Do You Have Any Unpopular Gaming Opinions?

[marurun]

@ElkinFencer10 Yeah, those are pretty solid truths I think. Only point I would make in favor of the PSP and UMDs would be portable full-length movies before streaming was a thing. It at least gives you a glimpse on WHY Sony went that direction. The execution was definitely not ideal though and I think helped drive CFW.

It's just too bad those UMD drives demonstrated typical modern Sony reliability.

[ZRofel]

2. The PSP, despite having a great game library, is a horribly overrated piece of hardware with a shit plastic shell over the screen that scratches way too easily, an obnoxious nub for a control stick, and an asinine decision to put an optical disc drive in a turn of the century battery powered handheld
3. Devil's Third is a Wii U gem that exemplifies "so bad it's good" and all of the hate for it is from people who either never played it or never played more than the first level

I always say to folks that I think the PSP has a genuinely fantastic library of games, but as a piece of hardware, it's always felt like trash. Putting an optical disc drive in a portable unit just doesn't make any sense, particularly one that feels as cheap and flimsy as the typical PSP. The Vita almost completely fixed the problems Sony had with the PSP, it's just that, by that point, no one cared.

And yes, Devil's Third is fantastic. In a lot of ways it's an absolute mess of a game, but (outside of one hair-pullingly cheap moment towards the end) I had more fun playing it than plenty of critically acclaimed titles. Complaints that the shooting is terrible are really overblown. It's totally fine. It's not going to redefine gunplay mechanics in videogames, but it's totally adequate. The bonkers story and totally bizarre world design are absolutely worth the price of admission.

[Ziggy]

Looking back, the UMD drive might seem kind of bonkers. But if you remember Sony's history, they were always pushing their own formats. And when the PSP launched, solid state memory still wasn't very cheap. Without researching, I would assume they developed the UMD drive as a cheaper alternative. You would think that the cost of the drive wouldn't make sense, but I suppose it must have. Sony had a very large space in consumer electronics, the drive manufacturing cost might not have been a big deal to them. And the cost of a UMD disc was probably nothing compared to flash memory at the time. But yeah, Sony and their weird media formats. I think they were pushing UMD hard, I remember seeing movies for sale on UMD in Best Buy. Maybe they had bigger plans for it? I'm surprised they didn't try to break into the car market with UMDs. At that time, it was all the rage to have a DVD player in your car with a screen on the back of a headrest or some such thing.

But yeah, too bad the hardware was kinda shit. My PSP never left my bedroom. Not only did I take very good care of it, but I also didn't game on it a whole lot. And it still developed minor problems with the UMD drive.

[Anapan]

At one point, I owned 3 of them - mostly from pawn shops, and by brother had his own. Then I was gifted dead ones. I bought some 3rd party batteries to keep them running.
In the end, I had about 12 batteries between all the different models. I gave the pile of it all to my friend, and he was able to resuscitate a handful of those batteries over some months of charging and checking. He has a large collection now. He has refurbished a lot of the consoles and accessories. He only uses a PSTV for everything PSP or Vita related. When I realized that Vita firmware can be modified to do everything the PSP can, but better, I never booted an original PSP again.

[ElkinFencer10]

2. The PSP, despite having a great game library, is a horribly overrated piece of hardware with a shit plastic shell over the screen that scratches way too easily, an obnoxious nub for a control stick, and an asinine decision to put an optical disc drive in a turn of the century battery powered handheld
3. Devil's Third is a Wii U gem that exemplifies "so bad it's good" and all of the hate for it is from people who either never played it or never played more than the first level

I always say to folks that I think the PSP has a genuinely fantastic library of games, but as a piece of hardware, it's always felt like trash.

I agree with literally every word of this sentence. That's actually part of why the PSP pisses me off so much; there are so many amazing games trapped on a piece of shit hardware.