Console of the Month (October 2022) - Playstation Portable

[alienjesus]

It's time for the next console of the month, and this month we're talking about Sony's first foray into the handheld market with the Playstation Portable. Touted as a console experience in the palm of your hands on par with the PS2, the Playstation Portable was considered to be the likely frontrunner in the portable gaming space that generation. Whilst this turned out not to be the case thanks to the dominance of the Nintendo DS, the PSP still managed to shift impressive numbers with approximately 80 million units sold!

Sony was no stranger to pushing new hardware formats with their consoles, and the PSP continued this trend my using UMD format for games and movies - mini discs in a plastic shell with a much higher storage capacity compared to the DS' cartridges. It also made use of Sony's own Memory Stick storage format for data, instead of the more standard SD cards.

The PSP had plenty of design revisions, with the original 'fat' 1000 series model being follows up by a slimmer 2000 series, and a 3000 series model, both of which offered video output. Later on the PSP Go was released, Sony's first venture into a digital download only console with no support for UMDs, and later the more budget friendly E1000 model.

Regardless which version you may have had, but let's discuss our experience with the Playstation Portable console this month!

[racketboy]

For now, I'll just interject the recent PSP guide links:

Defining PSP Games https://www.racketboy.com/retro/best-ps ... n-portable

Rare & Valuable PSP Games: https://www.racketboy.com/retro/the-rar ... able-games

I still have the Beginner Guide in the works and I used these two threads to spark some conversation

Biggest strengths and weaknesses of the PSP:
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=53733

Recommended Hardware & Accessories for the PSP:
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=53747

If anybody has anything they want to add to help develop the beginner guide more, feel free to share here or message me

[opa]

The PSP was the first system that I actually felt captured the "home console" feel; plus it made an excellent little media player. Remember, this was a time before smartphones were really ubiquitous (or out in general). The sucky thing about the console was the memory limitation. You were stuck with the proprietary memory sticks when SD cards would have been a more consumer-friendly option. I watched the price of SD cards drop and memory sticks seemed to stay about the same during the console's lifespan.

The console was also hacked wide open. The PSP was so useful at the time. You could play practically any game up to the SNES/Genesis era and even make your own PS1 eboots from your own discs. Not to mention copying the UMD iso's onto your memory stick which helped with load times and battery life. Sony may have created the system but the hacking community made it great.

I still enjoy playing the PSP from time to time. Although these days I tend to emulate for better graphics, controls, and performance.

[ZRofel]

I'll be honest, as a piece of hardware, I've never been a huge fan of the PSP. I purchased one fairly early on after its release, but I always thought it felt kind of cheap and brittle in my hands. I definitely didn't care for UMDs either, as they felt fairly fragile as well, but also somehow awkward and clunky. That being said, it absolutely had a stellar lineup of games, and like opa said, at the time it felt like the closest to a console experience you could get on a handheld. A lot of the games had that real mid-generation PS2 feel to them, which I suppose is both a good and a bad thing.

Interestingly, when I think about the best games of the PSP library, a lot of what my brain goes to first are remakes. I know there's a fair amount of controversy around the Rondo of Blood and the Final Fantasy Tactics remakes on the PSP, but I definitely enjoyed the hell out of both of them, as well as the remakes of Mega Man X, Tactics Ogre, the original Mega Man, etc. The PSP seemed to be great at giving old games just that little bit of an oomph they needed to feel like improvements, without giving developers so much power to work with that they felt compelled to needlessly change a bunch of things just because they could.

And there were plenty of genuinely great original games as well. One that I'll always recommend to folks looking for good PSP games is Dead Head Fred, which is sort of like a horror-comedy-detective-noire Legend of Zelda. It's not as awesome as that description might sound, but it is a very solid, fun, funny adventure game, and the titular protagonist is voiced fantastically by the hilarious John C. McGinley, who lends the perfect mix of drippy noire cynicism and deadpan humor to a man who's essentially become a brain in a jar. It does a great job of integrating the Zelda tools system in a way that's enjoyable for gameplay but also makes sense from a narrative perspective. Kind of. Also, sometimes random NPCs will just throw up all of the place, then drop dead. That's something.

Another one you don't hear much about is Disgaea Infinite, which is a visual novel set in the Disgaea universe. The time-traveling plot has something of a pleasant Groundhog Day feel to it, and you get to spend a lot of time in the company of the cast from the original Disgaea, which is good considering they're probably the strongest of the franchise. And speaking of Disgaea, the two Prinny action games first appeared on the PSP, and they were both fantastic, tough-as-nails old-school platformers. I liked how the games were, like their old school inspirations, tough but fair (for the most part). And I did like how the game used an old-school lives system, but in an interesting way. You had way, way more lives than you'd ever possibly need to get through the entire game, but they were limited. Like, you could conceivably get a "Game Over" and have to start from the beginning, so you wanted to make each life count. But realistically, you had a ton, so there really wasn't a reason to stress too much about things. The soundtracks for both games were excellent too.

Lastly, the PSP got a pretty solid port of the fantastic, and fantastically expensive, PC-Engine shooter, Sapphire, which for a while was definitely the most cost effective legitimate way to get your hands on that game. I think the port has gotten expensive too now, which is a bummer, but you can still pick it up for less than a PC-Engine copy. And I'm sure on this board, nobody needs me to talk up how great Sapphire is.

There were plenty of other highlights on the system too, like the quirky Half-Minute Hero, a bunch of awesome Nihon Falcom ports, that wild Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble game, a surprising number of tactical spinoffs of series like R-Type and Wild Arms, the bizarre Final Fantasy fighting game, and tons more. It was really a fantastic library.

[alienjesus]

The PSP reminds me of the Game Gear in some ways, in that for me the main thing preventing me enjoying the system is the system itself. The games are great, but I don't much love the console itself.

