PS1 essentials

Is there a difference between the greatest hits and original release versions of Metal Gear Solid?

Some of these games are pretty damn expensive!

Is it weird that most of the original playstation Final Fantasy games seem to still be in print (but not seven)?

Is Dragon Quest VII called Dragon Warrior VII (anyway that's what comes up when I search amazon)?

Is the first tony hawk game the best one? or which???

The first one with manuals.. III?

Also Hogs of War, a 3-d Worms/Scorched Earth type game... Will that one be a little dated now, I wonder?

Ape Escape otm

Tekken 3

Sexy Parodius

suikoden 1&2
alundra

FFVI / Chrono Trigger
Castlevania SOTN
Front Mission 3
DQ7/DW7
Metal Gear Solid
Tekken 2
Wipeout
Parappa

Tony Hawk 2 introduced manuals, so that one. Though you could always just play the Dreamcast version... or, well, honestly... any other Tony Hawk that's come out since then. A lot of these examples kind of have superior sequels on systems that came out later... My opinion on PS1/N64 games is colored because I totally skipped them when they were out, and emulated them years later.

FF6/CT, you're better off emulating the originals if you can. BUT I definitely agree with:

FF Tactics (still somewhat unmatched in this genre for sheer bombast)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (still the most superior CV game, though the handheld sequels were good too)
Metal Gear Solid (you must start here before getting into the rest of the series)
Parappa the Rapper (sheer gold it is)
Bushido Blade 1 and 2 (cool game mechanics rarely explored in other fighting games)

The first Silent Hill
And any Resident Evil game

oh and Metal Gear Solid for sure!
- Yes yes yes!

Gran Turismo
Rage Racer

i wouldn't call gran turismo or GT2 essential because their PS2 and PS3 sequels are basically the same game just with better graphics, so you're not missing anything by not playing them

i know nothing about RPGs but i will second:

* umjammer lammy
* parappa
* metal gear solid
* bushido blade
* wipeout
* tekken 2

and correct two serious oversights:

* TENCHU

* TIME CRISIS

and and uh

* tomb raider

god time crisis was so awesome.. it played identically to the arcade version except that it contained an entirely new level, in a casino, that put the others to shame

does anybody know if those PS1 gun peripherals work on a PS2? do they work with LCD TVs?

Shit. Every game in this thread is better than most of my top ten games since. I really under-appreciated the Playstation.

At the time, I loved the games but I always though it was the redheaded stepchild generation, because polygons were still fugly and ps2 was the first system to look sexy. but a lot of games really did stand up to the test of time.

The PSP version of FF Tactics has a competent translation.

Soul Reaver -- a 3D version of Link to the Past, really.
FF8 (but play 6 or 7 first).

ok Tracer i'll agree with the GT thing.

But I'd say the best Colin McRae was the first one on pS1, the sequels seemed to lose something rather crucial.

Driver.

I want them to make this the FF Tactics blurb:

"A competent PSP translation" - abanana

well, I heard the best ps1 multiplayer game is Poy Poy but I never played it.

I did get a kick out of Buster Brothers Collection for multiplayer action but thats only if you like old school stuff like Pac Man.

Finally, every fighting game from capcom or snk.

I found a pretty useful site with covers (and screenshots) for 1,218 ps1 games...

http://www.psxa2z.com/thumbs/TN01.html

KURUSHI

Abe's Oddyssey too.

Webber - I wanted to get Kurushi/Intelligent Qube - I vaugely remember playing it way back when - but the cheapest one (on Amazon, at least) was going for $84.99 + $3.99shipping - YIPES.

