The homebrew scene was much more impressive than anything official, if you ask me.

I remember thinking: "Whoa, burnout 3 is something I play on the big screen in the living room, and now it looks the same and I can play it on a handheld device?" (it definitely didn't look the same, but I was about 5 when it came out, so I never paid much attention to the differences. Also sorry if I'm making you feel old).

I also remember it being the first to do a joystick on a handheld. That was pretty cool.

EDIT: Yeah, July 2005, 2 years before the iPhone came out.

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/254588/psp-2-0-upda...

I'd contest that the Blackberry devices were smaller and earlier, e.g the 7230 from 2003[0]. Pretty sure some of the iPAQs (and other CE devices) arrived with wifi and a browser before 2005 as well since Pocket PC 2000 shipped with a version of IE 3.1.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-evolution-of-the-blackberry-f...

Objectively, that browser was terrible, even at the time. But the ability to just read text on my own (and not have to ask to use the family computer - and to stay up all night reading under the covers, which was much harder with books) was amazing then! Of course, it would seem so quaint to kids today.

So I ended up hacking together a site called AIMonPSP with PHP and MySQL that did all the AIM communication on the server instead of client-side. Made a decent amount of money (for a high schooler) on AdSense banners, and learned a lot about software design the hard way.

You’re not wrong that a lot of them felt hollow. Like that assassin’s creed game that had virtually nobody walking around on the street and felt like a dead world as a result.

But there were some gems.

I love the AC franchise and have been playing it* since the beginning. I know it was because of the limited power of the platform that you couldn't have the usual crowds of bystanders etc. I'm sure it was a great game in general, it just felt like a bit of a ghost town :/

(* on and off, I took a break around 3/black flag after a bit of burnout)

I worked on a bunch of PSP titles, my personal favourite was Bloodlines - are you not entertained?

Personally back in the days I had Nintendo DSi, but just recently I bought gamepad for phone just to check what I have missed by not owning PSP at that time :)

I just grabbed my PSP and took a look at the save file of Bloodlines. It says "Percentage completed: 0", which is super strange, because I distinctly remember playing the game as a kid when visiting my aunt. Maybe I actually enjoyed the game, but the savefile got fucked, I got angry, and never played it again? My memories are hazy, but now that I focus, I do remember enjoying it, but not much beyond that.

BTW when looking at the save files, what strikes me is how few games I actually played. To me it seems like there were lots of them, but actually no, I just spent lots of time playing same games.

I think maybe Sony created too high expectations with PSP.

[0] https://www.lifewire.com/psp-games-with-gameshare-2792549

it was only like ten years later when I got to realise how great those download play titles must have been for some kids. PSP games would have been way too large to pull off similar stuff, DS games were often only a few megabytes

They were. You could play Tekken against a friend without him having to own the game. It was great.

But in general not many games did this. Since even Tekken had pretty high load times, I suspect that the much higher graphical fidelity of the PSP made most games just too big for this to work well.

Can you share more about the experience, the development process, and any other PSP titles you worked on?

What other games did you work on?

I absolutely loved that game. I remember playing it on my white Star Wars PSP with a decal of Darth Vader on the back. I spent so many hours sitting on my bean bag chair playing it.

Thank you for making my childhood more fun :)

Most of the games still hold up and emulation is very easy to run. Probably the best handheld of its era.

Only limited by it's controls. KZ was great, they even had to patch in the last chapter, but it was an amazing game.

Admittedly with homebrew it was even more fun when the community patched MHP3 translations and we would have AdHoc wifi parties proxied over the net using a dongle. Good times

God of war chains of olympus, metal gear solid peace walker, crisis core ff7, test drive unlimited, motor storm artic edge... I could go on.

I don't see a world where a handheld console released in 2005 being able to play these games isn't impressive. And I wonder what homebrew could offer to match these games too.

Funnily enough, I remember some rumors going around about some people trying to develop an N64 emulator which never got released or went anywhere, AFAIK. I have a vague memory of a guy going by the ID PSDonkey or something like that.

Granted, it ran at about 80-90% realtime speed, and audio was a no-go, but maybe that improved in later releases.

For the PSP, media compatibility was obviously never a possibility, but as I understand it, the native PS1 emulator on the PSP essentially works with completely unmodified PS1 ISOs in some sort of container file format, which homebrew developers have then quickly reverse engineered.

The emulator itself is technically quite impressive, and apparently largely runs unmodified PS1 MIPS R3000 code on the PSP's MIPS R4000, although the GPU is emulated [1].

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/investigating-the-psps-psone-emula...

Because while I definitely bought a PSP, I definitely have never bought a UMD-based game to play on it.

It was quite amazing at the time, and (IMHO) it remains a spectacularly-good handheld for playing whatever games with an emulator or whatever.

(Am I the reason why we can't have nice things? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps I am.)

Perhaps you came to the PSP late in its cycle.

I happened to be in Tokyo when the PSP was released. I was on a subway and saw a girl playing Lumines and it completely blew my mind.

As soon as I was done with my daytime obligations, I went straight to Yodobashi Camera and bought one. When I got back to the U.S., showing it to people always blew their minds, also.

Until then, the notion of "handheld gaming" was mostly the early GameBoy series, and maybe Lynx. The PSP was a whole different category.

This was more than a small part due to the calculation that early models were more likely to be hacked and I'd save myself a lot of money emulating snes games instead of buying new ones...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/920780-wipeout-pure/204...

Still remember catching a ton of max-leveled soldier's when I was in Russia.

It also had a bigger problem in that it seemed to be designed for (and built a library of) ports from regular consoles. I’ve always believed full console ports make lousy portable games because they’re not designed for stop-and-go play sessions. I’m not interested in playing through some epic boss battle in God of War while waiting in line at the grocery store. On the other hand, I’m totally fine with playing a few moves in a quick adventure/puzzle/strategy game on a DS.

And that’s the crux of it. PSP seems to be designed for portable play only around the house. In that case I’d rather just have a regular console.

The PSP was definitely more complicated, and perhaps more fragile but it felt incredibly futuristic in early 2005. Graphics basically as good as my home PS2, you could watch really high quality movies, music on the go, browse the web.

I realized this after purchasing a Steam Deck. Initially I installed things like Apex Legends (rip) and Doom Eternal, but even with gyro and trackpads, it's just didn't feel great on a small screen. I will admit playing through the entire Master Chief Collection over various transits made my inner child kind of giddy. But Halo's chapter format and slow-paced combat makes it kind of an unique fit.

On the go I now mostly use my Deck for things like Slay The Spire, Ori, Okami, Hollow Knight, Tails of Iron, Stardew Valley, Baba is You, etc; Docked with a TV, playing the aforementioned FPS is fine. Or party games like Heave-Ho :-).

To be honest, I do kind of wish for a Vita-like, running SteamOS, with enough horsepower to run previously mentioned OTG games. Key factor is to be 'pocketable'.

> And that’s the crux of it. PSP seems to be designed for portable play only around the house. In that case I’d rather just have a regular console.

Sometimes the TV gets relinquished to the other half, in which case its nice to stil snuggle up instead of sequestering yourself to the study.

The thing is an absolute tank. I vividly remember the horror of dropping mine onto a concrete floor from a significant height – with no consequences, other than a minor paint chip.

And the thing features an optical disk drive! Between that and MiniDisc, I'm still convinced that Sony's mechanical engineers are wizards.

Lik-Sang? Good ol' Lik-Sang, before Sony threw them into the ground. So much Japanese video game console eye candy for grabs.

For me it was the Nokia Ngage, and ipod video. And then the airpods.