It's weird to say, because at the time it seemed like a pretty high tech piece of kit, but nowadays I find it clunky. Have a disc drive in a portable feels wrong and all the whirring and grinding noises it makes make me feel the system is pretty fragile. And based on my experience it is, as I've had to perform repairs to mine several times now, with a full screen replacement and multiple analogue stick fixes.

The analogue stick is another issue, particularly the fact that there's only 1 of them. It's odd to say because neither the DS or 3DS offers camera control via a stick either, but I didn't find it as much of an issue on those platforms. I think that's because games more often felt like they were built for the limitations of those systems, whereas many PSP games felt like they were built for PS2 and had zoomed in, close behind the character camera angles that really begged for camera control, as opposed to frequent static camera angles on DS and 3DS games. The stick itself feels a bit uncomfortable too.

Despite the hardware though, I've had a good time playing games on my PSP. I adore some of the quirkier Japanese titles for the system, with the likes of Half Minute Hero, Patapon, Gitaroo Man Lives, Patchwork Heroes and the likes being really interesting and fun releases. There's a treasure trove of RPGs and strategy games to enjoy too.

The Vita pretty much fixed all of my issues with the hardware (besides one, the stupid proprietary memory cards...) so it's a shame it underperformed so badly. I think Sony's portable line-up offered something interesting and different to their main console space (especially as that gradually became more and more western-focused) and I would have liked to see how it could have evolved.

[opa]

RE camera:

At least now you can emulate the PSP and play Monster Hunter with good controls!

[ZRofel]

The Vita definitely feels like the potential of the PSP realized. Like alienjesus said, it basically fixed all of the PSPs flaws but still continued to have the same large, diverse library of games. In a lot of ways the Vita also feels like the Dreamcast, in that it was the right system at exactly the wrong time. It felt like the first system ever that could have genuinely given Nintendo a run for its money in the portable system arena, but it came out right as smartphones killed off portable systems.

[Ziggy]

I love the PSP. It's just that I'm not too big on handhelds.

I got my PSP when I heard that Castlevania The Dracula X Chronicles was released. I'm a Castlevania nut, and when I heard that Rondo of Blood was coming to the USA for the first time (translated with English voice dub) I just needed to get it. The game had already been released by the time I heard about it, so I went out with a mission to get a PSP and that game. I had to go to several different stores to find the console, the game, and a ProDuo memory card. I think I got Dracula X from GameStop, the memory card from Radio Shack (although I checked a PC Richards as well) and the console from a Wal Mart.

The only PSP I could find in stock was the Star Wars Battlefront bundle. I thought it wouldn't be so bad to have another game to play, so I didn't mind picking it up. I would have preferred a black PSP, but the white color grew on me over the years. And this one had Darth Vader on the battery cover...





But not long after I got the PSP, I ended up getting the extended life battery. It comes with a different battery cover, since it's a physically larger battery. So I didn't enjoy the Darth Vader battery cover for long. Now I have a black battery cover, which kind of also looks neat on the white PSP.

I immensely enjoyed playing through Rondo of Blood with the English voice dub. At the time, that was the only way to play it (the translation had not yet been completed for the PCE). I played through Symphony once, of course. And I played through most of the 2.5D remake, but I never rolled the credits on it. I played through the single player campaign of Battlefront as well as Crisis core. I owned GTA Liberty City Stories, but I never really got into it. Other than that, I don't believe I played any other games for it.

After finding out about installing custom firmware onto the PSP, I went at that straight away. That's why I got the extended life battery, because I turned my stock battery into a "Pandora Battery" (it puts the PSP into a service mode that allows you to install the custom firmware). Custom firmware allows you to load PSP and PS1 games from the memory card, as well as it allows you to load homebrew apps. Mainly emulators. So I loaded a NES, SNES and Genesis emulator with a handful of my favorite ROMs on there. As well as the ISO for the few PSP games I owned. I never got around to putting any mp3's on there, but I converted a bunch of Family Guy episodes and put those on the memory card. It made the PSP a really great portable device! I definitely got some use out of that aspect of it.

Even if you're not into pirating games or emulation, installing custom firmware is the way to go because it'll allow you to install the UMD to the memory card. This will allow you to play games that you own off the memory card, removing the need for the UMD. So no drive noise, no worrying about damaging the UMD or drive, and no having to carry around multiple UMDs if you want to really use the PSP as a portable device.

I always wanted to check out the PSP library more. Like I said, I'm just not big on handhelds. But there's definitely a few games I'd really like to try. I only ever had the 2 GB ProDuo memory card. When I got it, I believe 2 GB was the highest capacity you could get. Hmm, or maybe there was also a 4 GB card but it was prohibitively expensive? Either way, I had that 2 GB card for years. But just a few months ago I finally picked up one of those microSD to ProDuo card adapters. Now I have a 32 GB card for my PSP, and no longer have to worry about rotating PSP games on and off the card. I actually picked it up in preparation for this month's TR.

[BoneSnapDeez]

The PSP was the first system that I actually felt captured the "home console" feel; plus it made an excellent little media player.

Yeah the handhelds of that gen (so, PSP and DS) were the first ones that seemed to be on the same level as home systems -- as opposed to the system you traveled with or whatever.

That said, I'm not big into most 5th+ gen 3D platformers, action-adventure games, or survival horror..... To me, the PSP was primarily an RPG machine, and it's a good one at that. Multiple Ys titles, Final Fantasy remakes, Dungeon Explorer, handheld BoF III, Legend of Heroes, Gurumin, and much more.....

On the non-RPG front..... Sapphire

[opa]

Ziggy, I ordered one of those adapters the other day. Do they work well? Still waiting on mine.