Reminiscing About The PSP

In honour of the 20th anniversary of the PlayStation Portable’s release in Japan, I’ve taken it upon myself to take a look back at a console that is close to my heart. As someone who has owned a PSP since 2007, I will always adore the sheer amount of stuff that someone could do with it.

Of course, the main reason I had a PSP was to play Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, but in spite of those games, I can’t deny being impressed by the small handheld’s ability.

There was very little that you couldn’t do with the PSP back in the day. You could buy films to play on disc on your console. Little Universal Media Discs (UMD) were made just so people could watch films on the console, instead of focusing only on games. You could listen to music, you could browse YouTube, and all of this was just in the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s.

For years, Nintendo had dominated the market, crushing any rival in their path, but the PSP seemed to hold its own quite well. It had features that the DS didn’t have, and the graphics were stellar for such a handheld device. The fact that they even made a smaller version (which was released in 2009 under the name PSP Go, an adorable version that seemed more similar to a mobile phone than a console) was something that blew my mind when I saw it. Admittedly, this was while hanging around CeX — a UK retailer where you can buy old consoles, films and games — many years after the fact, but I digress.

Gamers could use their PSP for remote play on their PlayStation 3 consoles (a feature that I couldn’t quite enjoy due to not owning a PS3 until a few months before I got my PS4) but at the time? That seemed almost unheard of. After all, you could connect a DS to the Wii or the GameCube, but playing remotely? That was a challenge that Nintendo took a while to get to grips with. Admittedly, it’s not so much of an issue now with the Switch, but it meant that the PSP and PS3 had an advantage there.

It even allowed people to read digital comics before the apps became such a mainstream part of mobile media. Heck, you could easily sit and listen to music on your PSP without any issues, and of course, you could save more data using an SD card, something that may not seem like such a big deal now, but definitely seemed like it back then.

Of course, that’s not to say there weren’t faults with the PSP. After all, the games were expensive (occasionally, just outright not working), the console could get damaged relatively easily — my one had a permanent screen burn that remains to this very day — and the fact that it had so much internet capabilities at a time when WiFi was still relatively new, were all some issues it had.

But, even then, I can’t deny that I adored the PSP. It offered a wealth of features that I would have expected from anything but a handheld console, and looking back on it? I still adore it.

However, I may adore it slightly less if my battery explodes one day. I should really double-check that the battery hasn’t swollen.

If it has? Well, the PSP still looks cool.