The PSP GPS Still Works in 2024

[Music] hey everyone John here and today I want to talk about what I think is to this day one of the coolest systems ever made and that is the PSP Playstation Portable not only did this have a stellar library but it was pretty much a smartphone way before the era of smartphones in 2004 2005 you could watch movies on the go take pictures on the go listen to mp3s Wherever You Are there's an internet browser this was a huge part of my childhood growing up and my sisters and I used this a lot the goam this allowed you to put it on top of your PSP and it worked as both a front-facing camera and a rear-facing camera by just flipping it around and this was way better than just general mobile phone quality but one thing that I was always curious about but never owned as a kid was this the GPS now this released in Europe and Japan Jaan but I'm not entirely sure if it released in America there were definitely announcements of it coming but there's very little information about whether it actually released so if it did it was a very small scale released but some crucial software that used the GPS didn't release in America personally though this is a Japanese version here I got it with everybody's golf which yes does mean that some games used the GPS this was a bundle with two different discs I'm not entirely sure what the discs do but we'll talk about the functionality in this later in addition to this which is incredibly cool but I think the most useful bit of software was go explore yeah we had the go cam we had go explore but these have no relation to the PSP Go in fact the PSP Go does not support the goam or the go GPS they nothing to do with each other I was incredibly curious if this thing still works and so I took to the streets of Southampton with my PSP in hand and a camera pointed at it and many people staring at me and you know what this thing guided me around I wasn't looking where I was going this the PSP was in control as it should be as it always is it can sometimes take a little bit to find the satellite signal especially inside but I found outside it very quickly calculates all it needs to and eventually it starts beeping once it finds all the dots and then magically the satellite is talking to your PSP and showing you exactly where to go you can point it anywhere on the map and say hey PSP take me here and instantly it will find a route and give you full 3d navigation both with visuals and audio telling you when to turn and exactly how many meters or feet are ahead until the next turn and it's just incredibly modern feeling in fact at the time the PSP GPS was perhaps one of the most powerful GPS's on the market because there was no need for many of those systems to have the power of a PS SP inside of them so many are quite sluggish in that era whereas this you can very easily just browse the entire map without really much slowdown at all although there is a 3D model mode which spawns some buildings and important landmarks and in big cities like London this does bring the PSP to a craw so I would suggest turning this off if you don't just want to see the low poly Big Ben model but yeah look at this this is working so well and I suppose it may be worth saying for those who have grown up with smartphones but but your GPS doesn't require internet when using apps like Google Maps all your data is doing is just streaming in map data but you can download that offline and use your GPS anywhere but with the PSP Go all the map data is on the go explore UMD so yes this is outdated this is nearly 20y old map data but it got me around Southampton and what's really cool too is yes you can just click on the map and say go here but it also includes a ton of suggestions like accommodation and restaurants and shops and travel there's a ton in here and much of it is still up to date not not that many of the shops are but just general Services they still work perfectly fine I tried telling it to take me to this Cafe over here and uh it's a Starbucks now so technically it took me to a cafe but not the one that it thought it was I also found that it didn't have Southampton central train station on the train list had Southampton airport Parkway but that's a different train station so I had to just sort of remember exactly where that was on the map and say go there please uh but for the most part it was great and the actual positioning is really accurate especially for GPS from this era it may not be quite as one to one as many smartphones today like if you turn around without really moving it probably won't recognize that you have moved around but the moment you take a few steps it catches up so quickly and you can tell it whether you're a pedestrian a cyclist in a car in a taxi and that all works perfectly I was was very able to get around with this thing telling me where to go and given I used to live in Southampton I wanted to explore some retro shops I used to visit and the first one I found is right by the station and it is now just a vaping shop so that was kind of a disappointment but then I said to the PSP GPS take me to the Marlon shopping center Southampton has two there's Wes key and the Marlins uh the PSP GPS remembers one that used to be there but it's not there anymore more but yeah it took me to the Marlins with no problem at all it was perfect and here I found a CX which I know is kind of basic and they all smell the same but I found Prince of Persia rival swords for the Wii in addition to this cool looking golf game here which I've never played before or really heard anything about but I think it looks neat and in the Marlins there's also a story I went to all the time called The Laugh ladder and I thought this was shut When approaching it cuz there was just these shutters where I remember the store being but then turning the corner turns out it's still open and it's got such a core selection just great Vibes in this store but unfortunately there was nothing in here that caught my eye that didn't already own but yeah really cool selection and then I just kind of walked around the city letting the PSP take me wherever it wanted to go and I had a great time doing this definitely got a lot of strange looks but I just think it's so cool using Hardware that's like 20 years old in fact I think many of the