DJMax Portable 3

2025-08-09
DJMax Portable 3 begins like any other rhythm game. You're coming to grips with the ugly yet practical UI, you watch a tutorial on how to press the proper buttons corresponding to the correct notes as they float down the absurdly miniscule screen–seriously they use like 25% of the screen for the actual interactive bit of the game–you're sporadically bobbing your head along to the music when it briefly descends out of the mire of mediocrity. And then you notice the audio seems off. You question whether your audio jack is bad. Unplugging your headphones you discover the sound persists. Is that a crackling I'm hearing now? Is it getting louder? It is getting louder. You finish the first song and move on to the second, concerned about the health of your PSP. I know it's been 20 years since I bought you, PSP, but surely you can make it through one more delightfully average song. Then the screen starts to flicker. Or maybe it's getting darker. Yes, that's it: the whole game is getting darker. "My PSP is dying. I’m so sorry, PSP. Playing these boring ass songs is no way to go", you think.

You just got anti-piracy'd. That's right, the developers of DJMax wrote code that detects when the UMD version of the game is played from a memory stick and starts a programmatic descent into madness, literally breaking the game down before your eyes. It's quite spectacular to behold really. On the one hand I'm honestly impressed with the creativity the devs had to fuck with people who pirated their game (fair play, really!) but on the other, after getting the proper digital version from Sony's servers, I found a very middling rhythm game. I mean, seriously, guys how are you able to see the fucking notes when you use like seven and a half pixels of your screen real estate. Well, at least my PSP isn't terminally ill.