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First hands on impressions of Playstation Classic are going up.

JORMBO

Darkness no more
I cancelled my Best Buy preorder last night after taking in all of the early impressions. I’m not paying $100 for this low-effort piece of shit. It’s a cash grab, pure and simple.

I am close to canceling mine. It just feels like a poorly thought out device. I’m sure it will still sell well as a holiday gift though. That’s probably all Sony wanted.

I thought about keeping it because it might be hackable, but I can already stick my discs in my PS3 so that isn’t much of a draw.
 

BigLee74

Member
That is a pretty poor selection of games. Ultimately though, games from this era have not aged well at all. Cant think of any reason to turn something like this on, save for a 5 minute nostalgia trip only to realise that everything looks and plays much worse than you ever remembered, and you are now 100 quid out of pocket for that privilege!
 
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BlackTron

Member
Shameless me-too cash grab after seeing Nintendo's success.

I appreciate what Sony does for the industry but they are really shameless in how they steal ideas. Usually they at least do it better than the original. TBH this looks bad and kind of embarrassing even. No dual shock is like the nail in the coffin.
 
I think the classic N64 will also feel dated due to how early 3D games have aged.

The NES and SNES have some lovely looking games and retro 2D has aged better than early 3D games

Nah,

The issue with the PSX/3DO/N64 3d is that they try to use texture and shadow tricks the hardware was to early for. It makes the games look bad for the most part. But if you look at some Jaguar games and some pre-1995 3D arcade games where textures are limited or none they look much better and have superior image quality.

199671-2289_1.png
19679-ingame-Iron-Soldier.png


Look much better than:

37091-Legacy_Of_Kain_-_Soul_Reaver_(bin)-2.png
vagrant-story-playstation-1-D_NQ_NP_850801-MLB20397436159_082015-F.jpg
 
Well visually the 3 types of Ps1 games that held up the best are: Games with cartoony graphics (Crash, Megaman Legends, etc), Games with good pre rendered backgrounds (Chrono Cross, FFIX, etc) and games with 2D graphics (Symphony of the Night, Megaman X3-6, etc).

And this collection has almost none of them.

FFIX used pre-rendered backgrounds otherwise it doesn't look good at all in the 3D aspect.

Legends doesn't look that good either, especially in the ruins. What makes some parts look ok is very plan clean walls or models without much on them or repeating the same basic designs. The Areas outside the city are basically bland with bright green coloring and 2D trees, the houses int eh cities are basic with not much going on. Flutter airship is basically among the most detailed things in the game outside the super tall Giant robot and he Giant green battle ship. Everything else looks like a pixelated mess that's PSX standard or are not 3D. Is still decent looking though there are worse looking games, like the ones I posted above.
 

stranno

Member
Nah,

The issue with the PSX/3DO/N64 3d is that they try to use texture and shadow tricks the hardware was to early for. It makes the games look bad for the most part. But if you look at some Jaguar games and some pre-1995 3D arcade games where textures are limited or none they look much better and have superior image quality.
Jaguar had floating-point arithmetic to begin with, so the image was much more stable than Saturn/Playstation. Saturn was also a bit more stable because of the quad-rendering (instead of triangle rendering).

Playstation was a mess of fixed-point arithmetic, tons of jittering, distorted textures because of the low-precission vertex position, no anti-aliasing, no texture-filtering, no z-Buffer.

Playstation had great graphics but terrible image quality overall. Thats why it even looks worse in HDMI output and even more in high-resolution.

Of course nowdays we have PGXP, a graphical pipeline to boost geometry precision of the GTE, that pretty much solves jittering and texture perspective correction. But thats not available on PCSX ReARMed and it seems it wont be ported.
 
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cryptoadam

Banned
I agree. Sony wanted to jump into the classic system craze because of Nintendo, but have failed to realize why the NES/SNES classic systems are very popular & why they have sold as well as they did.

It was because that Nintendo had put a lot of thought, love & care into these platforms. They used their own quality emulators, they had a decent selection of games that most people wanted to play, & they even gave display & graphic settings among them.

Sony, however? Went the complete opposite. Not only did they chose a worse selection of titles, but had also went the lazy route by using a PC emulator instead of using their very own, & by also using European/PAL versions of games in which the majority of those versions are 50hz max. That's very unacceptable.

This just screamed cash grab all over, especially as they most likely put this out during the holidays just to try to get as much money out of people for their shoddy product. It's just as bad as those AtGames Sega Genesis Flashback systems. Very shameful.

