Not a good medium for playing games.

In all the time Game Guy has tinkered with tech, he never shied from a challenge. He embraced iPod when many thought it odd; he warmed to Wii when its potential was difficult to see. The key always was to keep an open mind — and keep the user’s manual handy.

But that same spirit hasn’t worked with PlayStation Portable and its cranky Universal Media Disc format — a shrunken version of DVD technology — introduced in 2005. Game Guy has hoped since then that Sony would wise up and ditch the drive in favor of solid-state media, like in the Nintendo DS, and switch entirely to wireless data transfer, like with Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader.

No such luck yet, it seems. Late last month, while Game Guy was on hiatus, Kotaku announced it had spoken with Sony about UMD’s future and found that the format’s future, at least in Sony’s view, remains bright.

Yes, Sony has pondered placing greater emphasis on digital downloads from PlayStation Store to highlight a feature already available on newer PSPs. But that would be to only supplement, not supplant, UMD.

This is bad for me personally because I’ve never liked it as a gaming format: It’s noisy (the sound of the whirring disc banging against its protective plastic sleeve can unnerve a room full of readers at the public library — knowledge gleaned from personal experience), it’s clunky (games stall and sometimes lock up entirely as the disc spools to unload more data, because PSP lacks the spooling power of a full-size DVD drive) and it’s awkward (the disc sleeve can jam in the PSP’s slot loader if you’re hamfisted like me and aren’t careful).

All of this is why my PSP has collected more dust than playing time lately.

Let me say though that UMD is not useless — those dual-sided 1.8-gigabyte-size discs would work very well as a long-term storage medum, provided somebody soon devises an affordable UMD burner to milk this potential. As a gaming medium however, UMD has become an Edsel in a world of Maseratis, despite what Sony thinks.

Sure, there’s talk of a UMD-less PSP lurking somewhere in the wild — a device with direct digital transfer through PlayStation Store and, Game Guy presumes, oodles of Memory Stick-like space to run games without hesitation or lock-up. But that talk isn’t coming from Sony, rather from developers who claim to have Sony’s ear.

If this is true, then Game Guy asks them to please whisper in that ear, “UMD should be RIP.”