decided to do the obvious and spend five seconds on Google^TM figuring out what's up with this thing.

Wow.

And I'm giving this thing to the kidling?

I can already tell that Dad is going to be borrowing it. Often.