Sony announces the PlayStation Classic

Yeah, there are a lot of games in that PSOne Classics line on PS3. Buy it once and transfer to your PSP/Vita. I’ve gotten almost all the high priced games that way that I didn’t already own. They used to even run sales on them for like $2.99 a piece. Crazy.

Eurogamer was not impressed.

Moving onto the PAL titles, the situation worsens. Tekken 3 does indeed run at 83.3 per cent of its intended speed, but more than that is the fact that a 50Hz gameplay is dropped into the Classic’s 60Hz output, giving obvious judder. Looking at raw video captures, every sixth frame is a duplicate - there isn’t even the rudimentary frame-blending used in PAL PS2 Classics running on PlayStation 4. In fact, Tekken 3 also includes regular 50ms frame-time spikes - two dropped frames in succession, something that shouldn’t happen.

Time isn’t wild about it either.

They should have release a PS2/dual shock console, with select games from PS1 on it.

Tomb Raider not being on the thing feels like a bullet dodged. Those original games are painfully unplayable these days. Activision is in the middle of selling big budget remakes of Spyro and Crash making those unattainable in this case, and re-licencing HUNDREDS of cars for Gran Turismo wasn’t practical either.

Yeah, but if you’re talking about buying PS3s or Vitas and digital classics you’re already in a completely different class of consumer than will buy this thing. This is designed to sell to people who have no idea that option exists, and even if they did, would not want to jump through those kind of hoops. This is just a gift/collectable/novelty.

Seems that, like me, the writer of this article wasn’t entirely sure who the PlayStation Classic is intended for. It seems odd to me that the conclusion he reaches is that this is likely the wave of the future, with next gen consoles being incompatible with previous generations. Sony would be nuts to not have at minimum back compat with PS4 on the next machine.

It’s been discovered you can plug a USB keyboard into this thing, hit Esc and modify a bunch of emulator settings, including forcing 60hz in PAL games.

Thing is, Sony has discovered new ways to monetize their back catalog. Instead of building backwards compatibility into the hardware, they can sell Playstation Now subscriptions or these mini retro-consoles. Win-win, right? For Sony, at least.

That and they’d prefer you buy their sequels, remasters and remakes because those cost at least $40 or more for minimum effort on their part.

It’s probably no coincidence that all those games people would like to have like Crash, Spyro, Gran Turismo, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Tomb Raider all have available collections right now or big sequels available. Resident Evil 2 Remake arrives in Ferbuary… you get the picture.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the conclusion the author of that GQ article arrives at, why would companies give you backward comparability on consoles you already own when they can make money selling you a new device? But that seems very anti-consumer, even if it does line their pockets. There may not be many areas that MS beats Sony outright, but treatment of their early catalogs is one. I’d own a PS4 right now if it had back compat with previous generations.

One of these is not like the others.

I wouldn’t even mind paying $40 for a remaster of a game I care about. The real problem is when they won’t even bother to do the remaster for various reasons.

Backwards compatibility doesn’t always help either. I’m still waiting for Ninja Gaiden 2.

The only solution is to end the videogame console.

Might be worth picking one up soon if you’re interested in these games. I can’t believe that hackers won’t find a way to enable them, or that Sony won’t make a revision to the system once they have (actually, with everything else that’s come out I can believe the latter).

e: It looks like there’s still some debate on if these games are actually installed, or if it’s just references in the source code. So, don’t rush out to buy one and get mad at me when you can’t play Suikoden :)

I mean, if you’re going to hack it to add or unlock additional games, you’re landing very squarely in “just get a RetroPi” territory. There’s no longer an ease-of-use / quality-of-presentation argument.

I mean, they put out that think with those 30 and the 20 on the system already, that is an excellent 100 dollar purchase (even with the lack of analog stick controls)

Retropie isn’t super user friendly, and can be quite hard to figure out. At least as far as the NES classic and SNES classic the hacking part is super easy.

That tweet has been deleted and replaced with one that is worded differently.

Doesn’t look like those are anything but art and entries on the system. No actual ISOs are there. There’s no way they could have fit that many games on there.

It’s probably what the one guy at Sony who was tasked with making this thing used to test and play on his own and he just forgot to delete the entries or they took his work to mass produce it before he had time to do so.

That lineup would have made for a much better deal. I think Suikoden is pretty hard to get your hands on these days. And it would have filled in some of the weird blanks from the existing lineup, like Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider.

Slightly off topic, but I noticed on Eurogamer yesterday they were saying that there’s Crash Bandicoot racing game being remastered now. I wonder if Activision is doing all these as a quick cash grab on nostalgia, or if they’re setting up some kind of brand revival as a setup for new games in the franchise.

I’ve never played or seen a Crash Bandicoot game. I’m only familiar with the brand from their really weird commercials on TV during he late 90s.

Yeah, they’re just configs for games that were tested along the line, probably well before any licensing deals had been hammered out. The idea that this was at any point the “lineup” is simply idiotic.

Still, that is undeniably a better set of games that’s what is on offer. Multiple Crash Bandicoots, Tom Mb Raider, Gran Turismo, GTA, Tony Hawk, Ridge Racer, Vagrant Story, Suikoden, Legacy of Kain?

That’s a very good lineup. Especially since it has more of the traditional strengths of the system, it’s JRPGs.