Playstation

The Playstation Classic runs on an Open Source Emulator

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Ever since the release of Nintendo’s NES Classic we’ve been seeing more mini consoles/computers pop up, such as the C64 Mini, and the Playstation Classic. An interesting detail was noted about the latter device, apparently it runs on the PCSX emulator:

Nice to see that Sony has learned their lesson after the bleem incident. (Bonus points to anyone who knows what I’m referencing.) 😛 I shouldn’t be too surprised considering other consoles are pretty much the same internally with a tiny shell to give us warm fuzzies of a long gone era, but at the same time the idea of casting out $100 for a tiny computer with a built in emulator configured to play only 20 games doesn’t seem worth the dough (though I could say similar for the others). Unlike Sony though, I have to give props to Nintendo for at least selecting more memorable games. The list of games for the PSClassic are quite lackluster with the exception of a few titles. I remember the PS1 era for Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro The Dragon, Twisted Metal and a few others. I’m going to guess there’s a possibility that at the very least Activision might have something to do with the lack of Crash and Spyro. But I figured since one of the Final Fantasy titles would have appeared on the Classic that Square Enix would have parted with at least the original Tomb Raider?

I still expect people to go forth and purchase these things for nostalgia sake… but I’ll just hold onto my original, the PS3, and my emulators. I don’t need to spend a large chunk of my paycheck on something I could build, configure and install myself. :v:

A wild Playstation Classic appears

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I guess Sony has decided to get on the “Lets make a miniature console” bandwagon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl2h8LDq_oI

I’ll admit it does look pretty cool, but considering I have a PS3 that can play PS1 games that I got for a fraction of the cost of this lil guy, the original PS1 with original dualshocks AND epsxe on all of my gaming computers I think I’m pretty good. :v:

Old games catch me off guard to this day

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I wasn’t aware there were dedicated flying levels in Spyro. I’ve been having fun trying to get all of the treasure. I’m not sure yet if there is a dragon to free in this level, but it has been amusing trying to grab all of the rings and other stuff. It also looks like everything is made of giant gems. :happy: Of course up in the top right is a counter, you have a limited time to collect everything and everything you can collect time for each item you destroy/fly into. That I have yet to properly time. :zorak:

It’s kind of a weird transition if you think about it. For most of the game you can’t really fly, glide yes but never fly… Now all of a sudden for this level you can fly? I wasn’t aware there was a Spyro that could put the entire Superman64 game to shame. :v:

From Phantom Pain to Phantomile

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I’ve been playing Klonoa for the past couple days; Made it to the moon kingdom, I can tell that level is going to take a lot of patience to get through the damn vision. I’ve attempted it a couple times today and kept dying endlessly. Best to take a break and head onto another game. I even tried playing the Wii version and my hands seem to be fatigued. Here’s a comparison of the two versions:

I’m not sure which version I like better to be honest. I like the style of the PS1 version, but at the same time I like the updated graphics on the Wii version… Then again I also like the hybrid 3D with sprites for the Playstation version. Plus the pre-rendered cutscenes… something about them seems more magical. Then again pre-rendered cutscenes from that era were fun to watch, look at the original Tomb Raiders. 😛

And oh god… If you ever play this game do NOT use the english version. Switch it to Phantomese or Japanese, you’ll be doing your ears and mind a favor.

Process of emulation: Getting everything dialed into Steam

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Not what you usually see when you launch a game on Steam…

My pursuit to turn my computer into the ultimate console has been going quite nicely. I’ve been adding each emulated game individually to Steam so I can launch them in Big Picture without having to manually select each game. I’ve also been setting up my Steam Controller to work with the emulators, from what I’ve read people really like the Steam Controller with emulators like Dolphin (Wii and Gamecube) and a bunch of others thanks to the extra buttons. Spyro works really well with it, the grips on the bottom of the controller are set to rotate the camera view as opposed to the left and right triggers. It makes the games feel more comfortable IMO.

So far I’ve only setup Spyro and Klonoa (the PSX and Wii versions) and plan to add more as I come across them. At some point I’ll have to copy off my old Playstation discs onto the drive, or turn them into ISO’s. Would be nice to play some Crash Bandicoot and a couple others. Once I have this setup I’ll do the same on my laptop. That should REALLY catch some people off guard when I take my lunch breaks. 😛 I’ve already been enjoying quite a bit of Super Mario.

