5 ms·

I had a PSP and also loved it, but I don’t feel like it was that mind blowing. The tricks they pulled made it less impressive IMO. Most games felt like cheap pa

I had a PSP and also loved it, but I don’t feel like it was that mind blowing. The tricks they pulled made it less impressive IMO. Most games felt like cheap pantomime versions of what you wanted them to be, you’d buy something and then go “oh, never mind”. The homebrew scene was much more impressive than anything official, if you ask me.

sky2224 2y ago
I could see this as an adult, but as a kid, this thing was killer. I remember thinking: "Whoa, burnout 3 is something I play on the big screen in the living room, and now it looks the same and I can play it on a handheld device?" (it definitely didn't look the same, but I was about 5 when it came out, so I never paid much attention to the differences. Also sorry if I'm making you feel old). I also remember it being the first to do a joystick on a handheld. That was pretty cool.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Nursie 2y ago
Some of the games were awesome. I spent a lot of time playing the star wars battlefront game on there. And armored core formula front, wipeout, a few others. You’re not wrong that a lot of them felt hollow. Like that assassin’s creed game that had virtually nobody walking around on the street and felt like a dead world as a result. But there were some gems.
- djmips 2y ago
  Cry. Bloodlines was something I worked on and was quite proud of. But you can't please everyone.
  - Nursie 2y ago
    Sorry! I love the AC franchise and have been playing it* since the beginning. I know it was because of the limited power of the platform that you couldn't have the usual crowds of bystanders etc. I'm sure it was a great game in general, it just felt like a bit of a ghost town :/ (* on and off, I took a break around 3/black flag after a bit of burnout)
    - djmips 2y ago
      As I mentioned in other comments we only had 9 months from zero to finished original game with no source code or help from a very busy Ubisoft other than some reference assets (which were completely redone for the PSP). If we had more time, another year, bigger crowds would have been a high priority!
spike021 2y ago
the homebrew scene is what got me into programming. i knew some of the great minds back then and really idolized what they were able to pull off.
conradev 2y ago
It was the first handheld device I had with a web browser, years before I got my iPod touch
- jolmg 2y ago
  That 2.0 update was mind-blowing on its own. Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think? Pretty sure it was still the time of PDAs, before smartphones. EDIT: Yeah, July 2005, 2 years before the iPhone came out. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/254588/psp-2-0-update https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/254588/psp-2-0-upda...
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think? I'd contest that the Blackberry devices were smaller and earlier, e.g the 7230 from 2003[0]. Pretty sure some of the iPAQs (and other CE devices) arrived with wifi and a browser before 2005 as well since Pocket PC 2000 shipped with a version of IE 3.1. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-evolution-of-the-blackberry-from-957-to-z10 https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-evolution-of-the-blackberry-f...
    - davidron 2y ago
      Handspring Trio had a web browser by (before?) 2003 with a touchscreen. I loved mine!
- mod50ack 2y ago
  It wasn't until 2009 - which is also when my family got WiFi (and switched from dial-up) - that I got mine: a Nintendo DSi. Objectively, that browser was terrible, even at the time. But the ability to just read text on my own (and not have to ask to use the family computer - and to stay up all night reading under the covers, which was much harder with books) was amazing then! Of course, it would seem so quaint to kids today.
- scottbez1 2y ago
  Yeah. As a high schooler I just wanted to use AIM on it, but all the web-based AIM clients required Flash at the time, which wasn't supported in the PSP browser. So I ended up hacking together a site called AIMonPSP with PHP and MySQL that did all the AIM communication on the server instead of client-side. Made a decent amount of money (for a high schooler) on AdSense banners, and learned a lot about software design the hard way.
djmips 2y ago
I feel a bit hurt. ;-) I worked on a bunch of PSP titles, my personal favourite was Bloodlines - are you not entertained?
- thastings 2y ago
  Tell us more! I still beleieve that the PSP is a killer platform, those games are beautiful with 60 fps mods at high resolutions. I never really stopped playing them, just moved them to my phone.
  - the4anoni 2y ago
    +1, tell us more. Personally back in the days I had Nintendo DSi, but just recently I bought gamepad for phone just to check what I have missed by not owning PSP at that time :)
  - djmips 2y ago
    I can tell you how surprised I was to find out that index triangles were slower than triangle lists on the PSP due to (I conjecture) a broken vertex cache in the PSP graphics hardware (guessing it was rushed out with this bug). The huge challenge of clipping triangles on the PSP - they had to be clipped on the CPU. I loved working on the PSP and wished we could have done more PSP projects.
    - thastings 2y ago
