The Playstation Phone Was Ahead of Its Time, Here's Why.

the Playstation phone was everything I wanted as a teenager an Android phone with built-in controls designed by Sony to play Playstation games but the PlayStation games was just a small part of what made this phone so incredible for its time and I loaded up this phone packed with ROMs emulators games mods and all the PlayStation games that would have been around back when this thing came out and I want to show you how I would have set up this phone when it first came out and why it was so underrated for its time so this is it this is the Playstation phone or the official name I guess is the xeria play it came out in 2011 and it was PlayStation's first big push into the mobile gaming industry now for the most part in terms of Hardware it was middle of the road for phones at this time a 480p screen half a gig of RAM 400 Megs of internal storage and a camera that leaves a lot to be desired I mean this is best quality lighting here and it still looks like I'm shooting this on a shoe but the magic starts as soon as you slide up the screen which reveals a beautifully polished set of controls dual joysticks start select a d-pad and of course those iconic PlayStation buttons to show that Sony really is backing this up for for real this time yeah I realize this thing looks very similar to a PSP Go but no these are designed to do completely different things in completely different ways now you're probably asking those weird joystick things how do they feel and the answer isn't as entirely straightforward as I thought it would be yeah as it turns out it's entirely dependent on how developers program them if programmed right they can feel really smooth and one to one on how you expect them to feel you just kind of lean your thumb in the direction you want to go and it just works if programmed wrong there essentially a pad that only registers up down left right and it feels really really stiff that's what she said point is it's really hit or miss depending on the game that you play okay so what was the point of it what was the main goal of making it a Playstation phone well you got to remember the time that this was kind of released in 2011 the introduction of the App Store as we know it now was only about 3 years old and lots of companies were starting to see that hey all these people are playing the games on their phone like Temple Run and Angry Birds maybe this could possibly be a pretty viable platform to publish and run our own games so Sony who already had a phone division ER I's son I'm not I'm not sure who Eric is but okay uh decided to give it a chance and plan to launch a store exclusively for the phone that would sell officially licensed PlayStation 1 games and Playstation certified Android games that you could buy for your shiny brand new phone of course this service is now long discontinue but let's try and emulate it as best as we can just like it's 2011 so what can you do with this thing in this modern decade uh nothing absolutely nothing uh you can't download any games because all the servers are offline the Android market doesn't work due to some weird sign-in bug that'll just never be fixed websites don't work so good luck trying to load anything on it and this is a 3G phone so it's not even usable for phone calls anymore yeah 13 years in the tech world might as well be ancient so pretty much everything we want to do on this thing is going to have to be S loaded but because this phone is so old there's no file browser installed in this thing so we're going to have to install our own so that means enabling developer mode on the phone plugging the phone to the computer and inst selling a file browser through the command prompt then it's just simple as dragging and dropping APK files to the phone and installing them bam easy now what was one of the first things that every nerd would do to their Android phones as soon as they got them that's right rooted do people still do that I I don't know uh once it's rooted now I can do stuff like install my own ROM of any Android that I want and remove most of the bloww that came with a phone yeah get out of here Google+ we we were just pretending to like you now that we got all that set up it's time to play some games but first I know where you live this this is not part of the video I just I just know where or us today's video sponsor okay no I don't actually know where you live but it's actually really simple to get a hold of people's personal information things like your email address where you live your personal phone number in fact their entire companies whose entire business model is just getting this information and selling it to whoever wants to pay for the most and that's where AA comes in now legally they have to remove this information if you ask them to do so but they make it really complicated to do it Ora seeks out these data Brokers and makes op that requests on your behalf all with one press of a button I tend to take really good care of my personal information just because of like know YouTube thing and even then or I still managed to find 11 places posting my full name and phone number uh which are now being taken care of thanks to Aura and it's not just your name and phone number that it covers where you live email addresses Social Security numbers even your Gamertag if you want if it's being listed or sold anywhere or we'll find it oral can also do a lot more like credit monitoring password manager VPN identity theft Insurance and so much more all for really really low price it's time to take back control your personal data go to ora.com damage or scan the QR code it's going to come up right here I get you free twoe trial today and now let's get back to playing 30-year-old games on 15-year-old Hardware so PlayStation games the phone's main selling point fortunately the community for this phone has done a phenomenal job of archiving every PlayStation game PS1 game PSP games and Android games that were compatible with the phone they've also gone through the trouble of checking compatibility with all these games and have even started to work on modding some games to work with the controller since not every game had need a support for it this is the stuff that genuinely amazes me when a small community like this can keep a device that's been dead for years alive and relevant so many years later if you're even just the