We have been scouring the web for fake consoles for many years, we do it as part of a YouTube series which always goes down well with our community.
About a month ago, I was scanning through AliExpress when I found what the creator likes to call the “Project X” but it’s obviously a rip-off of the upcoming Playstation Portal and a way to legally get around copyright infringement.
So I bought one… specifically to make content on it and then shortly after to be use it as a paper weight.
It’s available on AliExpress for just £30, so in my mind, it was worth the risk, and oh boy, did I laugh as soon as it arrived.
The packaging is pretty basic, but comes with full colour branding, and the “Project X” branding on the side, with a USB-C cable and a HDMI cable that I didn’t even try because I knew it wouldn’t work properly.
It’s much smaller than the original Playstation Portal, comes with the unique Sony DPAD, soft low quality action buttons, click shoulder buttons, and two analogue sticks that work… i guess?
When you turn it on, you’ll be greeted with the awful, low quality screen which has barely any backlight so you won’t have any chance seeing the screen if you’re playing it outside.
The OS is what you would expect, laughably terrible, but I did manage to get around it easily, and found close to 10,000 games pre-loaded on this thing.
I found Gameboy games, SEGA Mega Drive games, SNES, Famicom and a single Playstation 1 game that ran incredibly slowly, had frame rate issues and audio stutters.
Which is a shame because I would have loved to play the best PS1 games on a fake Playstation Portal because I am weird like that.
In all honesty, I have seen worse fake consoles in my time and this has impressive build quality for something so illegal.
It makes the perfect gag gift this Christmas, but just remember to order it early as it typically takes a couple of weeks to ship from China.
