Sony PlayStation Portable

The **Sony PSP** (abbreviation for the **PlayStation Portable**) is a handheld video game console that competed against the Nintendo DS and was released in 2005. The Sony PlayStation Vita, the successor to the PSP was released in 2012.

## Why It Rocks

1. It is the only handheld gaming system to use optical discs. The discs were known as Universal Media Discs or UMDs.
2. The UMDs were also a movie format allowing the PSP to play movies essentially also making it a portable movie player. Unfortunately movies stopped being released in UMD format.
3. Could connect to the Sony PlayStation 3, internet and other PSP consoles.
4. The PSP had high quality graphics, comparable to Sony PlayStation 2.
5. It is possible to play original Sony PlayStation titles via virtualization.
6. The PSP is compatible with many emulators, such as Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis, etc, it even has an emulator **for the Nintendo DS** (Almost useless though, since many DS games have touch screen features)
7. New games can be bought via the PlayStation Store, and free demos can also be downloaded.
8. It has great games such as *Daxter*, *Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters*, *God of War: Ghost of Sparta*, *LocoRoco*, and more.
9. It has an analog stick, which helps a lot in games, and it'd be a feature added in every handheld console afterwards.
10. The PSP had little disc-based piracy due to UMDs which are a smart and unique way to prevent piracy.
11. While not as common as SD cards, Sony used their own off-the-shelf Memory Stick Duo for the PSP rather than a proprietary memory card format, which would be used in the PSP's successor, the PS Vita.

## Bad Qualities

1. Huge number of RPGs.
2. Battery life was shorter compared to the DS.
3. The UMDs could come loose from their cases, which makes them useless because the PSP requires a UMD to be in the case to work. Therefore, third party replacement cases were developed.
4. While the addition of an analog stick is an awesome feature, sometimes some games get bad controls due to having only 1 analog stick, this is very common in multiplatform games. The button and stick placements also made playing games incredibly uncomfortable.
5. Though it's somewhat of a gimmick, camera was released as a peripheral, rather than being built in the console like on the DS.
6. PSP Go model has no disc-drive and is only compatible with digital games which means popular physical discs such as *Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep* could not run on it. Also, the Go required the less common Memory Stick M2 for storage expansion. Plus, it also costed an arm and a leg. As of result, this model flopped instantly.
7. While Sony though it would be a great idea to use properitary game discs (UMDs) on the PSP, this unfortunately opened the doors to an unexpected levels of piracy which some people say the killed system. This reveal turned off both game developers and movie studios that had been releasing films on the format. Even worse, these discs and their enclosures were very fragile, took forever to load and cause the PSP to drink up its battery mega fast.

## Reception

The PSP was the first handheld to ever offer Nintendo real competition in the handheld market where most other handhelds paled in comparison to the Game Boy and *DS* line ups. Over 80 million units were sold in the PSP 10 year cycle. However it still fell far below the Nintendo DS' 154 million units.