No mood/mind manipulation algorithms
This era ended for me not when technology shifted, but when I moved from a northern climate to the subtropics.
The shit I’d have on me when I wore a jacket everywhere was downright cartoonish.
Sure, and I loved my PSP, but remember how Sony tried to sell us movies on disks made just for PSPs?
We were free because the companies sucked at making things terrible, not due to lack of trying.
UMD movies made perfect sense. It’s not like the machine took mini-DVDs, and back then, watching anything on a mobile screen felt futuristic. Competing options included movies on Game Boy Advance cartridges and black-and-white Spongbob episodes on VideoNow CDs.
Warner did try the sensible thing - whole movies on mini-DVDs, which could play on mobile or home players. But they were so fundamentally dysfunctional that every movie came split across two discs. Not two-sided! Separate easily-scratched discs! Like you’re gonna juggle that, in your pockets, halfway through Catwoman.
Where Sony fucked PSP users was on Memory Sticks. They took their price-gouging proprietary format, and made a special version you had to buy new. Oh were you already in the Sony ecosystem, for cameras and phones? Fuck you, buy it again. Then they released a newer PSP model and it took an even special-er version, so if you upgraded, you got zero benefit. I mean at least your games would play, until they released another PSP with no optical drive, and you bet your ass that took yet another extra-proprietary flash media format.
The wildest thing is - they weren’t fighting bootlegs. There were no bootleg Memory Sticks. The DRM was not cracked until like 2020. Sony played these fuck-fuck games purely because they could. And it must have chased off a lot of early adopters who glanced at the DS line’s simple backwards compatibility and thought Spirit Tracks looked fun.
I watched movies go from VHS, to DVDs , and Sony was at the forefront of all the media changes. So I was sold on the umd format.
I remember being so jealous at my one friend who owned like The Matrix on umd.
BRING ME TO LIFE
Their recent song Whom Will you Follow is a callback to that original sound and is full on nostalgia.
This is why cargo pants were so popular in that decade.
They’re not popular anymore?
Wearing a pair right now
Pants in August? You must be below the equator
Below the equator is the only place I’ve ever worn pants 🥁
Well, it gets warm in August, but not so warm that I won’t put on underwear.
How many cargo pockets do you have in your underwear? Lol
At least three. 😏
Cargo shorts for me (it’s 96°F right now)
Right? Where does OP keep his iPad and laptop?
They got some popularity in recent years, but I think it’s fading again.
The “Funny old times” title really reminds me of those boomer bot run facebook groups. The bots are now targeting a younger group.
Both
I want a modern Sidekick. 😩
We solved this by simply not bringing a camera everywhere. Or, if you followed my clothing style, by just having absolutely massive pockets…
I don’t think I’ve ever had a camera aNd gaming handheld in my pockets at the same time.
Soon enough we’ll be far enough along to go back to the future of Back to the Future 2.
Broke the OLED screen on my cheapish Motorola. Got a cheap TFT replacement for now. Now my phone is heavy. Not quite Walkman heavy but close.
as a PSP user the PSP is the coolest looking device with the most shitass graphics and games
it’s idolized so much in retrospect but honestly the DS was more iconic
with the most shitass graphics and games
Man what, the PSP was the most advanced handheld of its time. The DS had a worse screen and was much weaker but got away with it because games were really simple visually. PSP games look great.
Seriously. The PSP was a portable PS2, while the PS2 was still on top of the world. The DS was a gimmicky toy that sold better because it was priced and designed for play.
One aspect of that which seems obscure: the original DS used scanline graphics… for 3D. It could draw exactly 1000 triangles, row by row, at 60 Hz. This made low-poly games dead easy to optimize, and high-poly games an absolute nightmare. This also only worked on one screen at a time, which is why the second screen was always a map or a menu or something. The easy way to do 3D on both screens was to alternate, but that drops the framerate to 30 Hz.
I’m sorry but the PSP had a lot of great games. Jeanne D’Arc, Daxter, The Wipeout series, God of War, Metal Gear Peacwalker, Final Fantasy Tactics, loco roco, Crisis Core, Ys Seven, Mega Man Powered Up, Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, Gran Turismo, Monster Hunter, etc.
Yay, love for Ys Seven!!!
Death Jr, Death Jr 2, Work Time Fun, and if you have a PS Vita running Adrenaline then all the ps1 games (idk if the OG psp would too but Adrenaline definitely will).
it’s been awhile, years even, since I ran an OG PSP but I do believe I had the PS1 version of Final Fantasy VII on it that I got from the PS store.
I still replay the god of war ones occasionally, great games
All mid except for crisis core
I mostly played GBA through emulation and PS1
and I had a jailbroken PSP and tried dozens of top rated games
PSP graphics are pretty good tho, DS is a lot crunchier on that front.
My homebrewed PSP was my laptop before I had a laptop. It was an amazingly versatile device considering it’s era!
Hmmm I feel both of them are pretty evenly matched. Both have a wealth of great and beautiful games, both have a nice design. I do think the DS is more iconic in the strictest sense. It has the zeitgeist of the gameboy behind it and has been in production longer in some form or another.
I used to travel with a netbook, a UMTS modem, a camera, a satnav (when traveling by car), an MP3 player, speakers for the player plus, of course, a separate charger for each device and a bunch of cables. I felt so cool and modern.
Edit: and my phone, of course. Like, you could make phone calls with it.
… souls were free
maybe less captured.
Yep. Nothing free (as in non-proprietary) about a PSP.
Won’t be the last time. Once forced Android verification lands, you’re gonna see a lot of fediverse and darkweb peeps only accessing this side of the web from laptops and second devices, until Firefox and Linux go to shit on PC and we lose any and all privacy everywhere.
~5-10 years-ish?
Proprietary souls.