The PSP Games No One Remembers

thegamer.com:

Can we all take a second to appreciate how bizarre the PSP library was? I don’t know whether it was just the hardware limitations or a limited perspective of what handheld games could be, but there are very few PSP games that are even worth remembering. It’s pretty telling that Lumines is widely considered to be the best PSP game ever. Nothing against Lumines, but Tetris 2 isn’t exactly Breath of the Wild.

I remember the PSP games though. It came out when I was 15 and working at a seafood restaurant, so it was the first console I ever bought for myself. When I turned 16 I quit my job at Wholly Mackerel (that’s real) and got a job at Best Buy, which is where I discovered how bad I am with money. I had an outrageous PSP collection, which included dozens of UMD movies, a format I still think was way ahead of its time. If you can think of a PSP game, I probably had it.

Thanks to the Razer Kishi 2, I’ve been getting into PSP emulation on my phone recently (no narcs) and was surprised to find how many of the most obscure games have been preserved. Games like Coded Arms, a first-person shooter made by Konami that takes place entirely within a military training simulator.

Related: The PSP Go Was Way Ahead Of Its Time And It Deserved Better

While the lack of a right analog stick made Coded Arms basically unplayable, I still think about what an interesting premise it had. In a cyberpunk future that we never actually get to see, hackers are able to directly interface with computer networks anywhere in the world. One group discovers this long abandoned VR game that they can use to extract military secrets - but only by fighting their way through a series of combat scenarios featuring soldiers, robots, and for some reason, plant