My oppinion on Intelligent Cube and Jumping Flash being on the PlayStation Classic

OK so back to the PlayStation classic and my opinion on the games on it. For a start lets take a look at Intelligent Qube. Well you might have seen this game on the list of PlayStation games on the classic and shaken your head and gone ''what the heck is that'' well if your in Europe like I am then that might be because when the game was originally released here on the PlayStation it was released under the title Kurushi. Now I could lie and pretend that I had owned this game or that I had some story about how it was important to me to try and make this a good post but in total honesty the closest I ever got to this game was sampling it in a PlayStation Demo disc, it was a disc I remember also containing one of the Abe oddworld games but in all honesty all I ever did was have a few little go's on it and its not something that has really stuck with me. I can see why they would put it on the Classic, it was originally published by Sony and apparently it was very very popular in Japan. I guess with the fact that Sony published it would make it easy to get onto the system and well if your going by the idea that you want a full shooter a few RPG's a couple of puzzlers then this would definitely help you reach that kind of quota. I can hardly remember how the game worked so I am not very excited about it at all and I would personally have liked to have seen the space being used by a different title. 

One game I do have fond memories of though which has made it to the PlayStation classic is Jumping Flash, a game in which you play a metal high jumping rabbit in a 3D world. One of the things which makes this game interesting is that it was a very early PlayStation game coming out just after the machines release and has been described as an ancestor of as well as an early showcase for 3D graphics in console gaming. For me this game kind of represents a certain kind of game in a certain state at a certain point in time and this is kind of what I think these Mini Classic consoles are supposed to do, there supposed to capture and represent a particular point in video game history and the feel of a particular machine. It was generally well received by critics when it was released, it was praised for both its graphics as well as its unique 3D platforming game-play. This is a game that I am actually quiet happily surprised to see on the machine, but I can see why some people would argue for something else to take its place, something which has kind of been remembered by more people. There are plenty of games which are not on the machine which I would happily trade Jumping Flash for like Silent Hill and Symphony of the Night but there is certainly a lot of games I would throw off the machine before Jumping Flash.

I think my opinion on these two games probably showcases the real problem with these classic consoles, someone will probably read my opinion and go urgh why does he hold Jumping Flash in high regard and thinks it belongs while trying to get rid of Intelligent Qube, does this man not realize how great Intelligent Qube is and how much it represents the machine while others probably wonder what the heck either of these games are and thinks of Tekken and Ridge Racer when thinking about the PlayStation.

A bit about the PlayStation things I have been doing recently and if I am actually going to get a Playstation Classic?

So I guess with the PlayStation Classic being just around the corner I have been thinking about PlayStations an awful lot recently. For one I found myself setting up a PlayStation 2 so that I could play PlayStation 1 and 2 games but also because I had some equipment I wanted to mess with. I had a second hand PS2 I had grabbed from a charity shop ages OK with all its leads for like £10, and then I had a network/hard drive adapter I had spent like £3 on.  To be honest I had purchased this adapter not realizing I was supposed to have a official disc to set it up. I had an old Hard-drive a 40gig model I had grabbed cheap for, £2 and then I had this memory card with software on it which was supposed to help you use programs on your PS2 so you could burn games to the hard drive and play them. In the end I got it up and running and despite being disappointed that I couldn't burn PS1 games to it I did start going through my PS2 games and putting a few on the Hard drive and showing my daughter a few I didn't think she had played before.

Then last night I hit the PSN store and spent around £12 on there and got a load of PS1 games for the vita/ps3/ Vita TV I have. I got Crash Bandicoot 1,2 and 3, Spyro 1,2 and 3, Metal Gear solid, Silent Hill, and Crash Team Racing. Add these to the thirty PS1 download games my PS3 informs me I have on its hard-drive and I guess I now own nearly 40 of these games digitally and that's if I don't want to trouble myself by getting my disc collection out. Now one of the reasons I mention this is because I have been pondering if I should get the PS Classic or not, but when I put all of the above down in writing it doesn't really seem like the best of deals to be honest. If the machine ends up hack-able then this might alter things, or if I was to see some kind of deal on one, heck I might even get excited on the morning of release and run out and get one or decide as an amateur games journalist I just have to have it for reviewing so I guess I wont be overly confident in saying I am not going to be getting one.

