Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Shipped Two Builds on the Same Day. One of Them Runs on 100 More Handhelds.

On 19 January 2010, Konami released Silent Hill: Shattered Memories on two discs on the same day — a PlayStation 2 port of the Wii original, and a separate PlayStation Portable build. Both went on sale in North America that day, and both were in European shops by 26 February. The PS2 version is the one reviewers liked, and it is close enough to the Wii game that IGN called the content "otherwise identical". The PSP version is the one that got the complaints.

Sixteen years later, the version with the complaints is the version most people can actually play.

This catalogue grades 593 handhelds against nineteen retro systems each, and 445 of those devices carry a grade for both the PlayStation 2 and the PSP. On the PSP build, 234 clear a B or better — the threshold where a game is playable with some settings work rather than a science project. On the PS2 build, 134 do. That is a gap of exactly one hundred devices, and it does not come from a small sample of expensive hardware: it comes from a structure that repeats in every row of the table.

What shipped, and when

Shattered Memories is not a remake of the 1999 game in the usual sense. Climax Studios, which had just finished the prequel Silent Hill: Origins, pitched Konami two ideas — a detective story called Brahms PD and a snowbound entry called Cold Heart — and the finished game borrows from both. It is a reimagining: Harry Mason still crashes outside Silent Hill looking for his daughter, and the town, the characters and the plot are rearranged around a psychological profile the game builds while you play.

The Wii version arrived first, on 8 December 2009, built around the Wii Remote as flashlight and radio. The PS2 and PSP versions followed on 19 January 2010 in North America, 26 February in Europe, 25 March in Japan and 22 April in Australia. All three are Climax work, all three were published by Konami, and all three carry Akira Yamaoka's score.

The reception split along exactly the lines you would guess:

Those are Wikipedia's aggregate figures and the two IGN reviews, both still readable in the Internet Archive and linked at the bottom of this piece. The important line for a buyer is IGN's PS2 comment: "since the content is otherwise identical, there's great fun to be had." The PS2 port is the same game with worse controls than the Wii. The PSP build is the same game with worse controls and a smaller, slower, blurrier render — and, per IGN's PSP review, a framerate that "suffers" and textures that are "blurry".

Which is the version you should play. It is not necessarily the version you can run.

How these grades are built

The numbers in this piece come from the same table that renders every console page on this site, read on 15 November 2026. It holds 593 rows. Every row is graded per system, on an A-to-F scale, from a single hardware capability model: A means the system should feel easy on that device, B means many games are playable with emulator choices and settings work, C is a tinkerer's grade, and anything below that is a warning label rather than a buying signal. The explainer on how to read these grades says the same thing at more length.

A grade is not a benchmark of one game. It is the friction the whole system is expected to produce on that device, and it exists so that a person choosing between a $70 handheld and a $269 one can tell what the extra money buys.

Two disclosures about the count. First, 445 of the 593 rows carry grades for both systems and 148 carry none at all — the 593 is the catalogue, the 445 is the graded subset, and every percentage below is out of 445. Second, a grade measures the emulation target, not the game: nothing here says Shattered Memories specifically runs well, only that the platform it shipped on does.

The staircase

Cross-tabulate PSP grade against PS2 grade across those 445 devices and the table does something unusual. It has eighteen occupied cells, and in every one of them the PSP grade is the same as the PS2 grade or better. There is not a single device in the catalogue that grades worse on the PSP than it does on the PlayStation 2.

Read the top row down and you can see the whole argument in one column. One hundred and sixty-eight devices grade an A on the PSP. Of those, 104 also grade an A on the PS2 — the modern Android handhelds with enough CPU to brute-force a 2000-era console. The other 64 do not, and they fan out across every grade below A, from a B down to a D. Meanwhile the 102 devices that fail the PSP outright also fail the PS2 outright: there is no row where the PSP grade is F and the PS2 grade is anything else.

Two consequences follow directly:

• The PS2 list is a strict subset of the PSP list. All 134 devices that clear a B on the PS2 also clear an A on the PSP. Not 130. All of them. Zero exceptions in 445 rows.
• The reverse is where the money is. Thirty-four devices grade an A on the PSP and a C or worse on the PS2. Seventy-two clear a B on the PSP while grading a D or worse on the PS2. One hundred and forty-five clear a C on the PSP while grading a D or worse on the PS2 — a third of the graded catalogue.

That is not a property of Shattered Memories. It is a property of the two machines, and the catalogue records it honestly: the PSP is a 333 MHz handheld with 32 MB of main memory, the PlayStation 2 is a 294 MHz console with a vector-unit architecture that software renderers have spent a quarter of a century learning to imitate badly. Emulating the PS2 is the harder job on every device that can attempt both, so the grades descend in exactly that order.

What "100 more devices" means at the cheap end

The practical version of the gap is the price of admission. Here are the ten cheapest devices in the catalogue that clear a B or better on the PSP build, with the PS2 grade in the last column so you can see what the same money does against the other disc. Every price and every grade was re-read from the live console page on 15 November 2026. Where a maker sells several configurations, the figure is the opening price of the cheapest one.

The cheapest A on the PSP build is $70, and five of the six devices under $100 grade an A on it. Below that line the grades fall away fast: the catalogue's cheapest device, the $38 RG35, is a C on the PSP and an F on the PS2, which is the honest description of a 2019-era chip against a handheld with a 333 MHz MIPS core inside it.