Nintendo was lucky enough to have 2 cracks at it so lets hope that the PS2 Classic fixes the mistake Sony made. But we can also add in the Nintendo added a bonus never released game in Star Fox 2 on the SNES classic which immediately puts Sony's effort to shame.

The fact that they couldn't be bothered to create their own branding and just ripped off the classic branding shows how low the effort was on Sony's part. No Dual Shock also shows to me that Sony was sleeping at the wheel. NES controller is iconic and an all time classic. SNES controller is even more iconic and maybe one of the best controllers ever made. PS1 controller is just meh. Dual Shock is obvisouly the 2nd most influential controller ever. Should of included the Dual Shock, which would of also allowed for more/better games to be inlcuded on the classic.
 

JimboJones

Member
Nah,

The issue with the PSX/3DO/N64 3d is that they try to use texture and shadow tricks the hardware was to early for. It makes the games look bad for the most part. But if you look at some Jaguar games and some pre-1995 3D arcade games where textures are limited or none they look much better and have superior image quality.

199671-2289_1.png
19679-ingame-Iron-Soldier.png


Look much better than:

37091-Legacy_Of_Kain_-_Soul_Reaver_(bin)-2.png
vagrant-story-playstation-1-D_NQ_NP_850801-MLB20397436159_082015-F.jpg
Gotta disagree with ya man, Vagrant Story and Soul Reaver look a million times better than those top two games.
 
Gotta disagree with ya man, Vagrant Story and Soul Reaver look a million times better than those top two games.

Image quality is trash and the grainy muddy washed out look is hard for most people to look at. graphically, by technical aspects, yes they are better. But that wasn't what my post was about.

Soul Reaver and Vagrant Story, two of the best graphical milestones on the system. Vagrant even had Depth of Field (not exactly but it did the job).

Those aren't the two games he quoted.
 
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JimboJones

Member
Even with the grainy look i still think its easier on the eyes than the mess of cubes and bright unshaded geometric shapes.
 
Even with the grainy look i still think its easier on the eyes than the mess of cubes and bright unshaded geometric shapes.

Some people do some people don't. But back then the general consensus was the opposite, which is why arcades and some PC devs kept using the later for awhile.

I think games like Crash 3 are pretty good looking. I don't think games like Vagrant story are. Crash 3 is a PS game.
 

Fbh

Member
FFIX used pre-rendered backgrounds otherwise it doesn't look good at all in the 3D aspect.

Legends doesn't look that good either, especially in the ruins. What makes some parts look ok is very plan clean walls or models without much on them or repeating the same basic designs. The Areas outside the city are basically bland with bright green coloring and 2D trees, the houses int eh cities are basic with not much going on. Flutter airship is basically among the most detailed things in the game outside the super tall Giant robot and he Giant green battle ship. Everything else looks like a pixelated mess that's PSX standard or are not 3D. Is still decent looking though there are worse looking games, like the ones I posted above.

Yeah the 3D stuff in FFIX just all 3D of the Ps1 era hasn't aged very well but the game uses so many pre rendered backgrounds that aside from the resolution it's still nice to look at
25077-final-fantasy-ix-playstation-screenshot-playing-as-steiner.jpg

large.jpg



As for legends. Yeah you might be right. I was mostly talking from memory on that one but looking at a few videos it doesn't hold up that well (the characters themselves still hold up better than most other games from the era though)
 

Akuza89

Member
It sounds like a lot of bad things are coming out from these press briefings which isn't surprising.

You would imagine they've rushed the console for Christmas, which has inturn hurt the console.

It won't be updated either, there for it will become the ps vita 2! Be completely ignored by Sony when it gets released!
 

Redneckerz

Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
Sounds like a very basic shell with some built in games running on an ARM SOC in a PlayStation shell. Its not Famiclone levels of cheap but the ability to only have a single save slot is just.. yeah.

I do like the menu though, simplistic yet refined. Just want to see what the specs are.
 
Let's hope, that the Euro-version get's the slick grey Euro-menu:

latest


Not really sexy or anything, but a million times better than the colorbarf thing!
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Not for me. Early-era 3D has not aged well, wheras pixel art in the SNES/MegaDrive era had matured to a pretty decent point where it holds up pretty well today (hence so many modern games revisiting the styles around at that time).
 

Esteban5XG

Neo Member
Still believe there is a lack of video games in the final selection. I loved playing PS1 when I was a kid. Even though, I guess I'll get one PS Classic.
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
Been on and off thinking about this for the past few weeks. I've had my pre-order in since the day they went live - and mostly because of the controllers being USB (which I'm sure someone could hack to work on PC) and kinda hoping someone can hack the device firmware ala the NES / SNES Classic.

