SCEE reveals PlayStation Portable portfolio

Six new titles for the PlayStation Portable have been revealed by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, with franchises including WipEout, MediEvil and World Rally Championship on their way to the new handheld.

Development for the forthcoming console, which launched this week in Japan and is expected to arrive in Europe next spring, is underway at Sony's studios in London, Cambridge and Liverpool, as well as at third party studio Traveller's Tales.

SCEE London Studio are working on a vehicle action title called Fired Up, which sounds related to PS2 online title Hardware and boasts a single-player campaign and up to eight player multiplayer over Wi-Fi, and a soccer title currently simply called "Football" which will most likely become This Is Football by the time it arrives.

SCEE Cambridge, meanwhile, is developing a new version of its award winning MediEvil action adventure game for the handheld, while SCEE Liverpool - the studio known in a former life as Psygnosis - is working on a WipEout game for the console, called WipEout Pure.

Also in the works at SCEE, but developed at third party studio Travellers Tales, are PSP updates of the World Rally Championship and Formula One franchises, both of which promise eight player WiFi multiplayer modes and all of the official stages from their respective real-life competitions.

Interestingly, these titles are also among the first to mention support for post-launch downloadable content, with Formula One players able to download real-life qualifying data throughout the 2005 season, while WipEout Pure, WRC and Fired Up are all expected to offer content downloads ranging from new maps to new skins and even new music tracks.

It's still not entirely clear how content downloading to the PlayStation Portable will work. Content will ultimately be stored on Memory Sticks, but whether Sony will follow through on earlier plans to create a unified internet access solution for the console by uniting wireless hotspot providers, or if the firm will simply require users to download the updates on their PCs and then transfer them to the PSP, remains to be seen.