Reviewed by Proto Joe

*Note: The model pictured above is the PlayStation Portable 1000, the first model to be released. Additionally, this review goes over issues in PlayStation Portable 1000, 2000, and 3000 models. The PlayStation GO is not covered. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s take a step back to the 2000s. Back then, there was no such thing as easy to pick up gaming apps on your phone such as Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja; in fact, the concept of the modern smartphone was practically nonexistent. If you needed to fix your gaming kicks on the go, there was only one name you could turn to: Nintendo.

Nintendo essentially had a complete monopoly over portable gaming. While competitors such as the Sega Game Gear, the Atari Lynx, and the Nokia N-Gage tried to force their way into the market, none of them could last against the sheer popularity of the Nintendo Game Boy (and later, the Nintendo DS and its descendants). It looked as though the company that gave birth to Mario was destined to forever reign supreme as the king of portable gaming.

But then, in 2005, a surprise contender rose to challenge the champion. Sony, fresh off the success of their hot-selling PlayStation 2 home console, took on Nintendo with their own portable gaming system, the PlayStation Portable (PSP). With it’s awesome graphics, powerful processing, analog stick, and new Universal Media Disk reader, it seemed like the handheld for the next generation. Many gamers, myself included, thought the PSP would finally knock Nintendo off its treasured throne.

It never happened.

While the PSP sold quite well in its home country of Japan, it failed to make an impact anywhere else. It limped through several disappointing game releases and remodels before quietly fading away, overshadowed by other handhelds of the era. So what happened? Was the PSP a good idea that was merely released at the wrong time, or is it simply a bad machine to begin with? As it turns out, it’s a little of both.

The PSP 3000, the last and greatest model in the PSP line. Despite featuring a much slimmer design, a higher resolution screen with reduced glare, and a built-in microphone, the new design did little to change the Sony’s fortunes.

1. The UMDs

The UMD, the Noisy Cricket of portable gaming media.

The PSP’s claim to fame was its use of the Universal Media Disk, a compact disk format that was created exclusively for the PSP. With it, the PSP could access games with graphics and playtime that rivaled that of home consoles such as the PlayStation 2. Such a feat doesn’t sound that impressive these days since even the average smartphone holds the same processing prowess as a PlayStation 2, but at the time, it was practically unheard of to have that much power in a handheld. This power came at a pretty steep price, though.

Flash memory may be dirt cheap nowadays, but even a 4GB memory card like this could go for the price of a PSP game back then.

UMDs were essentially smaller CD-ROMs, much like the ones used in the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2. To load UMDs, the PSP needed to scan them using a miniature laser drive. Not only was this process fairly noisy and a huge drain on the PSP’s battery, but it also led to long loading times for games. Some games found a way to shorten load times immensely by installing game data on the PSP’s flash memory card, but this ate up huge amounts of space. The card provided with the PSP was pretty meager in size too, so you often had to buy another memory card just so you could store all of this install data AND the save data from your games.

In the end, the UMD was an interesting experiment by Sony, but it simply didn’t offer enough advantages over the cartridges used by almost every other portable gaming system in those days. Better graphics and longer games were a big plus, sure, but not at the cost of battery life, load speeds, and all-around practicality.

It should also be noted that Sony tried to sell UMD versions of movies that you could watch on your PSP. This would have been an interesting feature if it wasn’t for the fact that UMD movies costed the same as a regular movie on a DVD, so you were basically paying full price to view movies on a smaller screen than your television.

2. The Features

The PSP wasn’t just for games and movies. You could also browse the internet, listen to your favorite music albums, and even make phone calls using Skype on later PSP models. In essence, Sony was trying to make the PSP a proto-smartphone, capable of fulfilling just about any need a person could have. There was just one problem with this idea: the PSP itself.

To be more specific, it was the PSP’s physical design. It was excellent for gaming purposes with its giant back-lit screen, well-spaced button layout, and responsive analog stick, but its lack of a touchscreen meant you were limited to navigating menus with buttons and an on-screen keyboard. This made even simple tasks such as looking through a website painfully slow and needlessly difficult.

A picture of the PSP’s rather clunky internet browser. Moving the cursor was done via the analog stick, and text fields were filled out using an onscreen keyboard. Have fun typing out a long web address with that!

Many of the PSP’s multimedia functions also required additional accessories and memory space, costing you precious money that could be used on buying actual games. For example, in order to play music, you had to buy a mini-USB to USB cable, upload the music files onto your PSP’s memory card, and hope you didn’t have to delete any valuable data.

3. The Games

Of course, these weaknesses could be easily forgiven if the PSP had a large library of great games to choose from. It didn’t.

Now, I’m not saying that the PSP didn’t have good games. In fact, it had some truly excellent titles such as Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Persona 3 Portable, and Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. The issue was the amount; in every other area besides Japan, the PSP received a dismal number of new games per month, and many of the system’s better hits were released quite a while after it launched. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, for instance, didn’t arrive to United States shores until June 8, 2010, 5 years after the PSP was put in the market.

A screenshot from Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, one of the better titles in the PSP library. Great graphics and gameplay, but it didn’t hit North American shops until 2009, a year after it was released in Japan. Its sequel, Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, wasn’t even imported to the U.S.A.

Sony attempted to bolster the PSP’s small game roster by allowing players to buy select PlayStation 1 games off the online PlayStation Store. This was an amazingly cool addition, but you could only play these games by downloading them onto your PSP’s memory. This meant that, once again, you were practically forced to spend even more money on expensive memory cards!

The PSP was an advanced system with plenty of potential, but its flaws crippled the device and its sales. It’s a shame because the PSP was, without a doubt, one of the most powerful portable systems of its day, easily outclassing the Nintendo DS in terms of specs. If it were released in an older age, where the war between handhelds was more about power than anything else, it might have been more of a success.

But it arrived at just the wrong time. Just two years after the PSP’s launch, smartphones exploded in popularity, and with them came bite-size gaming apps that were cheap and, more importantly, convenient. Suddenly, power was no longer the name of the game; it was accessibility and affordability, and unfortunately, the PSP had anything but those.

Luckily, the PSP survived well enough to warrant a sequel system, the PlayStation Vita. Only time will tell whether Sony learned from their past mistakes… though, with the PS Vita’s even weaker sales, that seems unlikely.