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.

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.

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.