      Despite the limitations, many games pulled off amazing graphics. Many in the thread compare it to the PS2, but that's unfair. Doing better than PS1 graphics in a handheld was quite an accomplishment back then. Interestingly, the quality of the assets in these games didn't have a chance to show on the 480x272 screen of the PSP. However, many games, including Bloodlines, Gran Turismo, both GTA's, just to name a few, look very close to PS2 when upscaled. So the work was very much put into these titles, and it shows, even after two decades.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  I recall Bloodlines as not being a bad game, but not particularly good either. I think the biggest problem with PSP is that lots of games were just diet ports of PS2 games. Why play them if you can play better versions of same games on PS2? Having said that, there were absolute gems in the library, and it breaks my heart that in some alternative universe I haven't played Patapon or LocoRoco.
999900000999 2y ago
Disagree. Most of the games still hold up and emulation is very easy to run. Probably the best handheld of its era. Only limited by it's controls. KZ was great, they even had to patch in the last chapter, but it was an amazing game.
djtango 2y ago
It was niche outside of Japan but Monster Hunter Freedom/Portable was incredible and wildly more successful than the console edition - the PSP and social monhun parties in Japan validated a brand new IP for Capcom Admittedly with homebrew it was even more fun when the community patched MHP3 translations and we would have AdHoc wifi parties proxied over the net using a dongle. Good times
spookie 2y ago
I do not agree. God of war chains of olympus, metal gear solid peace walker, crisis core ff7, test drive unlimited, motor storm artic edge... I could go on. I don't see a world where a handheld console released in 2005 being able to play these games isn't impressive. And I wonder what homebrew could offer to match these games too.
- psygn89 2y ago
  Grand Theft Auto 3 (Liberty City Stories) running on the handheld... mind blown.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
  Homebrew made the PSP a killer emulation machine way ahead of its time. You could emulate the original PlayStation, which was how I got around to playing the original Final Fantasy 7 (although I think this also had an official release, my memory is fuzzy). And it could emulate the SNES, which was how I got around to playing Chrono Trigger. Funnily enough, I remember some rumors going around about some people trying to develop an N64 emulator which never got released or went anywhere, AFAIK. I have a vague memory of a guy going by the ID PSDonkey or something like that.
  - tripflag 2y ago
    I played a bit of Super Mario 64 using an early version of Daedalus, so it was more than a rumour :> Granted, it ran at about 80-90% realtime speed, and audio was a no-go, but maybe that improved in later releases.
    - circuit10 2y ago
      As someone who modded my PSP a few years ago I can confirm that Mario 64 now runs fine with working sound, and you can even force it into widescreen
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    FF7 did get an official PSN release playable on PSP. You could play FF1-9 on PSP by the end of it's life once the port of the DS version of FFIII arrived. There was also a PSN release of the PS1 version of Chrono Trigger, which is actually how I played through it (although perhaps on Vita).
ssl-3 2y ago
The homebrew scene is why I still have no idea if the UMD drive in the PSP that I bought new a million years ago has ever worked. Because while I definitely bought a PSP, I definitely have never bought a UMD-based game to play on it. It was quite amazing at the time, and (IMHO) it remains a spectacularly-good handheld for playing whatever games with an emulator or whatever. (Am I the reason why we can't have nice things? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps I am.)
- lxgr 2y ago
  To be fair, Sony released an UMD-less model themselves! Many titles, especially later in the system's life, got a digital/PSN release in addition to the UMD one, and some were even digital exclusive.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ezconnect 2y ago
It was mind blowing at that time because it felt solid and you can even watch movies on it. Too bad Sony abandoned it. The form factor was amazing even Nintendo and Steam copied it.
roboror 2y ago
It's a cool device but the display was terrible.
reaperducer 2y ago
I had a PSP and also loved it, but I don’t feel like it was that mind blowing. Perhaps you came to the PSP late in its cycle. I happened to be in Tokyo when the PSP was released. I was on a subway and saw a girl playing Lumines and it completely blew my mind. As soon as I was done with my daytime obligations, I went straight to Yodobashi Camera and bought one. When I got back to the U.S., showing it to people always blew their minds, also. Until then, the notion of "handheld gaming" was mostly the early GameBoy series, and maybe Lynx. The PSP was a whole different category.
- thastings 2y ago
  I got a PSP-3000 during high school, and loved it. In addition to playing native and PS1 games, it was a very powerful media player as well. Much more versatile than most phones at the time, especially with its nice, though not very hi-res, screen. The PSP wasn't very common in our area, but I managed to get some friends to get one, and we had a lot of fun with multiplayer too.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
I just never felt like there were games worth buying for the PSP. I only ever got three - Crisis Core, FFT, and God of War Chains of Olympus. The system collected dust mostly. My DS got a lot more use, because Nintendo is just better at making games imo.