You know what's another great PS1 game is Devil Dice. Does anyone remember that game? Did it come out on any other system?

there is a psp version out in japan, with wifi support

but yeah devil dice ruled

I got to try out Power Shovel over weekend! It's definitely not essential, but it may just be the most absurd game I've ever played... Unfortunately I can't find a youtube video of it in action...

http://www.us.playstation.com/PSone/Games/Power_Shovel

WipEout 2097 (called something else in some regions) >>>>>>>> WipEout

Spyro 1 is inconsequential and pointless but SO MUCH FUN. FFVII is cool too. There's a groundbreaking thing called Rascal which is shit, don't buy it.

driver was the shit - seeing cop cars fly over you and smash into each other as you slammed on the brakes, reversed, and sneaked into an alley; being able to REWIND that scene and play it back from any angle = so so awesome!

and yeah cosign re: wipeout 2097, that was the definitive version in my mind (the one with "firestarter")

driver was the shit - seeing cop cars fly over you and smash into each other as you slammed on the brakes, reversed, and sneaked into an alley; being able to REWIND that scene and play it back from any angle = so so awesome!

OTM.

Shame the final level was ridiculously hard.

I think I preferred the original Wipeout, but only because I was better at it.

Driver 1 was stupidly great frantic raw fun, fuck the plot, bugs and crap menu system.

Second Abe's Oddyssey as well, such fond memories. Especially the speed running levels, fucking frustrating to suss out after millions of attempts but everso satisfying when completed.

I might even venture Tomb Raider 1 ?

I still rate it as the best TR game.

Abe games thirded - Exoddus was really more of the same but no less rewarding. The emotional Mudokens were a nice addition. Also: exploding farts!

I don't know if anybody on here cares (I don't even care, because I don't see when I would ever bother to do this, but it is kind of interesting) - the latest ps3 firmware update (out today) allows you to play every single ps1 game you own over wifi remote play on your psp.

So basically you put the ps1 disc in your ps3, travel wherever you want in the world where there is wifi, log onto your ps3 via psp remote play and play the game.

Also, I just ordered a copy of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. Watched a clip on youtube and the graphics (color palette?) reminded me a little of Bioshock. I don't think I ever played it before, but I do remember it a little...

oh tomb raider is easily the best game ever released for ps1, and probably still the greatest console game ever

it was one of those games that people who had never even played videogames before bought a PS1 just so they could play it - there was awhile there in 1996 and 1997 when it seemed like everyone was playing it, asking each other where they had gotten up to

I never finished it :(

and yeah cosign re: wipeout 2097, that was the definitive version in my mind (the one with "firestarter")

-- Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 18 December 2007 21:33 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

Yep.

Apropos of sod-all, I played the entire 2097 soundtrack at the gym this morning. It chucks you straight into The Zone for burst cardio.

that is seriously the nerdiest thing i've ever heard.

But but but but but but it's all Chemical Brothers and Cold Storage and Prodigy and FSOL etc. It's just an omgawesome compilation, really.

PS1 games came with music as CD audio (track 2 onward), so you could stick the discs in any old CD player and they'd play normally.

The list so far then...

Alundra
Ape Escape
Bushido Blade 1 & 2
Buster Brothers Collection
Castlevania: SoTN
Chrono Trigger
Colin McRae
Colony Wars
Devil Dice
Dragon Quest VI
Driver
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy Tactics
Front Mission 3
Gran Turismo
Hogs of War
Intelligent Qube
Metal Gear Solid
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
PaRappa the Rapper
Proboarder
Rage Racer
Resident Evil
Sexy Parodius
Silent Hill
Soul Reaver
Spyro
Suikoden 1&2
Tekken 2
Tekken 3
Tenchu
Time Crisis
Tomb Raider
Tony Hawk
UmJammer Lammy
Vagrant Story
Vib-Ribbon
Wipeout
Wipeout 2097
Xenogears

A few I disagree with:

Colony Wars was what graphics whores of 1997 were jizzing over; the gameplay is nothing special.

Spyro gave me headaches (literally).

Resident Evil: the Gamecube version is supposedly a big improvement.