Nostalgic Feels in gaming and stomach churning

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Motion sickness isn’t something I’ve had in a long time, not even after hours of playing an FPS while knocking back lots of alcoholic drinks… I think the last time I had felt sick during a game was when I was playing the original Doom for an entire day, sometime during all the custom wads I cycled through I suddenly had to lie down and hope I wouldn’t throw up… at least until yesterday when those unfond memories of holding back the urge of throwing up surfaced, and who knew it would be while playing the original Spyro?

I never had access to the game when I was younger, the closest I could get to it was a Playstation Pizza Hut demo disc. I played the hell out of Spyro and some other demos on the disc always hoping that someday I’d get the full thing, sadly that never happened until years and years later when I started to play with emulators. I found roms for the first trilogy and thought “awesome!”, and so I began playing for quite a bit actually. Then after awhile last night my stomach started to turn. I didn’t want to stop playing because I was so close to finishing the level and finding all the gems, so I pressed onward a bit longer and called it good when I rescued one last dragon.

I was kinda bummed, the game itself is a lot of fun… but I can’t seem to play it for very long like I can with other games. I tried again a bit ago after getting the Playstation emulator to work through screen so I could take screencaps, and once again I had to stop after a short while of play… which pisses me off because I found an annoying boss battle and didn’t want to quit.

I wanted to do a livestream of this at some point, but it looks like I’ll have to shelf the idea. I feel the need to experiment though, maybe if I play this distanced away from the TV in the living room… could that solve my problem? Or would the larger TV make it worse?

In Other News: People are still morons

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I’m starting to think people are losing the meaning behind the word “emergency”. It isn’t an emergency if your favorite fast food joint runs out of chicken. It isn’t an emergency if facebook is down (and in many cases it’s probably a blessing). It isn’t an emergency if your jello has gone missing. And it CERTAINLY isn’t an emergency that PlayStation Network is down.

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What happened to going to the website to see what the problem is? Or using a search engine? I never would have thought about calling 911 if say for example Steam went down.

Damn we have really let ourselves go…

The game I never knew I had.

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Once upon a time when I was a kid I gamed on three platforms. A PC, a Playstation (the original one) and a Gameboy Advance (also an original one). My favorites to play on Playstation were the Tomb Raider 1 and Chronicles (which I also played on PC because being able to save ANYWHERE was a bonus), Crash Bandicoot 2, Twisted Metal 2, the PacMan collection which I also remember playing on an old Atari 2600 (god I feel old) and of course the old Pizza Hut demo CD’s which contained popular games like Tomb Raider 3, Spyro, Metal Gear Solid and some others. I played the hell out of Spyro and the Metal Gear Solid demos. I played those a lot because I could never find the full games at stores.

Recently my nostalgiameter has been going off between playing old DOS games and discovering a GameBoy emulator. So I figured why not try emulating some of my old Playstation games too? That could be fun. So I walked out into the living room and headed over to the small wall of Playstation discs and saw one game that not only stood out, but also made my jaw drop.

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I carried it back into my room and announced over mumble to one of my friends what I had found. The greatest hits CD’s for Metal Gear Solid. Instead of playing that version I decided to hunt down the PC version I heard so much about. Because hey, it exists so why not use it? I tracked it down along with MGS2 Substance, set my Logitech controller up and played some of MGS1 and the VR missions. I was in Nirvana.

Between finding the CD’s for it though and playing the game I kicked myself the entire time. I have no idea when this game turned up. Had I have known that I had it back in the day I would have definitely played it. As I stated I was hooked on the demo. Even now I’m still trying to figure out where the hell these even came from.

Playstation 4 seems interesting in design.

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I’ve been reading up on the Playstation 4 specs and have found their choice in architecture to be rather interesting.

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It’s basically a console PC (which Steam was already planning to do). This would make coding games between Playstation and PC much easier. It could also open up the possibility of cross platform gaming (like what Valve did with Portal 2 for both PC and PS3).

Either way I found it to be rather interesting. Not enough to get one since my computers do everything and more, but it’s interesting. We may finally see things begin to grow in gaming as it did a long time ago… while XBox/Microsoft continue to push people into their wannabe apple walled garden. :roll: