This year, the folks from the Into the Aether video gaming podcast put all their eggs in an older basket labelled Sony: the PlayStation Portable or PSP. The previous years were dominated by Nintendo and now Sony can try to fight their way to the handheld gaming top. Did they succeed? The following graph containing total lifetime hardware sales1 in million clearly indicates they didn’t even get close:

Hardware sales of popular game consoles. Light green: TV consoles (PS2 wins first place at 155M). Dark green: handhelds (DS wins first place at 154M. Source: Wikipedia. Of course that depends on your definition of getting close—The PSP did end up selling almost as much as the GBA and a tad bit more than the 3DS. That’s very impressive for a first-time handheld console that was (and still is) dominated by Nintendo for decades! Until Sony decided to focus all effort on the PlayStation 4, completely abandoning the PSP Vita that sold almost as low as SEGA’s Game Gear. Ouch.

My decision tree for buying retro handhelds will tell you you need to get yourself a PSP if your budget is tight, if you like to emulate a few things, and if you care for PS1/PSP support. The PSP is still going strong in the second hand market and in both the homebrew and emulation community precisely because of this: it’s a very hackable device with an excellent screen that can effortlessly run a lot of other systems.

Even though I used to own a silver PSP Slim, I do not feel entitled to write a proper ode to the PSP as I was and always will be a BG(C)(A)/DS fanboy (see my Ode To The Game Boy Advance). I don’t share the same warm fuzzy feelings Joel has when thinking about the silver thing: I think about how loud and slow the stupid UMD discs were, how hot the thing got after a while, how annoying it was from Sony to force a proprietary memory stick system down our throats, and how slow the damn thing booted.

In fact, the only way you will get even a tiny portion of joy out of your PSP is if you root & hack it! That finally enables backing up the disks and the snappy booting of ISOs from memory. It also enables a huge amount of customizability: from functionality to UI and of course GB(C)(A) emulators. See what I did there? The best use of a PSP is to have it act like a GBA, ha! The only reason why the PSP is so high up there on the above sales chart is because of its hackability.

So what about native PSP games then? Well… Are you perhaps referring to the influx of inferior PS1/2 ports? Sure, the GBA also saw a lot of SNES ports, and the PSP’s two 333 MHz processors easily outclassed any DS game attempting and embarrassing themselves with rendering 3D graphics. But this is exactly why I never was a Sony fanboy: I don’t care about power—I care about gameplay. So for the sake of this ode that looks like it’s derailing into a destructive rant, let us skip these games.

I never owned a lot of PSP games, but the games I did own, I really enjoyed: the best Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) version, the best Tactics Ogre (TO) version, a great GTA Vice City spin-off—whoops, am I talking ports again? It’s surprisingly difficult not to! To be fair, these games differentiated themselves enough from their bigger brother to justify the buy. Yet at the same time, I think it’s a bit sad to see so many Top 25 articles listing nothing but games like that (another God of War, another Metal Gear Solid, another GTA, another Kingdom Hearts, another Tekken, …)

Yet the PSP brought us weird stuff like Patapon and Loco Roco. I played and liked both games but wouldn’t rush to put them in my Top 100. The FFT and TO adaptations, however did make it in there until TO: Reborn kicked out the endless grinding PSP variant and it remains to be seen if the upcoming re-release of the re-release of FFT—that’s not a typo—will kick out FFT PSP as well. Jeanne d’Arc, another turn-based sleeper hit by Level 5, is a blind spot for me unfortunately.

I might as well confess it here. The only reason I bought a PSP was for the remake of Rondo of Blood in Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. It even included Symphony of the Night if you knew how to unlock it. Having a legal portable version of one of the best Metroidvania games ever played is nothing to sneeze at. As for Dracula X, it’s a bloody difficult Classicvania that’s not the best but deserves more love. Sadly, as a platform exclusive, the game currently remains locked behind the PSP library.

Beyond that… I have been combing through my personal archive of screenshots, guides, savegames, ISOs, FAQs, photos and came back empty-handed. There was no mention of any PSP game in any of my notes and I didn’t keep create and/or keep any material related to that silver PSP slim. The only thing I found a scan of a receipt of Loco Roco (€19.90) and a Hori case (€29.90) bought at 24/11/2007—that’s it.

As further proof for my pledged alliance with the PSP’s adversaries, here’s an 18 year old picture of my gaming shelf dominated by PC big boxes, GameCube games, a few Wii ones, and GBA/DS games:

A snapshot of this gamer’s shelf almost twenty years ago: a lot of GameCube games, a few Wii ones, DS/GBA, and the entire lower shelf dominated by PC games. I’ll leave it up to you to spot the hidden and good stuff, including a variant of Tactics Ogre that was really good but not as good as the PSP one. For me, the PSP was a mediocre platform that I had to buy into as a Castlevania fan. Perhaps that was just a tad later than the above photo (Dracula X Chronicles released half February 2008 in Europe).

So much for a true eulogy. What a bust. Sorry for the clickbait. That does beg the question: would it be worth it for me to install the PPSSPP emulator and see if I can give Sony’s console another chance? Games I would be interested in (re)discovering besides Jeanne d’Arc: Metal Gear Acid (why does nobody mention this?), and… Valkyria Chronicles II? That’s it? Of all the games mentioned in the six plus hours long Into The Aether episode on the PSP (that fails to mention Acid by the way), only Jeanne genuinely triggers my interest.

I compiled this graph in 2020 when the Nintendo Switch 2 didn’t exist and the older brother didn’t yet reach 150M in sales. The PS2 number should be 160+ by now. That means the Switch actually beat the Game Boy! ↩︎

retro psp