But as the system is set to release next week, I've just canceled my pre-order. $100 is just too much to ask here for the lack of good games and the lack of included software features. It's a lot of money to pin on hope that it can become better - and by better I really just mean "like my PC" (which I already have). So I'm out.
 

wipeout364

Member
Sony is such a weird company. Sometimes they do things that are so well thought out and execute so well, then other times it feels like they throw shit out the door hoping it sticks to something with no real plan or followthough. I felt totally burned by PlayStation TV , and Vita didn’t really deliver outside of a few titles, it’s really made me cautious touching any of their stuff outside the core console business. This looks like it falls into the latter category.
 

KellyM

Member
The lineup is just not good enough even though I was massively hyped upon announcement. Wild Arms? Cool Boarders? Including games like that feels like a waste considering what was left on the table. Jumping Flash could easily go as well imo.

Crash, Spyro, Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story, RE2, Silent Hill, Klonoa, Dino Crisis, Parappa, SoTN... you could name games all day. IDK about any potential business reasons why the list is the way it is but it's just not that exciting the way it is.
The Japanese version has Parasite Eve. Why didn't they just keep it the same instead of the trash games like Rainbow 6 and cool Borders???
 

Breakage

Member
My launch PS3 doubles up as a PS1, and I get to play with a wireless DualShock.
(Sometimes I think people forget that the PS3 has full PS1 BC.)

From what I have read, this Classic console is so limited eg one save slot per game. An utter waste of money imo.
 
Intelligent Qube? Toshinden 1?????

The game list isn't that good. Popular mainstream and cult games missing. Ridge Rcer type 4 with only a D-pad is not good. Puzzle Fighter but not one real fighting game in the series despite the many on PSX?

Persona 1???

and other analog stick games that you have to play with a D-pad and some eh games?

To be fair it may be slightly better than the Japanese line-up but this whole thing seems rushed or at the very least Sony didn't research much into what titles people would likely want and put in some popular games they remembered and drew the other games from a hat.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Intelligent Qube? Toshinden 1?????

The game list isn't that good. Popular mainstream and cult games missing. Ridge Rcer type 4 with only a D-pad is not good. Puzzle Fighter but not one real fighting game in the series despite the many on PSX?

Persona 1???

and other analog stick games that you have to play with a D-pad and some eh games?

To be fair it may be slightly better than the Japanese line-up but this whole thing seems rushed or at the very least Sony didn't research much into what titles people would likely want and put in some popular games they remembered and drew the other games from a hat.

Battle Arena Toshinden was in many demo pods here in EU and it was THE reason I wanted to get a PSOne as it was the first game I and many others obsessed over heh. It was the first competent and graphically impressive 3D fighter.

Still, I do agree with you. The PSOne’s software library is so vast, diverse, and awesome that 20-30 games miss sooooooo much amazing stuff that is not even funny.
 
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Kagey K

Banned
After seeing half the games are 50 PAL games, I’m out. Fuck that.

If they want to region separate the sales, then they should region separate the releases, at least make their games be industry standard.

Fuck 50htz games mashed in 60htz screens.
 

ROMhack

Member
As expected, the 20 games seems too limiting. I understand Nintendo going with that approach because their consoles' legacies are dominated by a select number of big titles. The PlayStation by contrast was seen as a versatile machine so selecting a mere 20 and having that represent the console feels remarkably tight.

Hopefully it doesn't sound spoiled but Sony had to go for the approach of having the majority of titles be big hitters, or simply throw the kitchen sink at it and have over double the number of games they offered. Or, you know, make it able to play downloadable games. Something like that.
 

Spukc

always chasing the next thrill
fuck man i wanted this thing so bad to put it next to my snes/nes mini
what a waste i still have hopes for the hacking scene tho



giant bomb 2 and a half hour EXTRAVAGANZA
get a cup of tea put some xmas music on and enjoy
 
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V4skunk

Banned
There should have been multiple skus of ps classic with different varieties of games.
A tonne of really good games are missing. One sku alone could have been the greatest rpg hits.
 
Battle Arena Toshinden was in many demo pods here in EU and it was THE reason I wanted to get a PSOne as it was the first game I and many others obsessed over heh. It was the first competent and graphically impressive 3D fighter.

Still, I do agree with you. The PSOne’s software library is so vast, diverse, and awesome that 20-30 games miss sooooooo much amazing stuff that is not even funny.

Yeah but for NA that's an odd choice, and even with that decent in EU the rest of the list is just as meh as the US one.
 

Trogdor1123

Member
I apologize for bumping a super old thread and didn't really think this question needed it's own thread but do the games on the mini load any faster? I assume not but thought I would check.
 
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