PSP Review

Look at the thing. A glossy widescreen slab with a 4.3-inch 480x272 panel at a moment when handheld meant a 2.5-inch backlit Game Boy Advance SP, running Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Burnout Legends at something close to home console fidelity. The hardware backed the look: a 333 MHz MIPS core, a dedicated graphics engine and 32 MB of RAM inside a chassis that is still the best-looking portable anyone has shipped. The library rewards digging, with Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, God of War: Chains of Olympus, Persona 3 Portable, Patapon, LocoRoco and a deep Japanese role-playing bench that mostly never crossed over.

The single analog nub was a genuine ergonomic mistake, UMD movies died within two years, and load times off optical media were rough enough that veterans ripped their games to Memory Stick. Against all that, an unkillable modding scene turned it into the most flexible emulation handheld of its decade. Eighty million units, and the ambition still reads as absurd for 2004.