Rarest PSP Game Ever: Hilton Ultimate Team Play - Rerez

Every now and then I go to independent game stores and pawn shops in my area looking for cool and rare games. Usually I don't find anything very interesting but the other day I went to a pawn shop and I found something very unusual. It turned into an interesting story.

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What I found was a game for Sony PSP titled The Hilton Family. It was five dollars so I picked it up, brought it home and found it it didn't work. Five bucks well spent. While looking over the game I noticed on the front of the UMD a logo for Virtual Heroes. They’re the developers responsible for America's Army. I looked at their site and found some information on the game but nothing telling me how to make it work. So I contacted Virtual Heroes and spoke with Randy Brown. Randy filled me in on a bunch of interesting facts about the game. The game was not The Hilton Family, despite what it said on the UMD, but Hilton Ultimate Team Play. It was a training simulator for various positions for Hilton Garden Inn locations. It's a 3D first-person game built using the Vicious Engine, the same engine used in Alien Syndrome and Dead Head Fred. Virtual Heroes became a licensed PSP developer simply so they could submit this game through Sony's TRC compliance process. Then Sony fabricated the UMD. Apparently there was a production run of just 500 copies of this game. Each one was bundled with a PSP and sent to Hilton Garden Inns all over. But there was a catch. Each PSP had a memory stick and they had certain files on the memory stick that allowed the game to run. So if you ever found this game out in the wild, like I did, the game wouldn't run for you. So what all this means basically is that this is a real game, it's not some unlicensed hack on the PSP or some unofficial downloadable game. It's an official Sony title but so rare that it's relatively unknown. It's probably the rarest PSP game ever made at 500 copies and maybe even the rarest Sony licensed game ever made for any of their systems.

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Now for me this posed a problem. The guys at Virtual Heroes couldn't send me a PSP or the files because they don't technically own the game anymore, Hilton does. So what I did was I contacted my local Hilton Garden Inn and they still had a PSP in storage. So I went over, picked up the PSP and brought it home and it worked! The game starts up in a Hilton Garden Inn where you're greeted at the front desk by a nameless guide. Once he finishes talking you enter the main menu and from here you can start the game. You're given the option to work one of four roles: housekeeping, food and beverage, guest services and engineering. Each role you perform is scored by a system called SALT, it stands for Satisfaction And Loyalty Tracking. The score is based off not only how well you actually perform the job but the interaction you have with the guests of the hotel. Whatever SALT score the player would receive would then be compared to their actual salt scores from the real customer feedback in the hotel.

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The first role, housekeeping, starts you off with a task list that takes you from room to room cleaning. You need to make sure you clean every spot of the room perfectly in order to get the best SALT score. The gameplay is pretty repetitive but each room requires different items to be cleaned or arranged and it wasn’t uncommon for me to leave a room having forgotten to clean something. Once you finish your tasks for the day you've completed your shift. The next role is food and beverage. This job starts up with you either greeting people and serving them in the hotel restaurant or just simply serving the tables. Serving people requires you to interact with customers, bringing them fresh coffee and taking their food orders. While it's pretty straightforward if you don't manage your customers effectively you can find yourself easily overcome. Plus you don't want to wait too long when a dish has been prepared because the game monitors how warm the food is. If you leave it out for too long it cools down too much and the customer won't like that. Once you've finished breakfast the game will ask you if you want to continue on to the next meal or finish your shift. The third role is guest services which involves you working the front desk of the hotel. You greet customers and answer phone calls to book rooms but you also have to keep track of the hotel's pantry and make sure that it's stocked. You also have to be ready by the phone to assist any of the guests with anything that they may need throughout their stay. The last and final role is engineering. Pretty much what this position is all about is fixing things in the hotel. If the guest has a broken air conditioning unit in the room, a malfunctioning TV, backed up toilet or even a broken lamp this is the role that deals with all that. While the engineer’s day starts off with a task list the role also comes with a walkie-talkie that informs you of random events in the hotel like a backed up toilet that needs your attention.

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Pretty much every game that I play nowadays is made for entertainment but this one serves a function and it's kind of interesting. But you know it's not for everyone. If you can manage to find a copy of this game and try it out well go ahead but don't expect anything super amazing. It is a simulator after all.

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