Lian Xing is stumbling clumsily backwards through the control room, the petite brunette moving with about as much grace as a gorilla on ice, which is disturbing, not only because the covert operative only tips the scales at only 54 kilograms, but because this is Syphon Filter, Dark Mirror, a game of stealth and the first game to bring user-friendly precision control to the Playstation Portable platform. Even more alarming, I’m not actually touching the analogue nub. Lian bumps drunkenly into a doorway, alerting the three guards to her presence and slumps to the floor in a hail of gunfire. Lian’s dead, but far far worse, and without getting too technical, The Incomplete Gamer PSP is rooted.

Everyone out there bemoaning the fact that the PSP only has one analogue nub, and not the two analogue joysticks like the PS2 and PS3; there is a fate far worse, which is of course no analogue nub at all. Kutaragi’s Law of course states that your PSP will break on a public holiday, at a location where you have no on-line access and at a time when you have a great deal of free time to get your game on, if only your PSP would function.

So 500 kilometres from the dust free Incomplete Gamer Lab, without so much as a ‘google’ and with only a jewelers screwdriver to our name, we set about opening the PSP ands exposing its innards. Or at least we would have had we remembered the location of the hidden screws beneath the battery bay sticker. Undeterred we managed to pull open the front of the PSP wide enough to give us access to the joystick nub and the phillips head screws that hold it in place.

There’s a broken disk inside the analogue nub (we suspect Pursuit Force was the culprit, but it may well have been Street Fighter Alpha) and no amount of temporary jiggling was going to put humpty together again, although that didn’t stop us trying. Rather than being rewarded for our perseverance, we managed to inadvertently scratch the inside of the front face plate, so when we eventually returned to the Incomplete Gamer labs we now have a PSP with broken analogue nub and a scratched screen.

Back at the lab and a quick search of Ebay found a number of Hong Kong based suppliers selling the analogue nub unit, and various options for replacement faceplates. The first analogue unit to arrive was slightly damaged (missing one of two loops used to attach it to the faceplate). We promptly order another unit from supplier B and then set about cannibalising the original unit and the replacement unit, hoping to making one complete sucker from the sum of the parts. Once you know how, you’ll be reassembling this sucker in your sleep, but until you reach that level of Zen like mastery you’ll find yourself cursing words you’d never even heard of. For the uninitiated, we highly recommend Califrag’s how to video, below.

The faceplate was next to arrive and fitting is a snap after the finger gymnastics you’ve just performed with the analogue nub. Props to the manufacturer. If it’s not OEM, it’s a near perfect clone complete with requisite PSP and Sony logos. We’re not altogether convinced about the colour. Sure it’s a perfect match for our Sony Ericsson K610i mobile phone lying around the Lab, but like the couch we moved to the other side of the lab, we still haven’t quite got used to the portables’ new clothes.