My next PlayStation Classic post will be another one looking at a few of the games but for now I just wanted to talk about if I was going to get one or not and what I had been doing recently with one of my PlayStation 2's (Yes I have more than one, because I am a bit of a sad collector who always worries stuff will break one day).

My oppinion on Destruction Derby and Final Fantasy VII being on the PlayStation Classic , and the issue with diffrent regions Roms being used on the system.

OK so more information seems to have come out about the Sony PlayStation Classic now that a few sites online have had test units, and apparently Some games are the SCEA versions, and some are the SCEE ones, this in itself seems a little bit weird but to start with lets talk about what I mean by SCEA and SCEE. SCEA are the American versions and SCEE are the European versions, the American Versions usually ran at 60hz while the European versions ran at 50hz this usually meant that American and Japanese games were around 20% faster than there European counterparts. Games were often programmed at 60hz and then essentially forced into 50hz for Europe sometimes with optimization but usually without, this means that basically most of the time the 60hz version is really how the developer intended the game to be, and so in most cases gamers in the know tend to prefer to play the 60hz version of games if they can.As the games on the PlayStation classic are essential just disc/rom files it arguably should have been easy for Sony to just slap the 60hz American versions on every English Language regions machines but it doesn't appear like they have done this, heck you'd think that if they really wanted they could have doubled up the machines memory and put the SCEE and SCEA versions of every game on so that people could have fun looking for differences. So why do some people see this as a big issue? Well basically because people kind of want the best product that they can get for there money, and if you know that you very easily could have been given a better version of a game with it incurring the company providing the units no additional costs then it kind of seems crazy for you to be given an inferior version, does this ruin or damage the credibility and usefulness of the PlayStation classic? Well I guess that depends strongly on what is making you consider buying the unit and your own preferences and annoyances.

With that new information touched upon why don't we look at a few more of the games?

Now one of the games on the PlayStation classic that I am very happy to hear is on the system is Destruction Derby. Now I got that game very early in the machines life and I played it to absolute death, I not only loved the racing but I couldn't stop playing the Bowl where all you do is start in a big circular bowl with lots of other cars and try to smash the crud out of them without your car getting so damaged that it can no longer move. I not only spent a great deal of time playing this on at my own but I also pulled it out at plenty of party's and sleepovers and one of the funniest things was that my mother who wasn't even that keen on driving games managed to set a time that none of my friends could beat and it drove a particular friend of mine absolutely  mad to the point that he tried for 3 hours straight and couldn't even approach her score. I love this game because it gave me a whole lot of fun but even more than that it gave me a memory which I will carry with me forever a memory which is very much


OK now with Final Fantasy VII some people will argue that this or that Final Fantasy would be better, personally I would if I had to pick one and one only Final Fantasy game would have gone for Final Fantasy Tactics just because I love that kind of game but I can defiantly see why this game was picked for the PlayStation classic it is a long multi disc good Japanese RPG and after all RPG's were a very strong part of the PlayStation and this one does tend to hold a very special place in a lot of peoples hearts so I think this is an excellent addition to the PlayStation Classic and is probably one of the games which will make the people who purchase this machine decide to purchase it.

The PlayStation Classic full title list annouced and my oppinion on two of the games on it and if they belong on the system.

 

So the full list of games for the upcoming PlayStation Classic has been announced and I thought that was worth talking about, in general it feels like there is a sense of disappointment in the air people have been asking questions like where is Medievil? Where is Silent Hill? where is Spyro, where is Crash  and why is there not a single Tomb Raider game on this thing? I guess one of the issues though is that the PlayStation was a massively popular machine with a huge catalog of games for it and no matter what games were put on the machine some people were always going to end up disappointed. What do I personally think about things though? Well first I will list the games and then I will spend the rest of this blog talking about one or two of them with the idea being that by the time this machine launches that I will have talked about all of them at least a little.

• Battle Arena Toshinden
• Cool Boarders 2
• Destruction Derby
• Final Fantasy VII
• Grand Theft Auto
• Intelligent Qube
• Jumping Flash
• Metal Gear Solid
• Mr Driller
• Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
• Rayman
• Resident Evil Director’s Cut
• Revelations: Persona
• Ridge Racer Type 4
• Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
• Syphon Filter
• Tekken 3
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six
• Twisted Metal
• Wild Arms

OK so I know a lot of people will probably be a little surprised at the inclusion of Battle Arena Toshinden but I actually really enjoyed the game when the PlayStation originally released and I think the double one two beat em up punch of Tekken and Toshindon was a really strong point of the original consoles launch but I do find it a little strange we got Toshinden 1 and Tekken 3 instead of getting for example Toshinden 3. I do see how they might have wanted this mini console to have a similar beat em up double punch but I think that given the consoles long life and high game count they perhaps could have come up with a bit of a better two punch combo here. The truth is though I kind of like the games inclusion on this classic system but I can understand it not being other peoples cup of tea.

