where did the PSP go?

[Crazy Climber]

Did they make the loading times better with newer revisions of the systems/games? I had a 1000 and the loading times just got rediculous when I was playing through PoPoloCrois. You think grinding sucks, well it is 10 times worse when you have a loading process BEFORE the actual battles. It was enough for me to put it down and pick my GBA and DS back up for portable RPG time.

 

I would love to pick another one up with Lunar, Y's, etc.. How do these ones play as far as loading times go?

[Austin]

I don't think the load times have been fixed. It's dependent on the game, really. I recall The Legend of Heroes taking more time than it probably should have needed between fights, whereas all of the Final Fantasy games are fine with no pause between fights and the dungeon or overworld.

[Atariboy]

I'm pretty sure load times are faster on my 3000 than my 1000.

[Cybergoth]

I don't know if many games offer that, but e.g. Monster Hunter Freedom Unite can be installed on the Duo Stick in order to speed it up.

[Rikkarr]

I don't know if many games offer that, but e.g. Monster Hunter Freedom Unite can be installed on the Duo Stick in order to speed it up.

I think Mana Khemia can as well. I have noticed that games also load much faster on my 3000 than on my old 1000, and are less noisy as well.

[onlysublime]

people seem to use the PSP for everything but retail releases. it's heavily pirated and it can be used for emulators/etc. software sales are terrible compared with other systems but yet the system sells well. Sony can't wait to get rid of the system. The hardware makes some money but not nearly what software makes.

[madmax2069]

people seem to use the PSP for everything but retail releases. it's heavily pirated and it can be used for emulators/etc. software sales are terrible compared with other systems but yet the system sells well. Sony can't wait to get rid of the system. The hardware makes some money but not nearly what software makes.

 

Software sales are terrible due to the fact that most of the official licensed software for it is absolute crap, horrid controls, massive bugs and glitches. People bought the hardware not knowing that the software was and is absolute crap. The reason why people hacked the PSP was homebrew and to unlock the full capabilities of the system to make it useful. like with any system, piracy will follow suit but i can not say it was a heavily pirated system, its about the same as any other system. Any hardware manufacturer know that they will take a hit on hardware sales but make up for that in software sales, but if said software is crap then yeah they will not make as much money if at all, and will do anything to ditch the system.

Edited January 3, 2012 by madmax2069

[akator]

I think the PSP piracy issue is somewhat overblown (as is music/video piracy). Sure, the crap content doesn't sell well, but people still buy full versions of the higher quality stuff. There have copious non-US studies showing that people who pirate content end up buying more content than many non-pirates.

 

This is anecdotal, but everyone I know with a PSP owns physical copies of games. Even the people with CFW PSPs own physical copies of at least a few titles.

 

In my household, we hacked our PSPs for 2 reasons: (1) for emulation, and (2) because homebrew offered features that Sony promised but never delivered. For example, in 2004 Sony announced that a soon-to-be-released PSP feature was streaming radio. It didn't show up in 2005, so by the end of that year an individual wrote PSP Radio to stream Shoutcast. Years later Sony did release a PSP radio client but it was slow, buggy, poorly designed, and limited. Instead of learning from what others had done with homebrew, Sony released an official and inferior product. Is it any wonder that people like PSP homebrew?

 

One of the few official Sony features that was awesome was when we had a Location Free server hooked into our cable. When I sat at the car dealer waiting for service to finish, I could watch whatever TV I wanted on my PSP... streamed from home over the web to the waiting room at the car dealer (or wherever there was WiFi). It definitely made the time pass easier. Why couldn't Sony deliver other, much simpler features with equal quality? Why couldn't Sony adapt the PSP Location Free software to access other online content (maybe even Sony's official content)? Sony dropped the ball so many times, it's no wonder that people turned to the homebrew community to get the most out of the hardware.

 

Too many PSP games were crippled ports of PS2 games. Once more developers figured out to stop being lazy, the quality of commercial PSP titles improved greatly. Now that the system is at end-of-life, it's much easier to weed through the stinkers and find the good stuff. I think there are at least 4 dozen games worth playing, possibly more for those with a broader taste of gaming genres.

 

Even at the time, it was obvious that Sony screwed up the PSP because they were too distracted by launching the PS3. They did not dedicate enough resources to the handheld and let things coast. The resources they did invest in the PSP were almost entirely dedicated to DRM in the form of firmware updates to block homebrew, so few if any "real features" were added for a long time. These constant firmware updates were required to play newer games, punishing the honest people just as much as those who had installed custom firmware.

 

Even with all of their screw-ups, the PSP has sold over 70M (and is the first non-Nintendo handheld to sell over 10M). It's fun to imagine how things might have turned out if Sony had actually backed the handheld properly.

 

How many more happy PSP owners would there have been had Sony delivered more of their promised features in a timely manner? They actually promised the concept of a "network store" in 2005... years before Apple delivered one for the iOS.

 

How massively more successful would the PSP have been had Sony embraced the homebrew community and created official channels for independent developers? Sure, there will always be people hacking hardware, but Sony could have brought homebrew devs into the fold and made custom firmware far less appealing for users.

 

Sadly, it appears they haven't learned much from their mistakes. There's still no reasonably priced dev kit for the PS3 or PS Vita...

