I played the OG PSO on Dreamcast, convinced someone to get me a Hunters License to play online in Episode 2. It was the advent of cheaters and they basically PK'd you with cheat device and using actions depending on whatever color/team number you were. Lost a lot of good weapons, since whatever you had equipped would drop on death or disconnect, and you had to go back and retrieve it.
I then got the Nintendo GameCube version of PSO, played online for a bit and it had offline couch coop, which was fun with friends.
I later played the Japanese version of Blue Burst, for a while. Then played Universe on 360, which I found to be a bit boring.
I never played the portable version, but I remember trying to play PSO2, but the MS store kept being a bitch because my Account was created in a different region than I was living in currently. So, I had trouble downloading it, then it came to Steam, and I was able to add it to my Library and the same regional issue happened. I wanted to play it with friends, but no dice, then NGS came out. From what I saw it looked fun, I'll have to try getting again when I get back Stateside.