I finally managed to figure out how to get my PSP online, and it only took me five years or so. I guess I wasn’t all that worried about it. But anyway, I signed up for the Playstation Network and got SH1 for PSP.

I know I’ve heard a lot of people complain about getting it off PSN for PS3, glitches and so on. I also know that a lot of people just dump it to their memory card and use an emulator on the PSP, but that’s too much work for me. I use my PS1 disc to play it on an emulator on my computer, but that’s mostly to take screenshots. I don’t much like playing on PC, it’s just more convenient for me. So that’s basically why I paid to get this game again, because I wanted to see how it would be to play it with PSP controls.

Anyway, the first time I ever played SH1 was in 1999, on PS1, and obviously on an older television set. I was just getting into figuring out how to do websites, and I bought a shitty TV capture card so I could make screencaps for my site. While it seemed cool at the time, you can see now how shitty it was. The above image is captured on my computer from the TV from back then.

And then of course, at some point people started sharing the ROM online and playing it with emulators. Above is an image captured with Fraps using EpsxE. Playing with an emulator was initially a shock to me, because the pixelation REALLY stood out. Playing SH1 on a TV added a sort of softness to the image, it blurred out some of this. Sure, stuff was still kind of blocky, but it was 1999. The game looked good. On a computer, you can see what’s going on. People like that, but I think it’s actually problematic for this game. I think you’re supposed to squint sometimes and not know what the hell you’re looking at. I’ve seen people play it on PS3, and it’s pretty much the same problems (though I heard there were also glitches).

So there are about 5 possibilities to play SH1 these days:

1. Get the game for PS1 and play it on a PS1. This is a problem for many people who didn’t buy it in 1999. Since then, and especially since the movie came out, original copies are expensive.

2. PS2: Mine broke years ago and I didn’t get another one, but I did use it to play SH1 for a while. Pretty much the same pros and cons of PS1.
3. Play it on an emulator. Even though I have a PS1, I still use an emulator to play most of the time. This is partially so I can take screens for the site, and partially because it’s convenient. Of course, many people who don’t have a physical copy of the game play it on an emulator, too.
4. PSP: This is what I just bought for $5.99 in the US PSN store. I don’t know if it’s still available everywhere, though. At the very least, it was cheap and convenient. Many people also use hacked PSPs to play ROMs of the original, for that matter, but I haven’t tried it. I do have a hacked PSP also, but I always have trouble trying to rip the game to the memstick.
5. PS3: Also via PSN. The main problems I see here are possible glitches (I don’t know if they’ve been fixed by now, but I heard about this a long time ago) and people trying to play a non-HD game on an HD console, leading to you really noticing how non-HD it really is.

Now I’ve had a day or two to sit down and play it on the PSP. The first thing I noticed was the filesize. It’s much smaller than what’s on the PS1 disc. PSP SH is 250 MB or so; PS1 SH is about 500 or 600 Mb, if I recall correctly. Obviously, they’ve downgraded the graphics of a game that already didn’t have especially high def graphics. Part of this must be the movies. They play at a smaller size even than the PSP screen. I guess this makes sense since the screen is 720×480, which is a lot more pixels than an SDTV could display. That didn’t bother me with the movies. I didn’t really notice when they were playing, but there must have been some compression taking place. What I did notice, however, was that the game itself looked horribly compressed, like a bad quality JPG. What made this all the more annoying was the fact that the game is noticeably smaller than the screen, it’s not even stretched to the full size vertically (I understand that it couldn’t fill the sides of a wider screen, but it could have been stretched vertically. Maybe there is a way to change this, but I don’t know.)

On the other hand, there’s the controls. I was in the cafe at the beginning of the game and the bird thing flew through the window. I couldn’t shoot the damn thing. I went to the control options and it said “R2″ was “aim.” “What the hell?” thought I. “There is no second right paddle on a PSP!” It turns out this was referring to the analog thing, not a second paddle. I changed it to R1 anyway, because I never use the sidestepping action. After that, I had no more complaints with the controls, I thought they were very nice.

As I see it, the main problem with playing it on a PS1 is that few people still have them in working condition. It’s still my preferred way to play SH1, though, because of what higher definition TVs and monitors do to the graphics. You see the flaws more. I think it works best on the system it was designed for.

That being said, that’s just not practical for most people, most of the time. That’s one reason people have been clamoring for a rerelease for all these years. People are even saying it should be part of the HD Collection, which is odd because it just is not HD and I don’t think it would fit in, visually.

Playing on a console/handheld is nice, though, mainly due to the controls. The price ($5.99) is also much cheaper than original copies on Ebay ($120). Mainly, what I like about it being on PSN is that there still is an official option for buying this. It’s still available, albeit in a downloadable form.

The other option, which I’m sure will remain the standard for playing this game, is emulation. Whether it’s with the actual disc or a downloaded ROM, it’s the most convenient for people. There are also more display options you can mess with in an emulator, so you can make it look however looks best to you. However, I do hate using a keyboard to control the game.

In conclusion, I don’t have an answer. Playing on PC seems like the best way to go, really, even though it’s not one of the officially-released ways. This is why all the options seem problematic to me. I will continue to play through on PSP for now, though the graphics are sort of killing me. I didn’t expect much, but I don’t like the compression that is very apparent in the visuals here.