@“dracula”#p125349 I first saw this in 1 million K if you know what I mean (it means I was there)
As someone who has amassed Entirely Too Many PSPs, I have to agree that the 1000 model is my favorite. It feels like a luxury object, over-designed in the classic Sony fashion. Slap a fresh new IPS display in there and a new Ostent battery and you've got yourself a perfect little device by my reckoning!
Though I will say, the 3000's ability to output over component cables makes it really fun to use on a CRT, or to watch UMD movies on a CRT if you're Very Cool.
The 1000 certainly feels like a fat PS2 in the palm of your hand, moving parts and all.
If you're obsessed with the weight of the thing, you can always remove the UMD tray and weigh down your PSP 3000 with lead pellets in there instead.
I've also been tinkering around with the PSP lately. I wanted to play Chrono Cross and thought an eboot on a psp was the way to go.
It's interesting to see the love for the 1000 model! I was playing on a 1000 but I just found a 3000 model lying around that was a lot cleaner so I hacked it and started using that instead. It does have a better screen, but it feels like a flimsy little toy compared to the 1000.
The 3000‘s screen has this weird sort of interlacing effect combined with a slow pixel refresh that makes it incredibly distracting to me, but the wider color gamut is certainly appreciated. Aww yeah now we’re into that nerd stuff.
@“exodus”#p125325 I‘ve played plenty of the first PSP Ridge Racer - that is the game that sold me on the PSP when it was new. Well, that and Lumines. I’ve got my PSP “hacked” so I started playing Ridge Racer 2 over the weekend. Good stuff.
I am also starting to dig into the library if anyone has any other recommendations. Besides PSP isos, what else is cool to do with a software modded PSP?
@“tomjonjon”#p125648 honestly the only reason I softmod my PSPs is to play translation patches! And, like, the original Cave Story I guess. Otherwise, I can‘t say there’s been a ton of homebrew there that interested me! I tried to play through Chrono Trigger emulated on a PSP Go while commuting a few years ago but it just wasn't hitting for me at the time.
Speaking of translation patches . . . [Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 3 AKA Disaster Report 3](https://cdromance.com/psp/zettai-zetsumei-toshi-3/) is my go-to rec for Insert Credit PSP fans, since it was a Japan-exclusive PSP-exclusive that finally got an excellent translation patch a while back! I get all my EN-patched disc images from CD-ROMance because the ISOs and ROMs are pre-patched so I don't have to mess around with doing any of that work myself lol.
@“andrewelmore”#p125714 CD Romance is the place to go for sure. I'll have to check out DR3.
@“tomjonjon”#p125648 You lit a fire in me to investigate some Homebrew stuff that I haven‘t checked out before and I found a repository at archive.org. Generally when I’ve looked into this stuff, I find a lot of tools or apps that would have been useful in a pre-smartphone world that don't make a ton of sense for my life right now but there are also a lot of original games and ports of others that made it to PSP.
Thinking back to picking up my first PSP after the Go released, I remember using it as an all-in-one emulation device and played a lot of Game Boy games. It was the first place I played Mother 3.
I think I might check out some of the Quake ports and the "Halo" games. I played a Halo game on DS that was made using the Quake engine and it was a fun hour or so of toying around.
In terms of the native PSP library, I just took my first step into Ys with I & II Chronicles. I would also recommend Coded Arms after playing through the first bit of it this month. It's an early PSP first-person shooter from Konami where you play through randomly generated levels with progressive difficulty. Like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, it uses the face buttons for camera control and starts to feel okay the more you play.
I've also had that Disaster Report 3 sitting in the XMB waiting for the right weekend to dive in.
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@“dracula”#p125790 It’s an early PSP first-person shooter from Konami where you play through randomly generated levels with progressive difficulty. Like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, it uses the face buttons for camera control and starts to feel okay the more you play.
i played a lot of SW battlefront on psp like this. i got quite good at it i think! or perhps it was movement on the face buttons, aim on stick
I recall Coded Arms getting reviewed pretty poorly on release, so I was surprised to see it downloaded so much on CD Romance. A case of not many FPS on the system/they don‘t make ’em like this anymore? I played a lot of N64 FPS so I think I could acclimate to that style of camera control fairly quickly.
I think you‘re right and ultimately it doesn’t have a lot more after you see the first few stages. I jumped into it after reading a bunch of magazines with previews for PSP ahead of launch and I started sampling some of the early library to see what developers were up to.
Speaking of those old magazines, I found this ad and love how much of an emphasis Sony always had on this thing being more than just a place to play games. I know I've brought that element of the PSP up in this thread before but it always stands out.