sky2224 2y ago

I could see this as an adult, but as a kid, this thing was killer. I remember thinking: "Whoa, burnout 3 is something I play on the big screen in the living room, and now it looks the same and I can play it on a handheld device?" (it definitely didn't look the same, but I was about 5 when it came out, so I never paid much attention to the differences. Also sorry if I'm making you feel old). I also remember it being the first to do a joystick on a handheld. That was pretty cool.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Nursie 2y ago

Some of the games were awesome. I spent a lot of time playing the star wars battlefront game on there. And armored core formula front, wipeout, a few others. You’re not wrong that a lot of them felt hollow. Like that assassin’s creed game that had virtually nobody walking around on the street and felt like a dead world as a result. But there were some gems.

djmips 2y ago
Cry. Bloodlines was something I worked on and was quite proud of. But you can't please everyone.
- Nursie 2y ago
  Sorry! I love the AC franchise and have been playing it* since the beginning. I know it was because of the limited power of the platform that you couldn't have the usual crowds of bystanders etc. I'm sure it was a great game in general, it just felt like a bit of a ghost town :/ (* on and off, I took a break around 3/black flag after a bit of burnout)
  - djmips 2y ago
    As I mentioned in other comments we only had 9 months from zero to finished original game with no source code or help from a very busy Ubisoft other than some reference assets (which were completely redone for the PSP). If we had more time, another year, bigger crowds would have been a high priority!

spike021 2y ago

the homebrew scene is what got me into programming. i knew some of the great minds back then and really idolized what they were able to pull off.

conradev 2y ago

It was the first handheld device I had with a web browser, years before I got my iPod touch

jolmg 2y ago
That 2.0 update was mind-blowing on its own. Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think? Pretty sure it was still the time of PDAs, before smartphones. EDIT: Yeah, July 2005, 2 years before the iPhone came out. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/254588/psp-2-0-update https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/254588/psp-2-0-upda...
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think? I'd contest that the Blackberry devices were smaller and earlier, e.g the 7230 from 2003[0]. Pretty sure some of the iPAQs (and other CE devices) arrived with wifi and a browser before 2005 as well since Pocket PC 2000 shipped with a version of IE 3.1. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-evolution-of-the-blackberry-from-957-to-z10 https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-evolution-of-the-blackberry-f...
  - davidron 2y ago
    Handspring Trio had a web browser by (before?) 2003 with a touchscreen. I loved mine!
mod50ack 2y ago
It wasn't until 2009 - which is also when my family got WiFi (and switched from dial-up) - that I got mine: a Nintendo DSi. Objectively, that browser was terrible, even at the time. But the ability to just read text on my own (and not have to ask to use the family computer - and to stay up all night reading under the covers, which was much harder with books) was amazing then! Of course, it would seem so quaint to kids today.
scottbez1 2y ago
Yeah. As a high schooler I just wanted to use AIM on it, but all the web-based AIM clients required Flash at the time, which wasn't supported in the PSP browser. So I ended up hacking together a site called AIMonPSP with PHP and MySQL that did all the AIM communication on the server instead of client-side. Made a decent amount of money (for a high schooler) on AdSense banners, and learned a lot about software design the hard way.

djmips 2y ago

I feel a bit hurt. ;-) I worked on a bunch of PSP titles, my personal favourite was Bloodlines - are you not entertained?

thastings 2y ago
Tell us more! I still beleieve that the PSP is a killer platform, those games are beautiful with 60 fps mods at high resolutions. I never really stopped playing them, just moved them to my phone.
- the4anoni 2y ago
  +1, tell us more. Personally back in the days I had Nintendo DSi, but just recently I bought gamepad for phone just to check what I have missed by not owning PSP at that time :)
- djmips 2y ago
  I can tell you how surprised I was to find out that index triangles were slower than triangle lists on the PSP due to (I conjecture) a broken vertex cache in the PSP graphics hardware (guessing it was rushed out with this bug). The huge challenge of clipping triangles on the PSP - they had to be clipped on the CPU. I loved working on the PSP and wished we could have done more PSP projects.
  - thastings 2y ago
    Despite the limitations, many games pulled off amazing graphics. Many in the thread compare it to the PS2, but that's unfair. Doing better than PS1 graphics in a handheld was quite an accomplishment back then. Interestingly, the quality of the assets in these games didn't have a chance to show on the 480x272 screen of the PSP. However, many games, including Bloodlines, Gran Turismo, both GTA's, just to name a few, look very close to PS2 when upscaled. So the work was very much put into these titles, and it shows, even after two decades.
anal_reactor 2y ago
I recall Bloodlines as not being a bad game, but not particularly good either. I think the biggest problem with PSP is that lots of games were just diet ports of PS2 games. Why play them if you can play better versions of same games on PS2? Having said that, there were absolute gems in the library, and it breaks my heart that in some alternative universe I haven't played Patapon or LocoRoco.