Now the same exercise for the PS2 build:

The cheapest B on the PS2 build is $114, and it is the same Retroid Pocket Classic: an A on the PSP disc and a B on the PS2 one, which is exactly the device this comparison exists for. The cheapest A is $209. The cheapest device that grades the same on both discs is that $209 Retroid Pocket 6, one of the 104 rows in the catalogue that grade an A on each.

Which gives the honest summary of the price structure, and it is more interesting than a straight ladder. The PSP build is playable at a B for $70. The PS2 build is playable at a B for $114 — a gap of $44, far smaller than the 100-device gap would suggest. What the grade gap actually measures is not the entry price but how far up the hardware ladder you have to climb before the second disc becomes comfortable: $209 for an A on the PS2 against $70 for an A on the PSP.

Which disc to play, if you own one of these

The gap does not make the decision for you, because the two versions are not equal as games. Working from the grades and from what the reviews actually say:

• If your device grades an A on the PS2 build, play the PS2 version. IGN's line is that the content is identical and the PS2 port "very closely resembles the Wii incarnation" — 8.5 for graphics, 9.0 for sound — and its only complaint is the one it makes about the Wii too: the psych-profile system is ambitious but does not go far enough. You are getting the better-looking, better-sounding build of the same story.
• If your device grades a B on the PS2 build but an A on the PSP, play the PS2 version and accept frameskip, or play the PSP build and accept a blurrier picture. This is the awkward middle: the $114–$209 band. There is no wrong answer here, only which compromise you would rather look at.
• If your device grades a C or worse on the PS2 but a B or better on the PSP, play the PSP build. This is the majority of the catalogue, and it is not a consolation prize: the psych profile, the chase sequences, the no-combat design and Yamaoka's score are all in the PSP version, because they are the game. IGN's PSP review is explicit that "the narrative and character profile system still impress" even while it complains about the controls.
• If your device grades an F on the PSP, no disc helps. That is 102 devices, and the number is not an accident: they fail the PSP and the PS2 together, in the same way, because they are the same class of hardware.

The version reviewers liked less is the one you can carry

There is an irony in the numbers that is worth stating plainly rather than burying in a footnote. The PSP build is the worst version of Shattered Memories by every published measure — 73 on Metacritic against 77 and 79, a 7.0 from IGN against 8.0 and 8.6, blurry textures, a framerate that struggles, a Harry who "moves slower and heavier", and a flashlight you cannot point. It is also the version that runs on 100 more handhelds in this catalogue, and the only version that runs at an A on a device that costs $70.

That is not a recommendation to prefer the worse port. It is a description of where the library actually lives. The PlayStation 2 was a 2000 machine whose architecture software has spent a quarter of a century learning to imitate; the PSP was a 2004 handheld that software has spent two decades learning to imitate well, on hardware that was always meant to be portable. If you want to play a 2009 survival horror game on a device that fits in a coat pocket in 2026, the PSP build is not a compromise you chose. It is the only door that opens.

The PSP emulation guide covers which devices are worth buying for that library specifically, and the PS2 guide covers the tier above it. This piece is narrower than either: it is about one game that shipped twice, and the hundred-device gap between the two discs.

What this does not say

Four limits, stated before anyone buys anything.

A grade is a friction estimate, not a frame counter. A B on the PS2 build does not mean Shattered Memories holds 60 frames per second on that device; it means the system is expected to be playable with emulator choices and settings work. A game with no combat and a lot of fog is more forgiving than the grade assumes, and one with heavy alpha effects is less forgiving. Nobody has benchmarked this specific title on all 445 devices, and this piece does not pretend otherwise.

The catalogue's price column is not one number. Many rows carry a maker's tier list — "$70 - $100", "$209 - $279", "8GB+128GB: $220, plus shipping" — and the figure in the tables above is the opening price of the cheapest configuration, read off the live page rather than out of the stored snapshot. Three devices checked for this article had a snapshot that disagreed with the page: the RG406H prints $209.95 against a stored $168, the Retroid Pocket G2 prints $319.95 against $219, and the TRIMUI Brick Pro prints $109.95 against $100. Some of these are maker's prices that ship from outside the EU, which means import VAT and duty on top.

148 rows carry no grade at all. They are in the catalogue, they are not in the 445, and they are excluded from every count here rather than being treated as failures. A device with no grade published is unknown, not bad.

The Wii version is still the best version. It is also graded — 136 of the 445 devices clear a B on the Wii build — but a Wii disc is not what this decision is about. If you already own a Wii and a CRT, the question answers itself and none of the above applies.

Sources

• Wikipedia — "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories": en.wikipedia.org — release dates for Wii, PlayStation 2 and PSP, Metacritic aggregates, development history and the IGN review summaries quoted above.
• IGN (via Internet Archive) — "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Review — PlayStation Portable" (2010): web.archive.org — the "obvious visual downgrades", "sluggish controls", flashlight complaint and the 7.0/7.5/8.5/7.0 category scores.
• IGN (via Internet Archive) — "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Review — PlayStation 2" (2010): web.archive.org — "the PS2 iteration is no slouch", "the content is otherwise identical", and the 8.0/8.5/9.0 category scores.
• Push Square — "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Review (PS2)": pushsquare.com — a later PS2 review reaching the same conclusion about atmosphere without combat.
• Eurogamer — "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories hands-on": eurogamer.net — contemporary hands-on coverage of the design changes.
• Lost In Consoles — emulation grades, prices and device slugs are read from this site's own catalogue table on 15 November 2026 and re-verified on each live console page linked above. The grading scale is explained in How To Read Emulation Grades Before Buying; the full per-system matrix is at /compatibility.