Nostalgia: The PSP

Well, hello there! Today I want to talk about a somewhat underappreciated gaming console which has a pretty special place in my memory: the PlayStation Portable.

I got mine when I was in seventh grade, a 3004 model, aka the last hardware revision before the PSP Go which was digital only and the offline only E1004. The console came with God of War: Ghost of Sparta packaged in the box and I was simply blown away at the time, seeing how good the game looked ona portable platform, as smartphone games were still in their early years.

My career as a PSP player continued with me getting a memory card for the thing. Until I got that card, which was a 4 Gb one, I simply replayed God of War without the ability to save.

After getting the card, which was kinda expensive, because it was a Sony proprietary format, I got to installing a custom firmware on it to play homebrews and pirated games. At the time I didn't really have the ethos of buying my games as I do now and the games were very expensive, as they were also released on a Sony proprietary format: the UMD, which is a tiny disk in a plastic shell.

The first game I played on the PSP after finishing Ghost of Sparta was the unbelieveable Assassin's Creed Bloodlines, a bite-sized Assassin's Creed game which still featured an open world, but it was a way better game than the first one. It also helped that the game looked pretty good, had a pretty nice story and also featured an upgrade system based on the collectibles in the world. The game also featured link capabilities with the PlayStation 3, granting you the weeapons of the Bloodlines bosses in Assassin's Creed 2.

The next games I played were Burnout Dominator, a pretty solid Burnout game in its own right, a homebrew version of Minecraft, which was basically the creative mode of the game, and Prince of Persia: Rival Swords, a game which I received as a gift from one of my classmates. So now, my physical collection doubled in size. Prince of Persia: Rival Swords is the PSP version of The Two Thrones, my favourite Prince of Persia game, but with some extra content: it featured more chariot races, with more intricate designs than the story ones, and a racing mode, in which you linked your PSP in adhoc mode with another and tried to go through a level specifically designed for this mode (of which there were several) and tried to be the first who finished it. I had a lot of fun in this mode with a classmate back then.

I played lots of other games on the system, including Call of Duty: Roads to Victory, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and GTA: Chinatown Wars (don't really know why these specifically popped up in my mind), but soon I turned to emulation on the PSP. I did not emulate other consoles, I did something weirder: I installed ScummVM on it. ScummVM is an engine port for several adventure games, specifically Lucas Arts ones, but it also supports the Broken Sword games. This is the way I finished the first two Monkey Island games and the first two Broken Sword games, using the analog nub of the PSP as a mouse. It was not ideal and I could have simply installed the games on my PC, but the novelty of playing them this way simply mesmerized me.

Nowadays, the battery of my PSP is dead, and there are only aftermarket variants available, but the memories I have of the system and the weird stuff I did with it will forever be etched in my mind. Thank you for reading through my nostalgia-ridden ramblings.

Images: cover, my personal box, 1, 2,3, 4

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