tiniest bit interested in this stuff go check out their Community Discord and say hi their resources were a big help in making this video so let's start with the PS phone's main selling point PS1 games ah yeah the classics now all phones came pre-installed with one game Crash Bandicoot which can't really be downloaded anymore because this phone is old so I just ripped it and yeah it ran really really well the only issue I found is that the controls seem to have the tiniest bit of input delay making it feel a little weird to play but I need you guys to understand how big of a deal this was in 2011 the ability to emulate console level games on your phone was huge here now you used to be able to buy additional games on the PlayStation pocket store for 3 to four bucks but you can't really do that anymore and even if you did get them on the phone somehow they still need to be verified through an online server that just doesn't exist anymore now there is an app called PS Xperia that lets you make your own apks from your PS1 ROMs but there is still that issue of input DeLay So what the community likes to do now is use a modded version of retro work and run PS1 games through there own by modded I mean it has support for the phone's native controls sure enough running them through here gets rid of that weird input delay and the compatibility is is much better on here than it is on the Experia native emulator again on a phone back in 2011 this was really impressive stuff to be running at full speed although don't expect any cool super sampling or shaders or anything no this can do raw native resolution and nothing more now for the big question can I run PSP games no well barely but but not really no the phone unfortunately is just not powerful enough to run 99% of the games while gaming was the focus on this phone it wasn't even the most powerful phone when it came out there's only six games that officially released that you can buy on the phone the most notable ones being Flo locoro midnight Carnival and AP Escape Academy and even then these games still tend to have a bit of frame drops every so often naturally I wanted to try myself I thought maybe Sony was being a little sensitive or something I don't maybe there's some games you can run on this thing so I downloaded an older version of ppss PP and no no no sadly it's it's really bad even by 2011 standards I I tried a few games but none of them really ran all that well even the lighter ones seem to struggle a little bit so if you were planning on using this to replace your PSP uh this isn't it okay so it can't run PSP games so I bet you're asking what is the highest level of console that it can run we'll get to that in a sec but first let's talk about all the other great consoles that this thing can emulate naturally we got your old school retro devices so SNES NES Sega Genesis run super great on here running these on your phone was just barely starting to become a popular thing back in 2011 then we got Game Boy and Game Boy Advance I'm using my boy which by today's standards looks really Bare Bones uh but it's just what I was the most familiar with back in the day there was also other emulators that were popular back in the day too everyone had their own preferences uh let me know what you used in the comments seriously playing Game Boy games like this on your phone was such a cool concept back in 2011 and it looks really nice on here on a side note which mode do you guys prefer when emulating old games the original aspect ratio or filling up the entire screen let's vote on this in the comments I'm I'm really curious Nintendo 64 works all right uh a good amount of games run pretty nice on this you can squeeze out a few more frames if you decide to overclock the phone I think the main issue here is that the controls are really weird and not really designed for a standard PlayStation layout like this still this is pretty impressive though as I remember many many years ago there was speculation that we might not actually ever see full speed emulation for the Nintendo 64 anyway so is this it is this the peak of what it can run uh no actually the highest console it can run is surprisingly the DS yeah so like 99% of games actually run really well in this thing the games that run a little laggy are actually the exception rather than the rule and since this it just a touchcreen that means you can just use a second screen exactly like a DS screen uh this would be really difficult to manage with onscreen controls but hey with the xeria play this isn't a problem anymore how neat is that all right so emulation pretty sweet by 2011 standards so what else can do to do well now this is probably my favorite section in this video the Android games yeah a lot of people forget that even in 2011 there was a lot of really serious full experienced Games available on the Android market some of these games work natively out of the box with the xeria controls while some were usually modded by the community so they can run the way that it was designed to here's just a few of the games that I remember being a big deal on Android asphalt 6 now this is one of the solid racing games of its time I remember playing this on my iPod Touch back in the day and one of the big common tropes with the racing games at this time was the gyro controls that you would use to steer your car like a like an actual RAC wheel I remember it was cute at first but then it did get old really fast well forget about all that not even a problem with this phone just use a good old controller with joysticks along with that the graphics looked insane by 2011 standards it was really demanding for its time and it used to even crash some phones if your device didn't have enough RAM on it still this was one of my favorite games as a kid and it was nice being able to just walk around the Digital Garage again mobile ports big AAA games was a really big thing thing back in the day so much so that companies were so certain that Yep this is where the industry is headed and in the distant future of 2015 no one would bother with consoles and we all be playing the newest games on our phones that kind of worked out but people are still buying PS5 so I don't know anyways this is dead space but mobile a completely bespoke made for mobile story and it looks and runs great okay you're in position remember your code name is bandal under no circumstances tell anyone