The time has finally come for me to admit to myself that I need to let go of a beloved handheld. For almost two years, I’ve been aware it was on the edge of death. This weekend, it finally went. I’m going to miss my PSP.
I’ve had this same PSP for about five or six years, it was actually a replacement I had gotten after a friend of mine spilled a bottle of Coke on my Ceramic White model 1000 PSP. When I had to pitch that one, I wanted to get a special one, and some limited edition metallic PSPs were released in Japan. I’m a bit picky about PSPs, due to their issues with dead pixels. I heard the later ones were better about this, but I’m OCD about that kind of thing. I had to buy my replacement one from somewhere I could test it. Fortunately, there were a few shops that carried them nearby. I came home with a metallic “lavender purple” PSP. 🙁
The PSP had some really great games on it, such as the Ys games, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, Growlanser, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, numerous Final Fantasy games the Disgaea games, some decent ports of fighters, a lot of JRPGs, and a slew of PlayStation games from PSN. Sure, the library had a lot niche titles. To me, it made It feel like a mini Saturn or Dreamcast. It was one of my first portable devices that had a web browser, which meant it always went with me when I’d travel, until I got a smartphone. I padded out my library of PSP games when the major retailers were slashing prices to blow the games out the door, which was sadly when I knew my PSP was reaching the end of its lifespan.
Like the Saturn, the PSP had a much better library if you imported games from Japan or Europe.
I noticed some dark spots on the LCD screen after buying a pile of games. I tried to ignore it. It didn’t get in the way of games as they were off to the side. They slowly got worse. I’ve seen electronics do some funky things in my time. I can’t say I’ve seen much like what happened to my PSP’s screen. It’s as if it’s rotting out. It reminds me of what happened to my original Game Boy, which had lines of pixels slowly die off. It never suffered any trauma, so I’m not sure what caused this to happen. My best guess is that the LCD screen got old and started to quit.
I went to play Star Ocean: Second Evolution on Sunday and the screen looked like swiss cheese. It’s over. I sadly shut it off and placed it back on my shelf. I know what people are going to say. “Why are you lamenting the loss of a handheld you can replace?” I’ve known this day was coming for a while, and I’ve been eyeing some other models and replacement screens. It’s not top priority, unfortunately. I’ll either replace the screen or buy another one at some point.
On a side note, playing Dragon’s Crown on Vita eased the pain a bit.
