Robot Claw

I wasn’t planning on doing another of these posts so soon but I got a PS Vita for my birthday. This was the final nail in the PSP coffin (so to speak), so since I found myself packing the PSP away into the ‘permanent collection’ I thought it was a good time to do a retrospective of the many years of enjoyment it has given me.

In December 2004, Sony released their first handheld console, the Playstation Portable, or PSP. I bought one on launch day in the US, March 24, 2005. It cost me $249.99 and I also bought Lumines, a puzzle game.

At launch, this was an extremely impressive device. It had a beautiful screen, wi-fi connectivity, was the first handheld with an analogue stick and used media with far more capacity than the cartridges Nintendo were using for their Gameboy Advance and DS systems. The PSP also launched very shortly after the DS, and was initially a much more impressive unit. The future looked rosy indeed for Sony.

Furthermore, the Universal Media Discs (UMD) that the PSP used were being used to sell movies and TV shows as well, and Sony wasted no time marketing the PSP as an all-in-one device. Customers showed little interest in buying movies though, and this market was soon abandoned and the PSP was devoted to being a game system.

Within a few years western support for the device as a game system had cooled as well. More and more tier-1 console franchises saw their PSP versions canceled or never announced, and it became more a console for translated Japanese games. In other words, it became heaven to an otaku like myself! The PSP more and more became the console for RPGs, shooters or other quirky games that would have been too risky to release on PS3. I lapped them all up, and I loved the thing.

Some examples:

R-Type Tactics (2008) – A tactical based shooter set in the R-Type universe. Unique, difficult and very playable!

Metal Gear AC!D (2005) – The second game I purchased for the PSP was this crazy tactical card game set in the Metal Gear universe. Incredibly entertaining, very replayable and for my money the second best Metal Gear game yet (after its sequel)!

Patapon (2008) – A rhythm RPG in which you control an army of Patapon’s against many fierce beasts. The graphics are in silhouette, the music charming and the gameplay surprisingly deep. A landmark PSP series (there are two sequels) that I’ll remember forever.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (2011) – If you look back on my list of favourite games of all time, this one (which originally came out for SNES in 1995) is one of them. The best version by far is the PSP re-release from 2011. This game is so packed with content I feel I could play it forever…

Of course no mention of the PSP library would be complete without the recognition of one particular series, and that would be Monster Hunter. Capcom’s juggernaut series was first released for PS2, but didn’t explode until it came out on PSP. Suddenly Japanese players discovered they could easily hunt monsters together via this portable system, and in the years that followed the launch of Monster Hunter Portable (Freedom in the west) in 2006 the sales of the PSP would get a large bump with each new Monster Hunter game.

I was – still am – addicted to the series, and played them all for many, many hours. To this day, I suspect Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (aka Portable 2g) is the portable game I have played more than any other, with a save file somewhere near 400 hours (not including the ~130 hours on the old savefiles that were imported from previous versions).

In 2007 Sony released a new model of the PSP – called the PSP Slim – that I bought on release day. It was lighter and had a better screen and longer battery life. In 2009 they also released a version called the PSP Go that was digital only and did not include the UMD drive, which meant it couldn’t play any of the existing games unless you repurchased them digitally. This was a tremendously bad idea and unsurprisingly it failed miserably, being withdrawn from the market within six months.

The writing was on the wall for the device in the west even then, and the last few years have seen few new game releases, especially in physical versions. The last UMD-based game released in the west came out last November (I bought it), over a year after the PSP’s replacement device (the PS Vita) was released.

During the years I purchased 102 different PSP games. Here’s a shot of most of my collection:

The PSP had no lockout, which meant games worked no matter where you bought them. About 15% of my collection is from Japan, Australia or the UK. I also have a decent amount of promotional UMDs (thanks AW!) also strangely some of these don’t work on either of my systems. Compared to my game collection as a whole, the PSP ranks sixth in terms of total games owned.

One of the PSPs strengths – the physical drive – is also a weakness. I haven’t used my original PSP in years, but around the time I purchased the slim model the original was demonstrating loading issues. And in the last year or so the springs on the UMD drive on my slim model have weakened, and occasionally discs take an excessive time loading. Were the PSP to continue as a viable device, I imagine I would have had to purchase a new one soon. I do wonder how playable they will be in the years to come.

For now, everything you see above is being sealed inside the pink storage box and put away. I can thank my PSP’s for nine years and thousands of hours of fun. In my opinion the PSP is one of the best handheld systems ever made.