your real name understand it's supposed to take place right after Dead Space one and serve as a prequel to Dead Space 2 I actually managed to get this one running at 60 FPS which was really nice and the controls felt really great on this one there's some really unique ideas in this game I really like the Eerie flashback scenes I feel like if I played this back in 2011 when it came out I would have been pretty scared this was a really cool experience I'm going to keep playing this off camera once I'm done with this video it's really neat so if you were ever into mobile games at all in this era odds are you probably seen this logo more than once honestly yeah that's Game Loft they made and still make a lot of games for Android and iOS back in the day uh what games did they make all of the games yeah pretty much any game you remember from those years was made by these guys and their whole thing was making big Grand skill games that at the time look almost console level in terms of quality these popped up every now and then back in the day and I always like seeing how far they can push devices like this games like Modern Combat was the closest you can get to a straight up Call of Duty campaign on your phone with the sweet looking Graphics proper controls and everything and they even got to do licens IPS like an original Splinter Cell game and the Dark Knight Rise has always looked really good in my opinion and paired together with what I think is the worst Batman impression I think I've ever heard this makes for a really interesting experience on the phone nice for a DAT and I'd like to know where a date is seeing games run out this type of fidelity on the thing that you made phone calls with with made you feel like we finally hit the future I mean this is it we made it I mean 2011 is already so great who knows maybe 10 years from now 2021 will be even better all right before I get to the last game let's get some honorable mentions that are specifically my personal favorites Call of Duty Black Ops zombies of course Battle Bears the original one not the weird multiplayer one Mr smart guy give these stupid Brown nub hands Shadow gun which is basically Gears of War mobile and of course the old mobile Classics like anger birds and like plant versus zombies and all those St you remember [Music] those so picture this it's 2011 you're in the n9th grade and there's this sandbox game starting to gain Traction in the community your friends wanted you to buy us you can all play together it's a game where you build anything you want fight off monsters and explore giant caves you don't know it now but 10 years from now it'll still be a very big part of your life one way or another now obviously the mobile version this game has evolved so much to what it is now but it's interesting to see how it had so much more humble beginnings there was no infinite worlds there was a low draw distance and we were still getting used to touch controls as an idea but with the Experia play and the Dual joysticks it's almost like this game was made for this phone and it's probably because this game kind of was made for this phone have you ever seen the Minecraft Pocket Edition trailer where the guy's on the toilet playing Minecraft on his phone everything yeah look look what phone is using there was even a special Minecraft edition of the Experia play that released exclusively in the UK okay though my God it really feels like they phoned it in here honestly it's like they tossed minecraft. jpeg onto the phone and said all yep send it they even had a whole marketing campaign with Christian Shaw promoting the game along with all of its awkward 2010 humor super cool I mean look I made my face out of dirt pretty good for a dirt face bro playing Minecraft from the go was the ultimate move back in the day and this was the definitive way to play it hands down and it's nice to see how far we've come not only Minecraft but also the state of gaming on phones as a whole today gaming phones is a completely different connotation than what it did like 12 years ago gaming specific phones now have stuff like high refresh rates and internal fans on the high end streaming your games is a lot more common now too things like Xbox game pass you know PlayStation Remote Play and steam link all offer you the ability to stream your games so that way your phone isn't doing the heavy lifting anymore battery life in general means you can play much longer compared to like the 1 hour game time I got max out of this thing and if you still want physical controls on your main phone there's options like the backbone available where you can just clip in your phone and it just works with all the physical buttons it's not as Sleek as simple as like the built-in controls on the xeria play but eh you know asked for the xeria play sadly didn't really sell as much as Sony wanted so the idea was never really Revisited they also own the patent for slide up gaming controls so no other phone can really try this out but I still really love this thing to me it still represents what it was to be able to be like a teenager and being all excited for regarding Game Boy emulators on your phone and using those weird survey apps like uh App Nana that took months and months of surveys to be able to get like one gift card I don't know it was just a special time to me that just can't really be replicated anymore I I I really miss it anyways I think an officially Sony licensed xeria Play 2 in this day and age would honestly be really really cool honestly apparently there was a leak a few years ago of a prototype of a modern Xperia Play but it obviously never really went anywhere and because of that we can't really validate if it was even real or not but it does look pretty real to me I feel like this is what a modern interpretation of an xerial Play 2 would look like what do you think if they came out with a modern xerial Play 2 with like Modern Hardware and proper controls and everything would you buy it is there even a market for this sort of thing anymore since I know a lot of people kind of hate on mobile gaming as a whole let me know in the comments I I know I can't be the only one that loves the idea of having a brand new modern Playstation phone in 2024

Channel: Dammit Jeff

Views: 242,906

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Id: zWWoU_JeNs8

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024