If you’ve followed my blog for a while now you should know that my PSP Go and I are inseparable.  Ever since I bought the device off Craigslist it’s proven to be extremely portable, versatile and user-friendly.  I’ve got every PSX-era Final Fantasy on it with room to spare — in short; I love it.

You should also know that I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Portable 3rd HD in my free time between school and various other projects.  It’s hard to plunk down a ton of time into the game, so I kept finding myself wishing I could play it when out and about.  Well, I recently imported a UMD version of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd for Sarah since she’s been getting into Monster Hunter due in no small part to our podcast.  I got her PSP-1000 all set up with the game and the highly necessary data install.  To make sure that the data-swap feature was as seamless as promised, I loaded my own file onto her PSP.  It worked!  I was playing my own character on a PSP!

Now, this was Sarah’s PSP, and as excited as I was, I didn’t want to steal it from her.  That would be wrong, right?!  That left one option: hack my PSP Go.

I’d never really researched how to hack a PSP, but I’d picked up bits of information over the years about how difficult it was.  Something about the PSP-1000 being the easiest to hack, something about buying a certain type of battery.  It was a daunting task in my mind.  Still, I pushed on.  It turns out there have been great strides in the area of cracking open PSPs for their illegal goodness.  I ended up using this site which walked a simpleton like myself right through the process.

Once I’d gotten Monster Hunter Portable 3rd operational, there was one other game I’ve wanted to play on my PSP Go for ages: Breath of Fire III.

Joel got me into this series when we were little sprats, so it’s always a highly nostalgic experience when I play it.  The PSP version of the game was only released in the United Kingdom for some odd and frustrating reason.  There was a slight issue in which the game was prompting me that there as insufficient memory available for a save file.  Now, I have about fourteen gigs of free space on my PSP Go so that obviously wasn’t the case.  I think the issues may have had to do with the game being a UMD rip, and the UMD naturally assumes that there is a pro-duo inserted into the device — which the PSP Go lacks.  I discovered a workaround in which I simply downloaded a save file from Gamefaqs and put it in my save file folder.  The game recognized it and I overwrote it!

It feels good to have the complete Monster Hunter Portable 3rd experience, and it feels better to have Breath of Fire III at the ready.  I hope to revisit the game soon.  I know the nostalgia it will create will engulf me like a warm blanket made of dragons.  Thus, I add another feather in the cap of my PSP Go — the device that keeps on giving, to the man with too little time to spend in front of a television.