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REVIEW: PLAYSTATION CLASSIC

11/12/2018

22 Comments

 
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I still remember the first time I spilled my eyes on a PlayStation, months before its release, hidden from syrupy fingers within a perspex box at a trade show. It looked - and still looks - gorgeous, losing none of its design classic status in this: its new shrunk-down form.

As is the trend for these miniature "classic" machines, the PlayStation Classic offers an HDMI cable, USB controllers, and... no AC adaptor. The latter doesn't bother me much - I've plenty of spare USB power plugs lolling around - but it needs mentioning if only to point and cackle at everyone who has thrown their toys out of the pram over something so insignificant. 

If that's the sort of issue which fuels your boiler then congratulations: you've clearly got nothing else to worry about in your life. 

Of course, this reproduction minikin offers a wad of old games; 20, in fact. Indeed, in some respects, the PlayStation Classic has more of a reason to exist than the Super NES, NES and Commodore 64 minis, given that PlayStation games are something more of a faff for the average pleb to get working with an emulator. 

Because, let's be blunt here, these mini consoles are not for the hardcore retro enthusiast (not that this stops the hardcore complaining). We know you can shove ALL THE GAMES into a Raspberry Pi. We know you like playing on the original hardware. These machines are for those gamers who remember enjoying a PlayStation back in the day, and will appreciate a quick nostalgia fix, before shoving the thing under the telly come December 27th, never to touch it again. 
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ALL THE HITS
The PlayStation Classic has come in for some considerable stick. There has been a lot of grumbling that it doesn't have all the classics - yes, not featuring Wipeout, Gran Turismo or Tomb Raider is a bit like releasing an Aqua greatest hits and leaving off Barbie Girl - but you've still got Resident Evil: Director's Cut, Final Fantasy VII, and Metal Gear Solid. 

There are some odd choices - Ridge Racer Type 4 rather than the Ridge Racer that launched the machine, Tekken 3 rather than the original Tekken (the sequels are arguably the better games, but far less iconic), a bunch of well-regarded also-rans like Rayman, Destruction Derby, Jumping Flash, Wild Arms, Revelations: Persona, some which wouldn't look out of place on a modern smartphone such as Rayman, Mr Driller and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and some that really haven't aged well - such as Syphon Filter, Rainbow Six and the original Grand Theft Auto. 

While it might not be a back-to-back golden greats, it does provide a more honest cross-section of the PlayStation's catalogue, warts and all. Because, let's face it, one thing the PlayStation Classic does reveal is that there were a lot of warts on the PlayStation. 

Nostalgia does tend to paper over the cracks, and history likes to forget that its icons weren't perfect. Winston Churchill might've led us to victory over the Nazis, but he was also a horrible old Imperialist racist who once said "I hate Indians", claimed that Palestinians were "barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung", and argued that we should crush Johnny Foreigner under our boot, by arguing that "Aryan stock is bound to triumph".

SEE?
See, for all that it gave the games industry, the PlayStation is far from perfect, and - just as Churchill's attitudes might've been common in his day - the spotlight of modernity casts an unflattering light upon its flaws. 

The PlayStation marked the point at which gaming went properly 3D, and most of the games here are entering unfamiliar territory. Consequently, the hardware isn't always up to the task, while you can almost hear the developers trying to figure out how a 3D control system is supposed to work. 

And that's okay. Progress happens, and it doesn't airbrush away what was achieved at the time.  Certainly, Resident Evil is a slow-paced, awkward, mess - but it's still groundbreaking (providing we all ignore Alone In The Dark), and - oddly - I found that this somehow added to its atmosphere, compared to the slicker, more recent, entries in the franchise.

​That wasn't the only surprise: the console comes with two replica controllers, but I've become so accustomed to my PS4 pad that my thumb kept reaching for the analogue stick. It's a bit like when I first drive a rental car in America, and my left arm keeps reaching down the side of my seat for a non-existent gearstick. 
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FINE!
Ultimately, the PlayStation Classic is fine for what it is.

I dunno what people expected, but had they gotten what they thought they expected - Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot et al - I suspect they still wouldn't have been happy. Point is, many, if not most, PlayStation games have not aged well. Whereas the games on the Super NES mini were at the pinnacle of 2D game design, the PlayStation was merely the first base camp on the ascent of Mount Polygon.

Tellingly, the biggest disappointments on the SNES mini are Starfox and Starfox 2, both of which saw Nintendo dipping its pinkie into 3D waters for the first time. 

