Sony announces the PlayStation Classic

Just think of it as salt in the wound.

You can get Suikoden (and its sequel) from the PSN store foe the PSP/Vita/PS3. Most of those games are available there.

I stand corrected, I forgot about the PSN store because I’ve never used it. All my PS games are physical.

Speaking of, this thing really should have been repackaged PSTV guts with a friendly front-end for the nostalgia crowd and enthusiast options to add all those PSN titles we already own.

That’s probably just me lamenting how great the PSTV could have been if it wasn’t completely abandoned though.

Hahaha, those games are a much better lineup.

Silent Hill, Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, Mega Man Legends, Soul Reaver…

It would have been way more expensive to get more of the Vita chipset manufactured. It had a complicated stacked memory design that would have hugely inflated the cost per unit to make compared to the commodity SoC they got off the shelf.

God. Damn.

The PS1’s catalog earned its place in the pantheon.

We talked about it earlier, but for people like us, right now the best way to play a lot of these early PlayStation games legitimately is by buying them from the PS3 PlayStation Store.

That link should get you the whole list of PSOne Classics. You can play all of them on a PSP too and many on Vita as well. They still put them on sale in Flash Sales too.

Well I don’t have a PS3 either, or a Vita, though I do have a PSP that I occasionally dust off to play some golf.

But I have a dream, Dave. Probably a pipe dream, sure, but I imagine the folks looking at MS’s effort in the backward compatibility arena and thinking hey, maybe there’s something to this. We know they could, they used to be kings of back compat, they just decided somewhere along the way that it wasn’t important. Maybe they figure they’re already on top, why bother? I’m sure it all comes down to money, and there just may not be enough there to matter.

The main reason I don’t own a PS4 and didn’t own a PS3 is because my gaming library, between PC, consoles and handhelds, already numbers in the thousands. Realistically, adding another console gives me games I may never get to. But I’m dead serious here, if Sony decided yeah, how cool would it be if our current device played all the old games too? If they showed a commitment to their history and the influence all these great old games had and still have today, I’d buy one in a heartbeat.

This thing, this miniature PlayStation with a couple dozen games, that’s a toy. Not only that but it’s a dead end. There’s no reason I should rebuy these games that are poorly emulated and kicked out the door. This shows disdain of their own history. Why should I respect it?

Yeah, the PS3 had great support for the PS1 classics (and you can play PS1 discs if you have them around)

Not just that, it could play PS2 discs as well, right?

Only at launch.

Only the launch models. The new PS3 slims will only do PS1.

Wait, really? They had the functionality to let people play PS2 games on the PS3 and they phased it out? What was their reasoning for that?

IIRC it was expensive silicon and possibly some licensing fee that they didn’t want to pay.

They basically had a PS2 in every PS3 at launch, the guts of it anyway. So getting rid of it made it cheaper to produce and let them lower the price.

I had a launch unit that could do that. After the first time it died, I paid $100 to an online company to repair it. Then it worked for another year, but then it died again.

Luckily I can play my PS2 games on the PS2 emulator on the PC, and I’ve done so. It’s a really good emulator, you should look into it.

I need to look into the PS3 emulator now, see if it will play Demon’s Souls and R&CF: A Crack in Time, the only 2 games on the PS3 worth playing.

Yeah, first generation PS3s basically had a PS2 included inside, later models had partial hardware emulation, so still had some hardware (the GPU, I think), but did the CPU in sortware, and further later models dropped PS2 compatibility entirely.

PS2 games you get off PSN are fully software emulated, so they work on all hardware.

In that case a PS4 should be able to play a PS 1 or 2 game, even if only by way of emulation over PSN?

I’m aware that some games have been repackaged with improvements and trophies and such, but I don’t mean those.

…and playing them on the Vita!

So would I. There are a number of PS3 and PS4 games I would love to play, but just don’t have room on my TV stand for another console (and I already have quite the stash of PS1, PS2, PSP, Gamecube, GBA, Xbox 360 and DS games/cases and consoles put away).

But if Sony released a PS4 that was backward compatible with the PS2 and PS3, I would buy it on day one.

They should have made the Playstation Classic a true mini PSOne that allows you download all the PSOne games from their store. That would have one-upped Nintendo big time.