I'm struggling to find a consistent capture of yourpsp.com to toy around with but I imagine there might be some more of that PSP aesthetic hiding out there somewhere.
I can see the appeal of its weighty build but I‘m still bitter from my 1000’s flawed d-pad membrane that made the O button impossible to fully press correctly. can hardly believe I still played it to death back then
I'm looking for a Cool Special Edition 2000 but they're getting so pricey. the MGS ones are nice but getting them on the cheap hasn't been easy. I _can_ see the appeal of just going full Vita but it's just _not the same_.
Ahh, first and third-person aiming on the PSP . . . Always a treasure. I also definitely got used to it back in the day. Some games were better at it than others, though I kind of wish more of them would have just adopted a stylish targeting system as opposed to copying the idea of precision-aiming as an input method just because it was maturing on dual-analog-stick consoles at the time, finally. Yes, it‘s true that shipping any platform, portable or otherwise, with one analog stick in 2004 was a ludicrous move. That’s been talked about to death. But I do think there's something interesting about the handful of games that tried to lean into precision-aiming on the PSP even without a second stick.
On the Dreamcast, you had games like Quake III and Unreal Tournament that used the face buttons for movement and the sole analog stick for aiming, which was probably fine at the time but it's exceptionally difficult to go back to in a world where we've spent the last twenty years training our thumbs to do the exact opposite. But then you had games like Maken X (and I think the two DC Rainbow Six games might have done this as well?) where the stick handles all movement, and you just hold down a trigger to strafe.
But on PSP, the most common precision aiming method (for first and third person shooters and similar action games, at least) was generally to move with the analog nub and turn with the face buttons. Like i said earlier, some of these work better than others! And I think the key difference is a fundamental one: acceleration curves. There's a reason Ridge Racer Type 4 feels better with a d-pad today then many of its contemporaries. It's tuned with remarkable precision so that the longer you hold down the d-pad, the sharper the turn. This leads to effortless micro-adjustments by tapping the d-pad, and allows for very organic precision drifting. The same thing applies to the original Halo. Have you played an old console FPS recently? Precious few of them had any kind of consideration for acceleration curves on the right stick, or any kind of sticky-reticle or aim assist. Those are the things we take for granted as a norm now, but it wasn't so until really the mid-to-late 360 generation. Go back and play the 360 ports of games like F.E.A.R. or Battlefield 2 or Shadowrun or whatever, then go play something from later in the console's life cycle like Syndicate. The difference in feel is enormous. But halo came out in 2001 and still feels very good in the hands, as compared to a lot of its peers at the time which feel, I think, often quite stiff and unwieldy by comparison. I don't know if "acceleration curves" is technically the right term when we're talking about face buttons, but hopefully I've rambled long enough now that this is at least somewhat coherently communicated. Apologies!
Anyway, all this to say that Coded Arms feels weird and clunky, but in a way that I can get used to much easier than I can with something like SW Battlefront II now, despite the fact that I played the absolute wheels off of both at the time. The long-winded point I was trying to make is that some teams managed to find ways to do with the face buttons what Ridge Racer did with the d-pad, to some extent. Maybe not as elegantly, so to speak, but some folks were figuring it out!
**Bonus Credit**: _~~Coded Arms is one of my favorite examples of "wait, WHO worked on this??" games on the PSP~~
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@“andrewelmore”#p125863 Coded Arms is one of my favorite examples of “wait, WHO worked on this??” games on the PSP
Curious who you're referring to specifically? I went through a little and saw a lot of regular dudes who just (no offense meant to them) Worked At Konami, ha ha.
The Socom PSP games were legit online shooters. I remember having voice chat on online PSP game being one of those “oh video game tech is magic” moments for my soft lil brain at the time
I will always be amazed I finished Peace Walker on PSP (tells you how much I loved it) because there was never really a sensible control scheme for that game. It is wild to me that in comparison the DS was maybe better for FPS games because the Renegade Kid trilogy had lowered expectations, and fully leaned into using the touch pad as a second analog.
ALSO SEMI RELATED: I got the Blue Retro adapter for the DC and just being able to remap some buttons to a second analog stick on a XBO controller made Quake 3 an entirely different experience. Shoot I need to get one for N64 and see if what it can do to make the FPS games there playable.
@“exodus”#p125865 Now that I‘m looking at Moby, you’re right! I don't know what game I had this mixed up with. Rengoku maybe?
one last note on Coded Arms, I stumbled across this video of someone playing it with mouse input and it's real weird to look at!
https://twitter.com/garungorp/status/1641481362396815360