I'm fine with this. The PlayStation Classic offers a snapshot in time. History is rarely all roses and rainbows. There might be the occasional leprechaun with a pot of gold, but leprechauns still need to do their poos somewhere. Assuming that leprechaun digestive systems function the same way as those of other primates. Assuming leprechauns are primates. I digress.

The Classic doesn't distort the picture of the PlayStation by giving everything a HD make-over - FMV is grainy, polygons still wobble - and only featuring 10/10 games. This is a more honest representation of a machine which - as groundbreaking as it was - was never perfect.

We're all going to have different favourite games, we're never going to agree on what should've been on here, but the selection could've been a lot worse. It's a solid, nicely-designed bit of kit, and my only real complaint is the same with all these machines; I'd like them to function more as a general museum-in-a-console. I don't just want to see games on there, but commercials, interviews with the people involved - that sort of thing. 

But whatever. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. As you were.

SCORE: 32 bits out of 50 bits.
22 Comments
Paul
11/12/2018 09:40:39 am

I finally found my original PlayStation - the one that this mini thing looks like. I found one game disk here (all the others are back at my parents’). So I plugged it into my big telly and ...

... oh, my eyes. It looked dreadful. Big JPEG-like blocky graphics. The game disk - Atari Anniversary - is fun, but those graphics do not upscale well. So I plugged it into the little telly I have, which is a 12 inch LCD affair, and it’s fine on that. The graphics still look shockingly clunky, but the small screen size makes them acceptable. You have to remember - these consoles weren’t designed for flat panel monster screens - we were still on SD CRTs back then.

I also found my GameCube, which looks lovely on the little screen. Zelda Breath of the Wind does anyway.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
11/12/2018 01:40:52 pm

I take it you mean Zelda: The Wind Waker? If so, you're right. If anything, I think I prefer how the original looks to the slightly saturated bloom-lighting-addled HD remake.

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Guru Larry link
11/12/2018 09:43:38 am

Apparantly Rage Racer was originally going to be the Ridge Racer of choice, but was rejected as it didn't have "Ridge" in the title.

Driver and Silent Hill are also a bizarre omissions. But who the hell was screaming for Rainbow Six? It's not even a good port of the game, nerfed to hell compared to the Dreamcast/PC ports. It seems they did a weird comprimise wirh publishers where they can have 1 game that everyone wants at a cost of having 1 nobody likes :D

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Deep Shane Thrombosis
11/12/2018 11:11:58 am

Driver isn't a terrible omission considering the incredibly difficult opening training section. There was a kid at school who made quite a few quid back then as he would complete the training mission for a fiver; you'd just hand him your memory card and he'd return it back the next day with the game save.

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Trevor Cid
11/12/2018 12:12:01 pm

How much did he charge for doing the President's Run?!

Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
14/12/2018 05:53:02 pm

Driver was cack even at the time. The missions were badly made, the police AI appalling, the graphics awful... it won plaudits from idiot new games journos who wanted to show how world and culturally savvy they are when given something retro-themed (likewise how any game that features period music seems to go up at least 20%)

And yes, fuck The President’s Run.

Matthew Bennion
11/12/2018 09:53:45 am

I'd be more accepting of this hunk of junk if they'd actually spent the time to set the emulation up properly. Instead you get a machine that doesn't even offer the nostalgic experience it instead offers a distorted peak into the past that's actually worse than your nostalgic memories remember. GTA at a woeful 16 FPS, while Ridge Racer Type 4 chugs along with unresponsive controls. I expected more from Sony than this quick cash grab..

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Floop
11/12/2018 12:05:15 pm

you can access and tweak the emulation settings with some trickery (the whole thing is PCSX based)
There are guides on the youtubes.
You can also run game isos from USB if you like to wear a tricorn hat and fly the jolly roger

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Biscuits
12/12/2018 10:26:58 pm

The very nature of the device is a quick cash grab

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Iain Devenney
11/12/2018 10:54:27 am

I still have all the PS1 games I ever really loved playing, so I'll keep my backwards compatible PS2 which still works perfectly and play that through pr/cr pb/cb y settings and a component video cable, saving myself a good wedge of cash. All things said and done, this is a good idea, badly realised.

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DD
11/12/2018 11:14:11 am

‘It looked gorgeous’?

It looked like a grey dinner tray mate. This is just smaller, probably more suited as coaster or something.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
11/12/2018 01:41:56 pm

I've never really warmed to the original Playstation design. The tiny pastel PSOne always looked better to my mind.