strange looks were people looking at the PSP and thinking I didn't know the GPS store worked I've got to go and buy one myself now now it is worth saying that the go explore software this one here this only contains map data for the UK and Ireland they released this in many different ways with many different map data uh mostly covering Europe as I don't think that's ever released in America or Canada and so if you try deviating away from the UK you will see that the maps are there but they're not actually filled in there's no actual data locations or anything so this is just for UK and I Island but there's so many cool things you can do with this you can plan out Journeys in advance and see exactly how they would play out without actually taking the journey I think that's kind of neat in fact here's some direct feed see exactly how it works prepared to go over the roundabout after 300 M taking the second exit after 100 m go over the round about taking the second exit take the second exit drive for 5 km if the PSP GPS were just a GPS from 2006 2007 that would be perfectly fine go explore is incredibly impressive for the era it came out in but this is a game system and some games did use the GPS so let's talk about the game that I had bundled with the GPS here being everybody's Golf and while I can't exactly demonstrate what this does I can show you what the menus kind of look like so what this would do is you could take it to real golf courses in Japan and essentially use it like an overhead map so you can be golfing on a real Golf Course look down at the map see where the green is and just kind of aim for that and as you walk down to where your ball is it will tell you exactly where you are on the map how far away you are from the green and I think that's so damn cool I kind of want to go to Japan to use this feature alone but I don't know if that is worth a video budget maybe a maybe that can be a patreon goal I don't know but another game that I think has incredible utility is Metal Gear Solid portable Ops this essentially had Poké stops in 2007 but what is strange about this is while the PSP GPS doesn't seem to have released in America had a very limited release in America only the American and Japanese versions support the GPS so here in Europe with a GPS was pretty pretty broadly released our menu doesn't have GPS as an option which is weird because it's in the manual look it's right there in the manual but no it's not actually on our menu and so I found a way to play the ntsc version and you know what I think this is so damn cool so in Metal Gear Solid portable Ops a big component of the gameplay is recruiting enemy soldiers to be part of your squad so you can essentially use them as lives like if they die you go to a different character and they have different perks too like better sneaking speeds or different weapons it it's a cool little system and this game allowed you to go to Wi-Fi hotspots to get different recruits as well so it wasn't just within the game itself but another way to do it was with GPS and I have looked everywhere online but I can't find any documentation of this feature people have asked about it and the responses are I don't know what you're talking about but I can't see any images or video of this being used and so as one of the few people in the world with PSP GPS and an American portable Ops I'm going to show you what this does so when you click GPS first it has to find the satellite and then it shows you this circle with a bunch of dots and for a while I just kind of waited on this screen because it looks a lot like how go explore looks when trying to s to the satellite but no this is the game and these dots are recruits they're soldiers you can find and so you're meant to be walking around and trying to get these dots to get into the middle of the radar so you're trying to walk towards them and but one problem with this is there's no like real time Compass showing which way you're facing so it's kind of trial and error as to what way you're meant to be actually walking but I did managed to secure a soldier it wasn't easy though first off it was was raining so I was getting pretty wet and as was the PSP which was a bit concerning to me but also I ran into a dead end quite a few times I managed to get a DOT really close to me I zoomed in I could see how close it was but I couldn't quite reach it there's a wall in my way should I throw the PSP or should I find another route I decided to find another route but eventually I did manage to get it in my circle and I could recruit a really high level Soldier again apologies for the wet PSP but here is footage of this working this feature not only works in the year 2024 but we can finally see it I'm probably one of the few people in the world who have ever used this and I just think that's really damn cool I got a bit cocky though and I tried using this again and I got really close to finding another recruit but then that happened and it's probably just as well because there's a wall right here and I was very close to invading on someone's private property so yes the PSP GPS does work in 2024 and while the map data on go explore is outdated I think it's still fine for the most part when using it when driving some roads may be outdated but just as a pedestrian I had no problems oh yeah some of the shops it was listing don't exist anymore but just getting around and about this totally works and in fact I'm going to use it more this month I kind of want to replace my smartphone with a PSP does that sound crazy maybe a does but that's definitely going to be a video coming up sometime in the future and a big component of that is the GPS but it's just so rad that some games would use this too portable Ops is essentially Pokémon go like 15 years before Pokémon go was ever a thing and is red as all flip but let me know if you have a PSP GPS and have you tried using it in the last decade plus and are you now tempted to get one yourself thanks for watching everybody and I will catch you next time [Music] bye

Channel: Good Vibes Gaming

Views: 12,014

Keywords: PSP, GPS, playstation portable, accessory, peripheral, camera, maps, navigation, footage, metal gear solid, portable ops, gameplay, playstation

Id: chZmey_HzaQ

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024