My wife just surprised me with a new PSP battery after listening to me moan about not having one ever since reading PerfectDark’s most recent PSP article. After messing around with broken USB cables and jumping through hoops to un-spoof my old prome-2 firmware version for too long last night, I finally got ARK4 running and had a blast playing Wipeout Pure.
My favourite PSP game back in the day was probably Monster Hunter Freedom Unite… so many late nights spent playing that with friends in my freezing flat. There was something special about LAN parties with handheld games. I remember putting serious hours into Peace Walker and Dissidia too.
Now I want some game recommendations… tell me which games you loved on the PSP! I might even have a look around for some UMDs!
Oh hell yeah I hadn’t even considered running a tracker on PSP. I’m a big fan of LSDj and Dirtywave!
Forgot to mention: ‘Sid Meyer’s Pirates!’ is reportedly good on PSP, and it’s in my queue as a classic economic sim.
‘Pilot Academy’ is a remarkably difficult flight sim. Try also ‘R/C Stunt Copter’ on PS1 for extra credit.
There are several ‘Airport Hero’ games, from the ‘Air Traffic Controller’ series, aptly named for being simulators of ATC.
I’ve also heard good things about ‘428: Shibuya Scramble’, which is a detective visual novel adventure.
An ATC simulator on handheld seems like a bizarre game development choice… I must see this game in action!
There were also games from that series on GBA, NDS, 3DS, and five games on phones.
Again forgot: I’m not sure that the PSP games are officially translated to English, since the series primarily targets the Japanese market. But there might be fan translations.
Then you’re probably all set with Dirtywave, but you could also be interested in looking at SunVox for Android. It’s a combination of a modular synth, tracker and sequencer. Has a rather peculiar interface, and has been around on portable platforms like PalmOS for twenty years.
I’m not sure that the app can currently be bought, since the author is in Russia and will certainly not receive the money (not right away, at least), but afaik one can pay him directly and he’ll arrange the apk.
For my taste, SunVox is too much in beep-boop territory, so I prefer desktop trackers with some gnarly samples and effects, but the app is definitely good.