I’m not a fan of Tekken. There’s nothing wrong with the game, I’m just not a fighting games is all. Nor am I fan of JRPGs or racing games outside of Mario Kart. So when news dropped about the Playstation Classic, a miniature PS1 with twenty classic games from that era on pre-loaded on, I really felt was a great big bloody “meh.”
Now, only five games out of the twenty have been made official (Tekken 3, Wild Arms, Final Fantasy 7, R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, and Jumping Flash), so there’s every chance that the other 15 games on the list will get my heart racing. But if I’m going to be honest, probably not. Certainly not enough to get me to fork out however fucking much they decide to gouge us for it down here in Oz. Mind you it still got me thinking and asking myself a question I hadn’t really pondered before: which games from that era do I actually love? Which games would I actually pay to play again?
Y’see I’m definitely someone who’ll give in to nostalgia, but I’m also a fairly practical person who’ll discard a property that doesn’t live up to my rose-tinted expectations. There’s been a number of movies, shows and games that I’ve gone back to over the years for a rewatch or a replay, only to dismiss them because of bad narrative and dialogue, problematic themes, jokes that were a lot funnier when I was 10, or wonky controls. Oftentimes it’s a combination. That doesn’t necessary mean I suddenly dislike a property (though sometimes it does), it just means I can’t get through it again.
The big example for me is Red Dead Redemption. I fucking loved that game. I still love that game. But when I sat down after a year to try a replay I didn’t even make it to Mexico before I got tired of it, put down the controller and went to something else. Thing was I’d forgotten how unintuitive, janky and all-round frustrating the outdated controls were, and what got me through the first time was exploring the stunning world, the compelling characters and the fantastic narrative. When I picked up the game again, however, I’d already explored the world, I remembered the character beats, and I knew how the story ended. Without those things to distract me, well, the troubles involved with just shooting a bloke were a lot more apparent. So I couldn’t play it again, but I still call it one of the greatest games I ever played.
On the other side of the scale, I’ve played the original Mass Effect game through to completion probably close to a dozen times. Add another half-dozen playthroughs of Mass Effect 2 and just under of Mass Effect 3, and you’ve several hundred hours of shooting Geth and, a lot of the time, making the exact same decisions (though sometimes a little more violently). In fact one of the most frustrating things about changing consoles from the Xbox One to the Playstation 4 (when I moved) has been the lack of backwards compatibility. I would quite happily buy all three games again if it meant I could play through them on my PissPoor. That’s something I’d spend a hundred bucks on.
From the generation before I can name KotOR 2 (and the original KotOR for that matter), Jade Empire, the original Killzone, the original Call of Duty, Star Wars: Battlefront, and bloody Lego Star Wars. Fuck, there’s actually a lot of games from then that I’d still play (and do if the option is available).
But from the original Playstation? Fucked if I know.
Y’know what, maybe the first Medal of Honor. I played through that game, Christ, I don’t know how many times. It was probably the first FPS I bought with my own money. Not the first FPS I ever played, that was probably Goldeneye on the N64 at my neighbours house, but the first First Person Shooter I owned, that I bought with my own money. I loved that game when I played it, and it was a great game for its time. I mean this was the title that launched what was, for a bunch of years, one of the biggest franchises in shooters. For a long time (amongst the cool kids at least) you went to Medal of Honor for your single-player campaigns and Battlefield for your multiplayer, until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came along and took both those titles.
Funny thing is that right now I don’t have fond memories of the gameplay, but I do of the narrative. This was the era of the truly silent protagonist, the briefing for each mission lasted for about as long as it took to load the game, and there were about three characters that I can remember in the whole game, including the player character, and only one of them spoke (Colonel Stanley Hargrove, voiced by William Morgan Sheppard). Yet it managed to make me care a whole lot, and started a whole bunch of tropes.
And that’s about it. That’s the only game I’m keen on trying again. And I paid twenty bucks Aussie for it a decade-and-a-half ago or so, I would not be keen to pay one hundred US. But that’s me though. Truthfully, I came to the PS1 scene late and I never got to stick my feet in the water as much as a lot of other people. We were poor. It happens and it doesn’t.
What I’m getting at is that people are getting excited about this, which is very fine. Truthfully we’ve been talking about a need to archive old games for years and this feels like a step in the right direction, even if it’s not a big enough step and it’s a little bit expensive (give me ports or give me death!) I’m already seeing plenty of “what should the other fifteen games be?” lists being written by people with much more experience, and people who like Tekken and JRPGs are already pretty happy about what’s on the Playstation Classic.
Let’s remember though that rose-tinted glasses do not provide the best view.
This is a step in the right direction, yeah. But maybe give me ports as well, aye?
The Long and Short of it 