FFVI and Chrono Trigger should not be played in their PS1 versions as they are poorly emulated with long load times.

crash bandicoot 2?

adidas power soccer, the first football game i can remember that let you kick people in the head

micro machines v3 was awesome; if you had a multitap you could play 8 player simultaneously (each person took half a controller each)

i remember toshinden being THE reason i wanted a ps1, which is weird because i never bought it and it's pretty much the worst game ever

GRIND SESSIONS

Pro Evo 6

the only reason everyone got toshinden is because it was:

1) 3D!!!!!!!!!!
2) manga girl with knives and diaphonous clothes

bushido blade 2: not essential

colony wars was AWESOME

i don't know what you mean by the gameplay not being special?? you control a spaceship that does NOT move like an airplane - it took me a few hours just to get the hang of that

then you had to fire EMP weapons at giant battleships, tow them off by some distance, fire rockets into other things, and race away while they exploded behind you - god that game was awesome - it was also very very hard. i would coug my jorts to play an updated version

oh my god yes - tomb raider

was TH4 on psone?

the scenario: third-person shooter in which you control a mechanical spider that can walk up walls and across ceilings and fall any distance without taking any damage

you can strafe endlessly (even forward and backwards), shoot up to six missiles at once, each of which is capable of locking onto a different enemy

a typical level sees you in a city of skyscrapers, at night, needing to destroy four superguns scattered throughout the nieghborhood, which are protected by helicopters, fighter jets, fixed gun turrets, cyborgs with shoulder rpgs, and other mechanical spiders which can shoot blue lasers at you and also crawl up walls

strangely, the closest thing i can think of to this game is tenchu, which is all about stealth, whereas this is a full-on, guns blazing strafe fest. i think it's because both of them allow you to climb on onto roofs and both allow total freedom of 3-D movement (although ghost in the shell does have two thrilling levels on "rails" -- one at sea and one on a highway, where your little spider is always carried in a certain direction and must dodge things and rotate to deal with other things)

probably the best shoot em up PS1 game ever

another thing: this is one of the few, proud playstation games in which the training level is the most difficult and most satisfying level of all

oh, and the soundtrack is by takkyu ishino!!

I recently found an old stockpile of PS1 RPGs. Give me an honest assessment of which of these games are actually worth revisiting in the year of two thousand ought nine:

Chrono Cross
Persona 1
Vagrant Story
Valkyrie Profile
Xenogears

I haven't played any of them but the ones I remember getting the most positive press were Xenogears and Persona.

chrono cross - disappointing, boring story with a weak battle system. not hard enough. at the time i think it was well-received but i think now the game would same extremely formulaic

persona 1: is this revelation? or the jpn version? this game is kind of a mess and not worth investing time in imo i'd rather play 4.

vagrant story: yes!!! really rad game and i think it would still be extremely challenging. and the look will have dated well. so much to do with this one

Valkyrie Profile - i dont think i ever beat this game fully. it may actually play better now. battle system is the best on this list and i liked the puzzle stuff but there are A LOT of retarded points in this game where yr stuck wandering around and need to just guess at wtf yr supposed to do

xenogears - :D i really loved this game when it came out idk its tied to a specific aesthetic that requires the player to really buy in - i can see how someone trying to play this shit now for the first time would just be O_O at the story and voice-acting and battle system but... i mean i voted for this in that 100 best poll so i would def replay it.

Vagrant Story: definitely
Xenogears: only if you have a way to speed up the text (emulator, or maybe some sort of game genie device?)
Chrono Cross: I never beat this. I hear it gets better towards the end. Dumb battle system and tons of redundant characters.

Haven't played the others.

intelligent cube

don't do xenogears if you just want a pick me up game

seconding twisted metal

Valkyrie Profile-

saw this played but never played it. seemed to have a great deal of neat things going on but I don't think I'd invest that much time in it myself? certainly nothing that fried itself into my brain, unlike

Xenogears

This is best RPG ever made for the PS1. I played through it to the end only once and would probably drop $200+ just for the game if they ever rereleased it.

