#oneaday Day 781: Pink Pussp

Poor old PSP. You’ve had a hard life. Unappreciated in your own lifetime, it seems that you’re actually home to some truly brilliant games, particularly if your user happens to be a fan of JRPGs like I am.

I’ve owned two PSPs over the years. Both have been somewhat underused. My first had a dinky memory stick that was far too small to download anything on to, but then this was in the days long before PlayStation Network anyway, so it wasn’t an issue. I recall spending many long hours playing Lumines and Untold Legend: Brotherhood of the Blade on it when it first came out, being rather impressed at the large, bright screen and then-impressive visuals for a handheld; being rather less impressed at the amount of “ghosting” which occurred whenever anything moved or scrolled and the dead pixel just to the right of the centre of the screen.

Then I put it down for a bit and didn’t pick it up again for a long time, except for on one memorable occasion when I was guesting on an Internet radio show with my friends Mike and Simon and “someone” had loaded porn onto the memory stick in question in order to distract the person who was talking at the time. (It worked.) Besides that, I didn’t take much time to explore the growing library of games out there — I played Loco Roco briefly, for example, and very much appreciated its charming aesthetic, but never quite thought it was worth the money to pick up a copy myself.

I got poor, and ended up selling the PSP and its games to help pay a gas bill or something. I regretted it a bit, but then figured that I really wasn’t using it that much.

I got a Nintendo DS and found a bunch of games on there that I took to — Ace Attorney, Hotel Dusk and numerous others captured my attention so much that my DS was, for a brief period, my most-used games system. I didn’t think about the PSP for quite a long time, until I went to visit my friends Mark and Lynette in Canada, and Mark was talking about the bizarre Atlus strategy game based on R-Type, and I found myself desiring a PSP once again. I took a trip to my Canadian friends’ friendly local game store and scored myself a cheap PSP-3000 with a copy of Ratchet and Clank (which I, err, still haven’t played) and 1 GB memory card.

All was well for a little while. I picked up a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and played that for a while, and R-Type Command proved interesting, though I didn’t finish either of them. (I had previously finished Final Fantasy Tactics on PS1, I should add at this point, back when the translation meant the plot made even less sense than it does now.) Eventually, it got set aside once again in favour of Big Exciting Things on Xbox 360, PS3 and iPhone, which was just starting to hit its stride with awesome games by this point.

I held onto it this time, though. And I’m glad I did, because I can’t help feeling that the device is enjoying something of a renaissance thanks, as it happens, to its offspring, the recently-released PlayStation Vita. Vita’s connectivity means that it’s dead easy to get online and download games to play — something which Sony got terribly wrong with the rather disastrous performance of the PSP Go, but which they seem to have a better grasp on now. Even better, the Vita plays the vast majority of the PSP back catalogue, though lacking a UMD drive, it’s unable to play games on physical media.

As such, the PSP library has been enjoying renewed scrutiny, and it’s becoming abundantly clear to many people that the PSP, a system often passed over and at times even ridiculed, is home to some fine games. Just one such example that I’ve blogged about recently is Corpse Party, and I have several other titles lined up to play in the near future.

I was tempted to pick up a Vita, but there’s not really anything on it right now that interests me enough to blow a few hundred quid on it. (When Phantasy Star Online 2 and Persona 4: The Golden come out, however, things will be very different.) So instead I bought a 32GB memory stick for my PSP. That 1GB stick I had was fine for save games, but wasn’t big enough to contemplate downloading games from PSN to, so I’d never really investigated in great detail. I figured it was time I took a look, though, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’m glad I did. I’m finally getting the chance to discover the roots of the Persona series, for example. P3 and 4 are probably my favourite games of all time, so to see where the series came from with the PSP remakes of the PS1 originals is interesting — it helps that they’re still decent games, too, though from my relatively limited experience with Persona 1 so far, not a patch on their PS2 descendants.

Then there’s all manner of other great titles just waiting for me, too. The portable versions of Disgaea, for example. Tactics Ogre. Trails in the Sky (aka “TitS”, which makes me giggle childishly every time I remember). The PS1 Final Fantasy games in my pocket. Ridge Racer Type 4 (which is still awesome). And all manner of other stuff, too.

It’s for this reason that I really don’t feel like I’m missing out by not playing Mass Effect 3. Because there’s a very deep library of unexplored classics just waiting for me to dive in, and I intend to do so with aplomb over the course of the next few months. Couple that with a pile of PC and PS2 titles that I’m finally going to get around to playing thanks to our “Pile of Shame” challenge, and my immediate gaming future looks both rosy and cheap. Which is nice.