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lilock3
11/12/2018 11:36:59 am

A pretty fair assessment I'd say. It's aimed at Average Joe, rather than a retro gaming fanatic, and, as a product, should be judged from the viewpoint of its intended audience. I think most people would consider talk about emulation accuracy and upscaling quality to be hilariously anal... Personally, I've spent a fair bit of money on various upscalers and high-end CRTs to get the best retro gaming fix for myself, so wouldn't touch this with a barge-pole, but I can see it fills a substantial niche in the market.

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Grembot
11/12/2018 11:51:06 am

I’m not sure aiming for the “casual” market is an excuse for it being a bit rubbish. As Mr. Biffo said, we’re rose-tinted about these things, so a lapsed gamer buying a PS Classic will probably think it was always this bad. Sony might be content to take the money from these once but a bit more effort might have made a few people invest in their current products.

Also, I quite liked Star Fox 2.

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lilock3
11/12/2018 12:21:05 pm

I don't think this would appear rubbish to its target audience though...

I work at a facility that does, amongst other things, vehicle testing, and has its own racetrack. There are people here who could tell you what particular model of engine is in a car just by listening to it. They could discuss the pros and cons of different variants of Porsche 911, describing one as rubbish and another as great, whereas these cars would be entirely indistinguishable to me.

I think that as gamers we're very good an only viewing things from our own perspective. We forget that we are, for lack of a better word, "experts" on gaming. We can spot the flaws in the PS Classic a mile off. I think the average person would struggle to discern any difference with framerate or 50/60Hz issues, and even with a direct side-by-side comparison would simply shrug them off as immaterial. I think Sony is well aware of this and has built its product accordingly.

What's the point in someone spending extra on Heinz baked-beans if Tesco Value beans taste identical to them? For those of us who can tell the difference, simply buy the Heinz beans (a real PlayStation).

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Col. Asdasd
11/12/2018 02:35:03 pm

Starfox 2 had me in quite the tizzy. Knowing nothing about it, I loaded it up expecting a rehash of the first game but with different levels. But no! Sandbox! Roguelite elements! Dynamic campaign! Full 3D movement! Vehicle tranformations! Customisable difficulty!

Yes it's a shame it barely breaks double digit fps, but there are literally fridges and keyboard LCD arrays on the market now with more computational power than the SNES. I'll understand people rejecting it out of hand as unplayable - you have to want it work to get anything out of it - but its feature list is ambitious even for games released today.

That's what I find exciting about it: while it feels like a game pushing the technological envelopes of 1996 (and coming off the worse for it), more interestingly it's also pushing design envelopes which haven't been much troubled by the industry in the intervening 22 years.

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Konstantinos
11/12/2018 03:24:15 pm

While I am in no way incensed about the lack of AC adaptor (as you say, there are way more important things to be upset about), I have to disagree with the idea that it’s just ok.

At the end of the day, it means that the thing doesn’t cost what they say it does but what they say + an AC adaptor. It apparently makes enough of a cost difference to Sony that they chose not to include it, why shouldn’t it make a difference to the person buying it?

It reminds me a bit of the release of the Switch. The complaint that it did not have sufficient storage was usually countered by the idea that you either have a SD Card already somewhere or that they are cheap to get. Ok fine, but if they are so cheap then why didn’t Nintendo include them in the first place?

I understand that it’s not the same thing but honestly it’s worse as I assume that the PS Mini does not function at all without an AC adaptor.

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lilock3
11/12/2018 03:30:45 pm

Like the Mini NES and SNES consoles the PS Classic comes with a USB power lead in the box, the intention being that pretty much any modern HDMI capable TV will have a USB port capable of powering the console. You only need an AC to USB power adaptor if your TV doesn't have a spare USB socket.

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Johnc
11/12/2018 04:55:12 pm

I was beginning to wonder if it was just me that powered off the TVs USB. It's clearly the intention right?

Konstantinos
11/12/2018 06:24:18 pm

I have to admit that it never occured to me that you could power it straight off the TV. Perhaps seeing it as a technological advancement away from AC power does make sense.

Marro
11/12/2018 05:42:36 pm

I learnt a while back that to actually play old games is not necessary for the glow of nostalgia to warm my cockles, and in fact can get in the way and prove disillusioning when you see how badly they play now.

Just discussing the old games on boards like these, or reading about them in Retro Gamer or watching YouTube longplays is often more gratifying to me than actually playing them (with a few exceptions).

For me, it's not the games themselves I'm nostalgic for but the way the games made me feel, which is a subtly different thing.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
11/12/2018 08:40:56 pm

I feel like once you get disposable income, no game means as much as it used to.

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