If the video demonstrations shown at Sony’s pre-E3 press conference are representative of the PSP’s final performance, then the system should be a pretty amazing piece of hardware. Sony showed a handful of interesting-looking demos of first- and third-party software, but it was EA’s demo reel that stood out the most.

　　Need for Speed Underground is the latest iteration of the long-running Need for Speed series. It focuses on street racing in the vein of The Fast and the Furious and allows you to drive and customize a number of real cars. At today’s press conference, EA announced plans to bring the series to Sony’s new PSP. The demo video looked really impressive, and perhaps only a step or two below the game’s performance on the PlayStation 2. But there’s a bit of a catch.

　　The demos shown by EA during the press conference were created and run on early PC-based emulators that were developed with the previously announced PSP specs in mind. So the demos aren’t 100 percent representative of the PSP’s final performance.

　　Will the PSP be able to run such impressive-looking handheld software? We may not know the answer to that for some time. Need for Speed Underground for the PSP is scheduled to ship during the first quarter of 2005.