One of the best things Sony did in the middle of 2006 was release a free demo of the game LocoRoco. not only did it mean that everyone was suddenly familiar with a new ‘concept’ game, but it meant that Sony had taken the first official step into the world of downloadable games.

Many years ago, the monthly magazines that covered the 8-bit home computing markets of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 started experimenting with adding cover mounted cassettes - sometimes they packaged up older games from publishers, but a lot of the times they shipped with the first few levels of a game - in other words, a demo to encourage you to buy.

Skip forward to the PSP, and you can do the same thing over the internet, download a demo, put it on your memory stick, and you’ll be able to see what a few games are like. It’s still reasonably technical if you’re putting the file manually onto your PSP, but this is what you do.

First of all, you need to find the demo of the game. The best way to do this (as it is constantly changin) is to head to the Wikipedia Entry for PSP Demo Games for a list of the titles avaiable, and visit PSP Images.net’s demos page for the downloads. Most games will consist of a single file (eboot.pbp) although later demos have a .DRM file as well. You need to copy these two files into a specific fodler. All demo files are held in MEMORY STICK:/PSP/GAME/ and when you download the game, you’ll be told what the sub folder should be. So for example, Killzone Liberation says it needs to go into UCES00279-demo, so the full path would be MEMORY STICK:/PSP/GAME/UCES00279-demo. Because of the complicated file names, I’d also suggesst creating an empty text file with the name of the demo in the relevant directory so later youknow which is which.

To play a demo, all you do is go to the Game menu on your PSP, and scroll down the list to the Memory Stick Icon (at the very bottom). Go into this, and the demos are listed. Just run them like you would open a video or play a music file.