Retro Gaming - PSP

Lately, I've been getting back into gaming, specifically retro gaming on my old PSP. It feels weird calling this 'retro'; it doesn't seem like that long ago that this device was in its heyday.

Games

Some games I've been enjoying are:

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions (fantasy turn-based strategy)

Lumines (puzzle, kind of like a twist on Tetris)

Medal of Honor: Heroes (first-person shooter)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (action, platformer, some puzzles)

Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon (farming simulator)

Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) is one I started a year or two ago, but never finished because I stopped gaming since then, so it didn't take much more to finish it out. This one is challenging, but deep and seemingly infinitely replayable. You could replay this time after time, and as long as you do a different strategy for the characters' classes, it would be almost a different game on every playthrough (aside from the story). I forget the exact number of hours, but it took me about 60-ish hours to get through the main storyline, and I only did one or 2 of the side missions. Cheap entertainment!

I could talk more about the others in the list above, but FFT is my favorite on the list so far and is really the only one I feel like talking much about. Harvest Moon seems like it has potential, but I'm not very far into it and it's slow-going at this point. I think I'm close to the point where I'll have more playable options open up.

The Console Itself

Media

For a 17 year old device, I have to say, this thing has aged quite well. It is a bit slow on loading some games up, but not unbearably so. The click when opening the disk tray for the Universay Media Disc (UMD) slot is quite satisfying, too.

I remember when this was brand new, being impressed at how it could almost double as a handheld computer: networking, hardware kill switch for WiFi, web browsing, expandable storage, movies, music, podcasts, RSS, games and even an online and on-device digital game store. Nowadays, that combination is taken for granted but back then, this thing was really ahead of its time.

The Old and the New

Fast forward to today and some of those cool features don't really work anymore, but that's not so much because of the device itself, but because of the internet infrastructure making everything so much more complicated. The exception being the UMDs: unless you are specifically playing a game that has an online mode (several of mine do), or one that is online only (I don't have any of these, or know if they even exist), you don't need an internet connection or the manufacturer's permission to play it. With the networking being optional, you can also play in total privacy. Another perk of retro games!

The SSL version is way outdated, so most sites fail the SSL handshake. The rest barely or don't at all render because of the bloated state of CSS and JavaScript. Also, a lot of the system links to various applications no longer work because the backend systems no longer exist. For example, the game store says it's no longer supported, but I found a secondary icon to get you into it, and from there, I can see downloadable games, with a price and everything. I haven't actually tried buying any of these, so who knows if it'd still work?

There is built-in support for configuring a proxy server, so I suppose I could set up a MITM proxy on my LAN to work around the SSL thing? Even then, I doubt it could render much outside of the smol net and lightweight websites. I even idly wondered how hard it'd be to get a Gemini browser, like Lagrange, to compile and run on this? I'd likely need to flash custom firmware, but if Lagrange is written in C, it might work? The bottleneck might be the low RAM, which I think is only 64 MB.

Even my old Memory Stick PRO Duo still works! By today's standards, it seems worthlessly tiny at a mere 1 GB, but when game saves take up just a few hundred KB, this is plenty. It is, however, a proprietary storage format. That along with its age makes me nervous about depending on it, so I bought an adapter that lets me plug 2 microSD cards into it, then that goes into the PRO Duo slot, and it works fine. This lets me have a backup in case the old card breaks, lets me use modern storage devices, and makes it less dependent on the proprietary (and expensive!) shape of the memory stick. I am not sure if there is a cap on the microSD storage size it'll support, but I could easily see this being a portable movie device. Sure, we have phones today, but this is easier to hold, and has great battery life, especially considering I'm still running the original battery (I should probably get a backup one of those too).

Through a basic USB port, I was even able to hook it up to my Librem 5, mount it as external storage, and sync my game saves off it it as a backup. This was trivial, yet exciting. Old and new, working flawlessly together with a basic cable. Pretty neat!