 

[/rant]

Edited January 3, 2012 by akator

[hex65000]

Any recommendations to look out for on the PSP? I've got about 20 titles for it and don't know where to start loading up. I do have some of the classics though like Lumines 1&2, Wipeout, and Untold Legends. I also have a few of the JRPGs like Lunar (which I would like to play again), Persona 2, and one of the Y's installments. The machine doesn't see nearly the level of use that my DS does.

 

Hex.

[ Will tell you how AWFUL Plants V/s Zombies for the DS is and will then promptly continue to play it... 0_o ]

[Reaperman]

I had posted this though in another PSP topic, but edited it as it seems to fit better here. Maybe the forced firmware upgrades to play new releases hurt the PSP's game sales in a significant way, which shortened it's overall lifespan (even as far as being a homebrew console).

 

A large number of PSP's heaviest users (/customers) are using modded hardware, and with a modded system I don't know which games I can legitimately buy that will even work. This pretty well shrinks the possible userbase for new games. I'm wondering how many of those re-release 'bargain packs' that I bought (still sealed) even run on my system, or if I'm going to have to *ahem* "find" their initial releases (or hacks) to even play them.

 

Sony's idea to make me choose between a world of CFW's superior functionality or a few retail titles, didn't go the way they expected with me. And I wonder how many modded console users just gave up on the system entirely because of the constant BS that OFW changes cause.

 

Edited January 4, 2012 by Reaperman

[onlysublime]

I think the PSP piracy issue is somewhat overblown (as is music/video piracy). Sure, the crap content doesn't sell well, but people still buy full versions of the higher quality stuff. There have copious non-US studies showing that people who pirate content end up buying more content than many non-pirates.

 

This is anecdotal, but everyone I know with a PSP owns physical copies of games. Even the people with CFW PSPs own physical copies of at least a few titles.

 

 

HAHA. I find that hard to believe. I know in my youth, I pirated the heck out of the Atari machines (1200XL and Atari ST). Why buy 1 game for full retail when you can buy 4-5 of them on a disk with a nice pirate menu interface for $5? Lots of mail order places where you could simply buy an illegal game pack. Pirating on the Atari machines hurt more simply for the fact that system sales weren't that great. At least on systems like the Crap64, they had a much bigger population that the number of paying customers more than made up for the piracy on that system.

 

I know friend with 360s where they have stacks and stacks of downloaded games with nary a purchase. One friend only bought Guitar Hero World Tour because he had to get the band kit. The modded Wii was a favorite as you don't worry about Nintendo at all. At least with Microsoft, people are worried about losing their Xbox Live account (hence some people buy 1 360 that's clean and 1 that's modded for single player).

 

I don't think this site is representative. This site is full of hoard... err... collectors and there's not much value in collecting pirated material. Heck, people on this site prefer physical objects at all cost.

 

PSP game sales are way too low considering how well the system itself is selling. It can't be merely that the quality of games is bad.

[Atariboy]

I personally doubt that the amount of modded PSP's out there ever approached even 5% of the total install base. I have no doubt that the vast majority of PSP owners only ever played legitimate retail releases.

 

A healthy and robust userbase that went beyond that and explored things like custom firmware, emulation, and even piracy of actual PSP software doesn't mean that the average PSP owner was doing such.

 

The average PSP user probably didn't even realize the thing could do such things. And of those that did, I bet most never expended the effort into exploring it.

 

Software sales are terrible due to the fact that most of the official licensed software for it is absolute crap, horrid controls, massive bugs and glitches.

 

I'll admit that I never found that special game that alone jusified the purchase. It didn't have a game like Ocarina of Time on the N64 or River Raid on the Atari 2600 was for me.

 

But despite lacking a AAA game where my taste was concerned, what it did have was dozens of good to excellent games. I never felt like it had a shortage of interesting software to play on it and I'll have a big backlog of games for it for many years to come. And the stats seem to confirm that I wasn't alone in that regard (An attach rate not much different than what the DS had (DS owners have bought approximately 1 more release on average than PSP owners have) and over 40 games having reached the million mark.

Edited January 5, 2012 by Atariboy

[DemonoidTentacle]

I personally doubt that the amount of modded PSP's out there ever approached even 5% of the total install base. I have no doubt that the vast majority of PSP owners only ever played legitimate retail releases.

 

A healthy and robust userbase that went beyond that and explored things like custom firmware, emulation, and even piracy of actual PSP software doesn't mean that the average PSP owner was doing such.

 

The average PSP user probably didn't even realize the thing could do such things. And of those that did, I bet most never expended the effort into exploring it.

 

I for one have only ever had/considered legitimate releases for the PSP.

 

I have heard of people "hacking" the PSP, but assumed it was simply for piracy.

[Cybergoth]

I'm pretty sure load times are faster on my 3000 than my 1000.

 

Hm... I just quit playing the first GTA after half an hour, because it was much more loading than playing, even on the 3000.

 

Since there's almost zero loading times in both God of War games, it must be plain laziness of the developers I assume.

[Rex Dart]

Where did the PSP go?

 

It's at the bottom of a basket in my TV room. Haven't used it in a while, you wanna borrow it?

[Mord]

PSP game sales are way too low considering how well the system itself is selling. It can't be merely that the quality of games is bad.

 

Kinda like the Wii then?

[DemonoidTentacle]

Are there readily available fan translation patches for games released only in Japan? The reason I ask is because I'm really wanting Valkeria Chronicles 3, but there's no word on a release outside of Japan.