999900000999 2y ago

Disagree. Most of the games still hold up and emulation is very easy to run. Probably the best handheld of its era. Only limited by it's controls. KZ was great, they even had to patch in the last chapter, but it was an amazing game.

djtango 2y ago

It was niche outside of Japan but Monster Hunter Freedom/Portable was incredible and wildly more successful than the console edition - the PSP and social monhun parties in Japan validated a brand new IP for Capcom Admittedly with homebrew it was even more fun when the community patched MHP3 translations and we would have AdHoc wifi parties proxied over the net using a dongle. Good times

spookie 2y ago

I do not agree. God of war chains of olympus, metal gear solid peace walker, crisis core ff7, test drive unlimited, motor storm artic edge... I could go on. I don't see a world where a handheld console released in 2005 being able to play these games isn't impressive. And I wonder what homebrew could offer to match these games too.

psygn89 2y ago
Grand Theft Auto 3 (Liberty City Stories) running on the handheld... mind blown.
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
Homebrew made the PSP a killer emulation machine way ahead of its time. You could emulate the original PlayStation, which was how I got around to playing the original Final Fantasy 7 (although I think this also had an official release, my memory is fuzzy). And it could emulate the SNES, which was how I got around to playing Chrono Trigger. Funnily enough, I remember some rumors going around about some people trying to develop an N64 emulator which never got released or went anywhere, AFAIK. I have a vague memory of a guy going by the ID PSDonkey or something like that.
- tripflag 2y ago
  I played a bit of Super Mario 64 using an early version of Daedalus, so it was more than a rumour :> Granted, it ran at about 80-90% realtime speed, and audio was a no-go, but maybe that improved in later releases.
  - circuit10 2y ago
    As someone who modded my PSP a few years ago I can confirm that Mario 64 now runs fine with working sound, and you can even force it into widescreen
- goosedragons 2y ago
  FF7 did get an official PSN release playable on PSP. You could play FF1-9 on PSP by the end of it's life once the port of the DS version of FFIII arrived. There was also a PSN release of the PS1 version of Chrono Trigger, which is actually how I played through it (although perhaps on Vita).

ssl-3 2y ago

The homebrew scene is why I still have no idea if the UMD drive in the PSP that I bought new a million years ago has ever worked. Because while I definitely bought a PSP, I definitely have never bought a UMD-based game to play on it. It was quite amazing at the time, and (IMHO) it remains a spectacularly-good handheld for playing whatever games with an emulator or whatever. (Am I the reason why we can't have nice things? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps I am.)

lxgr 2y ago
To be fair, Sony released an UMD-less model themselves! Many titles, especially later in the system's life, got a digital/PSN release in addition to the UMD one, and some were even digital exclusive.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ezconnect 2y ago

It was mind blowing at that time because it felt solid and you can even watch movies on it. Too bad Sony abandoned it. The form factor was amazing even Nintendo and Steam copied it.

roboror 2y ago

It's a cool device but the display was terrible.

reaperducer 2y ago

I had a PSP and also loved it, but I don’t feel like it was that mind blowing. Perhaps you came to the PSP late in its cycle. I happened to be in Tokyo when the PSP was released. I was on a subway and saw a girl playing Lumines and it completely blew my mind. As soon as I was done with my daytime obligations, I went straight to Yodobashi Camera and bought one. When I got back to the U.S., showing it to people always blew their minds, also. Until then, the notion of "handheld gaming" was mostly the early GameBoy series, and maybe Lynx. The PSP was a whole different category.

thastings 2y ago
I got a PSP-3000 during high school, and loved it. In addition to playing native and PS1 games, it was a very powerful media player as well. Much more versatile than most phones at the time, especially with its nice, though not very hi-res, screen. The PSP wasn't very common in our area, but I managed to get some friends to get one, and we had a lot of fun with multiplayer too.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

I just never felt like there were games worth buying for the PSP. I only ever got three - Crisis Core, FFT, and God of War Chains of Olympus. The system collected dust mostly. My DS got a lot more use, because Nintendo is just better at making games imo.