OK so that leads me to Cool Boarders 2 known in Japan as Cool Boarders 2: Killing Session for those who haven't played it well its basically a snowboarding video game which is part of a series which was largely exclusive to the PlayStation. So why are we getting the second game in a series and not either the first or even the 3rd or the 4th or Cool Boarders 2001 which was an American Exclusive? Well the second game builds upon its predecessor's features with the addition of trick competitions, as well as there being more unlockables, with 7 snowboarders, 18 snowboards and 10 courses to compete on. Sure the games after kind of have even more added to them but they are not made by the original developer so Cool Boarders 2 is the fullest game offered up by the original developer and perhaps the reason it was chosen. In all honesty I enjoyed the Cool Boarders games enough back in the day but its not really something I see as an essential title which encapsulates the essence of the original PlayStation console.

Some of my current thoughts on the PlayStation Classic

OK so I already did a post about the possibility of a mini PlayStation console back during June 2017 but since then what once was a fantasy has actually turned out to be something which is coming up on the horizon in fact it should be out by Christmas. If you want to read my previous post before I start getting in to things then I will make this as simple as possible by dropping a link here.

My Original Mini Playstation Post 

To quote from my original article  ''Imagine a PS TV ,now instead of it being black imagine it receiving a redesign, imagine it in classic PlayStation grey, imagine it looking like a shrunken original PlayStation complete with original logos and everything but with A hdmi port and all the modern trimmings. Now think about what it would be like if instead of giving it all kinds of settings options and download channels and such you replaced all of this with a user friendly game selection screen and a choice of around 15 classic PlayStation one games and you market the heck out of it just before Christmas appealing heavily to those of us who lived through the original PlayStation years.''

Well what has gone and happened? Several days ago Sony announced that  they will be releasing a miniature PlayStation which will be released on the 3rd of December 3 this year in the US and Canada. I was a little off with the numbers as I had predicted 15 games and Sony has bettered this by telling us that the system would come with 20 games on it. I kind of talked about the games that I thought would appear on the console, it wasn't a list of dream games it was more of a list of games I had come up with while thinking about memory restrictions and other boring serious issues this list consisted of Tekken 2, Battle Arena Toshinden 2, Ridge Racer Revolution, WarHawk, Air Combat, Rayman Krazy Ivan, Loaded, CastleVania Symphony of the nigth,  Parapa the Rapper, Gran Turismo ,Twisted Metal, Vandal Hearts, Suikoden and Wild Arms. So far though Sony have only announced 5 of the games that will be on the machine and these are Final Fantasy VII, Jumping Flash, Ridge Racer Type 4, Tekken 3, and Wild Arms. So basically I got it right with Wild Arms and I was right to say there would probably be a Tekken and a Ridge Racer on it but I am actually surprised to see Sony offering up newer arguably more complete titles in this series. I also think the inclusion of Final Fantasy VII shows that I was wrong in thinking that they would look at titles which would take up a less storage space in order to keep costs down, here we have them sticking a multiple disc game on the machine and one which I think rightly deserves its place on a mini console, I am just very happily surprised there not skimping on storage. I guess to see exactly how close or far I end up being with my predictions will take a bit of time, so here I sit waiting to see what other titles they add to the list and if there is any more cross over with my own list.

 
When I stop and think about things now though there is one certain little disc which will have been a lot of peoples first experience of the PlayStation and in fact to me is as quintessential part of PlayStation  history as any game you can think of and this disc is Demo One. You see a lot of people really wanted a PlayStation and saved up for one and simply couldn't afford to buy a game at the same time, so would end up spending weeks or even a month simply messing around with Demo one, not only playing the demos of things like loaded but also watching the music video which showed off quick flashes of various games on the console as well as playing with the controllable manta ray or T-Rex, and using the V-CD player application which would put up trippy on screen visuals when you put your own music CD's in to the console. I doubt we will get to see anything like this but to me DEMO ONE was such a huge part of the PlayStation that I would like to see it included at least in part on the PlayStation classic just to make things authentic.