Can you buy cheap PSP games?

If you're a PSP owner, then you're already familiar with the cutting-edge glow of Sony's handheld. The first time you held one, it felt like the future.

It might seem wrong, then, to look into the old and the used as a source of gaming. But with all the other gadgets and extras out there for your PSP, every bit of saved cash helps.

PSP gamers already benefit from a thriving homebrew community that enables them to emulate a lot of great, old games. But because of the console's slow start, there are probably a few old made-for-PSP classics that you never found. The best way to play the missed chart-toppers of yesteryear is the realm of second-hand gaming, and we've gone on a journey to see just how economical it is.

The bad news is that the sleek, slick black gadgety feel that we love so much about the handheld is exactly what makes it hard for PSP owners to get good second-hand deals. Owners keep their games, it seems.

Major pre-owned distributors on the high street, like Gamestation and Game, have little or no pre-owned PSP games available, and charity shops are even less likely to give up any portable prizes, unlike the second-hand DS and GBA situation.

So where do you go when all looks bleak? Where do you go when you can't find it anywhere else? The internet, of course.

Auction sites are where most games change hands nowadays, and it's not just because it's simple to do: it often provides the seller with a better return than trading in on the high street.

eBay, still the largest auction site on the internet, has thousands of auctions for PSP games of all ages, and all costs. We took Pocket Gamer's top PSP games list and saw what we could get for our measly budget.

We started off well. Lumines, the excellent PSP puzzler, was ours for just £4 and Ridge Racer for £8. Because the big names have been passed by their sequels, games like Lumines often get ignored online, which means you can still enjoy them for very little.

But a lot of the auctions seem to be disappointingly pricey. Call of Duty: Roads to Victory was going for as much as £25 used, and Mercury Meltdown was hard to find for less than £15, even though it's a relatively old and unloved game.

Second-hand PSP games usually come in good condition, but you still need to be careful online for fakes and damaged goods. Thankfully, region-encoding isn't a worry, but make sure any purchases are in a language you understand. We almost grabbed a cheap copy of Metal Gear : Portable Ops before realising we'd need to spend a few hundred pounds on a course in Japanese to be able to play it.

Before leaving eBay, we'd pocketed WipEout Pure for just £4 and the excellent, underrated puzzler Exit for £3, but got hugely outbid on some surprising games. Sid Meier's Pirates! went for £16 and Ace Combat X had its price pushed up by £10 in the space of a few minutes before we gave up.

The frustration of auctioning was beginning to get to us. Was there nowhere else worth going to?

We had mixed success elsewhere. Whilst eBay continues to thrive online, some sellers prefer to take the luck out of selling and use sites like Amazon.co.uk to sell at a fixed price. The downside is that many of these games aren't cheap at all.

Our earlier shock at Pirates! was drained when we saw it on sale for £21.95 used. But a select few games are markedly cheaper on sites like this, and they're not the ones you might expect to see cheap. Gitaroo Man Lives! was ours for less than a fiver, and were also happy to pay £16.99 for the brilliant Syphon Filter : Dark Mirror and only £11.99 for Ultimate Ghosts and Goblins.

Pre-owned games shopping is always about searching and bartering, but PSP owners face a more win-some, lose-some experience than other gamers it seems. Some games are undoubtedly very cheap, but very likely because of the homebrew scene, second-hand PSP consoles themselves remain relatively highly-priced, and some brands, such as Grand Theft Auto, never seem to get any cheaper.

Nevertheless, we filled our library with a lot of the past classics after some diligent work online, and saved some money with some snooping around. As the range of PSP games becomes ever-larger, so will the range of preowned games, and prices are inevitably likely to fall in line with the recent console price cut.

For now, though, it's a case of rummaging around.