Early PSP memories

I am halfway through listening to the Into The Aether’s PSP episode, and well, I just thought it would be nice to talk about the PSP once again.

I’ve already written plenty of posts about it and how significant it is for me, how a friend just gifted me his PSP on my 12th birthday and changed my life forever, and similar stories.

However, I knew about the PSP long before I got one, since a couple of friends or family members had them, giving me a chance to experience glimpses of its greatness. In this post, I decided to write down some of them, not just for your pleasure, but for my future self as well.

A short week with a PSP

I think the oldest memory I can recall about the PSP would be from one of my cousins. He is much older than me, and he had a PSP. It was either a 2000 or a 3000, I clearly remember he put it on one of those clear plastic cases, making the device a little harder to hold for my kid hands, that didn’t stop me though.

I remember he let me borrow it sometimes, and I would play some sort of Crash game—I think it was Crash: Mind over Mutant—having some fun with the platforming and not much else. I really have a hard time remembering this one, I don’t think it was a very good game, but kid me didn’t mind that much, I never bothered to revisit it, either way.

However, the other game my cousin had—or the other game he let me play—was, and still is, a gem of the PSP. It was Motorstorm: Arctic’s Edge. An absolutely exhilarating racing game that featured a huge variety of vehicles, incredible graphics, and a sense of velocity that I really, really liked.

I remember not even playing to win, I would just try to go as fast as possible and let myself jump from huge ramps, because the slow-motion and camera angle shifted to be more cinematic and I thought it was just super cool when I pulled off stunts, or to crash and get thrown around, even out of bounds, when playing as a biker.

All the vehicles looked super cool, like something out of Mad Max—I hadn’t watched Mad Max at that age—the soundtrack during races was rock and alternative music. It just was full of style and rule of cool. I played that game for hours during that vacation visiting family. I remember completing a bunch of tracks, and unlocking quite a few vehicles during that short week.

And then it was time to go back home and be bored again… I got over it soon enough, at least, and now I can play Arctic’s Edge on my PSP whenever I want! Although I prefer Ridge Racer nowadays.

A mind-blowing feature

I have a glimpse of a memory, where a friend of mine— or maybe a cousin—was playing one of the FIFA games on the PSP—I think it was FIFA 06 or 07. I did like soccer videogames back then, but I was never a huge fan, and I never got good at any of them, to be honest.

Either way, I didn’t get to play this time, I could only watch him run around and score goals, you know, what FIFA is known for.

What is cool about this, is that he connected the PSP to the TV, and instead of being bunched together around a tiny screen, we got to see the match in glorious CRT scanlined perfection. I can’t recall much about this event, where I was, or who I was with, but seeing the PSP be capable of external display output was just wild to me.

My first multiplayer experience

There’s this other time where my family and I got invited by some friends to have dinner. Their house was just so cool to me, one of those every kid wishes to live in—and adult gamers too, to be honest—The kids there, who were maybe 2 or 3 years older than me, had a Wii! I had plenty of fun playing Mario Kart Wii, I really liked that one track with a section where you jump around in mushrooms. It’s still around on MK8 Deluxe!

But most importantly, they had not one, but two PSPs. Because of that, I was able to experience local multiplayer games, portably!

This is something that was possible already on Nintendo handhelds since the original Game Boy, the Advance and of course, the DS, which was all the rage at the time. But I hadn’t been anywhere where two of those would connect to play.

What multiplayer title did I play? Killzone Liberation.

What even is that? would be a fair question. First, I didn’t know about Monster Hunter yet, so I had no idea of what I was missing out on the multiplayer department. Second, Killzone Liberation is actually rather good! The original title for PS2 was an FPS, however—unlike most titles that tried and failed to adapt FPS controls to a handheld without dual sticks—Liberation went for an isometric top-down perspective, where walking and aiming is all done by the same stick, and the rest of the controls are designed around it, making the gameplay actually kind of great, once you get used to it.

We played some multiplayer on both PSPs and it was super fun. I think I never got to win a round, but throwing around grenades above walls and covers, and trying to hide from danger was fun enough to me. Simply seeing the soldiers moving around and thinking “the other kid is controlling it from his PSP” was kind of mind-blowing to me.

I don’t know if I played something else that day, but I clearly remember this being my first local multiplayer handheld experience, and it was great.

A couple of “impossible” ports

Before getting the PSP gifted to me, that friend let me play it from time to time, or sometimes I just watched him doing so. He didn’t own that many physical games, and with a Memory Stick of just 4 GB of storage, he didn’t really have many ISOs downloaded either.

However, he had Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, one of those cool games that were just absolutely mind-blowing to me. Something that looked and played like GTA: San Andreas—a game that was everywhere on arcade machines with Xbox controllers attached to them¹. Something like that running on a tiny little handheld like the PSP and being actually fun, featuring voice acting, good animation and a lot of mayhem and destruction thanks to cheat codes. It’s amazing that it ran at all.

And then there was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I think this was probably the game that solidified my love for Star Wars as a franchise. It was simply fantastic and bombastic and full of very cool moments, I only saw glimpses of it but I was obsessed. Years later, when the PSP was finally mine, I played it again and fell for it completely, I even read the novelization because it was just such a cool piece of lore for me—later ruined by Disney a year or so later but anyway. To this day, it’s the only Star Wars novel I’ve read and I wouldn’t have done so without the PSP game.

Well, that was another nice trip down memory lane! I guess I’ve been way too inspired by Marisabel’s Blaugust theme of Nostalgia. Can’t be helped. 🤷‍♂️

In any case, the PSP is as great a handheld today as it was in 2012, so if you have one laying around somewhere, make sure to give it a go! You can do a lot of stuff with it still. Like, play music, emulate games from the GBA and SNES and of course backups of your own games. Just mod it already, it only takes like two minutes…