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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

I feel a bit hurt. ;-)

I worked on a bunch of PSP titles, my personal favourite was Bloodlines - are you not entertained?

I remember being so excited for Bloodlines because I had no way to play AC2. It was really impressive what you and your team managed to accomplish on a handheld. Now knowing that you built it from the ground up makes it even more amazing.

Can you share more about the experience, the development process, and any other PSP titles you worked on?

I loved my PSP and the homebrew scene during that era. The biggest area where the PSP felt like it was lacking was with multiplayer games. I remember playing some fighting and puzzle games with friends on the PSP, but the most fun wireless multiplayer experiences were on the DS; and primarily it was Mario Kart DS. The real killer feature was being able to play with friends without requiring them to own the game; I don't think PSP games were capable of this.

For some reason the DS didn't take off at all in the area I grew up (neither did the original Pokémon games despite seemingly being massive everywhere and the cartoon being a big hit in my school).

it was only like ten years later when I got to realise how great those download play titles must have been for some kids. PSP games would have been way too large to pull off similar stuff, DS games were often only a few megabytes

Maybe it's just because it was high school and not elementary school, but I remember basically everyone who was into games even a bit having a DS, but nobody used them as a daily carry portable. It was something you'd just notice in people's rooms when you went over.

There were some games that had a feature called game sharing. This let you send a smaller version of the game, essentially a demo, to another PSP over wifi, and this let you at least try the experience without owning the game. Burnout Legends definitely did this, but I also remember it on some NFS and sports titles. I just found a list of games that did this.[0] Also, there were some good shooters as well, like Medal of Honor or Battlefront, with pretty nice maps, especially for a handheld. And for racing games, Gran Turismo was incredible with almost all GT5 tracks and 900+ cars present.

[0] https://www.lifewire.com/psp-games-with-gameshare-2792549

> I don't think PSP games were capable of this.

They were. You could play Tekken against a friend without him having to own the game. It was great.

But in general not many games did this. Since even Tekken had pretty high load times, I suspect that the much higher graphical fidelity of the PSP made most games just too big for this to work well.

I recall Bloodlines as not being a bad game, but not particularly good either. I think the biggest problem with PSP is that lots of games were just diet ports of PS2 games. Why play them if you can play better versions of same games on PS2? Having said that, there were absolute gems in the library, and it breaks my heart that in some alternative universe I haven't played Patapon or LocoRoco.

Bloodlines was not a diet port. It was an original. Given what we had to do and the timeframe we had (9 months) we had to go from zero to finished game and it was a terrific challenge. We had no original source code so everything you see, including the mobile version of parkour, all the game systems, complete pipeline from Maya had to be designed and built as well as getting a game finished. I truly believe the project was a AAA endeavour but with a AA budget and timeframe. Assassin's Creed, the original game has a much larger scope but also a much larger team and a four year development time. Bloodlines if only given an additional months to a year could have been outstanding. I'm still very proud of the accomplishment of our team given our constraints.

As someone involved in the game production, you saw all the hard work and miracles that happened. It's your child and you love it even if it's imperfect. As audience, I compare this game to a different one, without any regard to the constrains you had. Heck, I'll give your game a bad score simply because I don't like the genre, in which case there's absolutely nothing you could've done to improve my experience.

I just grabbed my PSP and took a look at the save file of Bloodlines. It says "Percentage completed: 0", which is super strange, because I distinctly remember playing the game as a kid when visiting my aunt. Maybe I actually enjoyed the game, but the savefile got fucked, I got angry, and never played it again? My memories are hazy, but now that I focus, I do remember enjoying it, but not much beyond that.

BTW when looking at the save files, what strikes me is how few games I actually played. To me it seems like there were lots of them, but actually no, I just spent lots of time playing same games.

When you think about it too long, the fact that one day you're a kid, and then you're not a kid anymore is super strange

I'm impressed! Bloodlines was the only AC I've ever finished completely, and even though the story was odd at some points, I found the gameplay and the graphics to be spot on for the platform. Very enjoyable for teenager me back then, and still holds up quite well. Doing this in 9 months... Just wow.

been long time but I recall playing it on PSP, ( before playing the AC game before though ) I have pretty good memories, and it was one of the best games I played on PSP for sure.

I think maybe Sony created too high expectations with PSP.

You worked on AC: Bloodlines?!

I absolutely loved that game. I remember playing it on my white Star Wars PSP with a decal of Darth Vader on the back. I spent so many hours sitting on my bean bag chair playing it.

Thank you for making my childhood more fun :)

I appreciate that! It was a really fun project to be part of.

Tell us more! I still beleieve that the PSP is a killer platform, those games are beautiful with 60 fps mods at high resolutions. I never really stopped playing them, just moved them to my phone.

+1, tell us more.

Personally back in the days I had Nintendo DSi, but just recently I bought gamepad for phone just to check what I have missed by not owning PSP at that time :)

I can tell you how surprised I was to find out that index triangles were slower than triangle lists on the PSP due to (I conjecture) a broken vertex cache in the PSP graphics hardware (guessing it was rushed out with this bug). The huge challenge of clipping triangles on the PSP - they had to be clipped on the CPU. I loved working on the PSP and wished we could have done more PSP projects.

Despite the limitations, many games pulled off amazing graphics. Many in the thread compare it to the PS2, but that's unfair. Doing better than PS1 graphics in a handheld was quite an accomplishment back then. Interestingly, the quality of the assets in these games didn't have a chance to show on the 480x272 screen of the PSP. However, many games, including Bloodlines, Gran Turismo, both GTA's, just to name a few, look very close to PS2 when upscaled. So the work was very much put into these titles, and it shows, even after two decades.

The PSP was probably the most hyped up gadget in my teenage years. It was launched only after a long delay in Europe, but even after all that time of waiting and the highest of expectations, it delivered. So thank you for being a part of that :)

What other games did you work on?

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