Most importantly, I'm not ashamed to say so.

There are copies of Xenogears for around fifty bucks on amazon

tombot you'd rank xenogears over suikoden II?

you can grab xenogears on the US PSN now I think?

nah, Suikoden has just been added on there (for $6), not Xenogears.

ah, that's right! sorry

My PS1 essentials (not that I ever had that much for the system) - Symphony of the Night, Parappa or Umjammer. Tony Hawk: 1 and 2 are both great, I probably sank more time into 2 which just adds TONS of stuff, but it does lose a few of the most fun things about the first one, mainly the downhill courses! Definitely need two players to get the most out of either, they are definitive dorm-hallway collective games for me.

I really loved Soul Reaver but I think I might just not have known the genre well enough, all I had to compare it to was Tomb Raider and I think it was slightly more fun than that (although less of a revelation). But there are probably much better games in the 3rd person "leap, shove cubes" genre.

tony hawk 1 was kinda my life at this point

I never played suikoden II! I still need to get around to suikoden V!!

anyone played these

internal section
nanotek warrior
tombi
brave fencer musashi
jumping flash
C12
front mission 3

silent bomber
destrega

?

i played front mission 3 and destrega. the former is pretty good but nowhere near as fun as front mision 1, but better than 4. destrega is a hilarious game to paly when it's 1999 and you're well drunk but as a "serious" fighter it's grossly unbalanced and kinda shit really.

jumping flash: loved the huge jumps when I first played it, but I recently bought it on psn and it's not so good. It's really ugly and it has tank controls.

Jumping flash and Jumping flash 2 are probably my all-time favorite personal cult games! JF2 is way better than the first one.

Some other great games I don't see here yet:
-Ape Escape
-Bust-A-Move (don't know which version we had, prob. '99)
-Resident Evil 3, which has gotten a bad rap, historically, I think. The initial reviews were really positive, and I had more fun playing it than either parts 1 or 2. I especially liked the survival mode that unlocked after you beat it.
-Tenchu 2, which was much better than the first one.

I never actually got to play Vib-Ribbon but I always wanted to.

a giant cube made out of styrofoam filled with dead flies

it really is incredible that you have a hard time getting girls to date you, burt

get it? PS1 the arts center? Hilarious.

according to your posts your the one not getting it

I have an easy time getting girls to date me, I have a hard time not being a righteous fruitcake and screwing it up. I stand by my lame gag, btw.

I FINALLY GOT VIB RIBBON!

it's freaking hard

ooh nice!

I got gitaroo man, it's also freakin hard

haha Brave Fencer Musashi!

I can't remember if I told this story on this board elsewhere before, but when I was in first year university I had a roommate who would play video games in this windowless room with gray-painted walls for hours and hours and hours at a time (36 hours on Ocarina of Time entirely uninterrupted, except, one hopes, by bathroom breaks). He would become just completely demented after awhile. In the middle of one of these binges, I overheard him on the phone, calling Slocki, desperate and deranged, at god knows what time: "HELLO MARK HAVE YOU HEARD ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT BRAVE FENCER MUSASHI?"

curious - anyone play Poy Poy? I haven't but heard its a great multiplayer game.

I recently found an old stockpile of PS1 RPGs. Give me an honest assessment of which of these games are actually worth revisiting in the year of two thousand ought nine:

Chrono Cross
Persona 1
Vagrant Story
Valkyrie Profile
Xenogears

― Nhex, Friday, January 9, 2009 11:17 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Chrono Cross - I remember liking it when it came out, it tried to do something different and had some things going for it, iirc (great music, an abundance of extraneous characters but a lot of them were actually p. compelling, esp compared with much less fleshed out PCs from games with smaller casts, like ff9, kinda sloppy overall and it admits asmuch by the end, when [i remember j parish pointing this out] [lol] it assembles some toddler versions of the main characters around the portal to the last boss and employs them as expository devices that explain the entire convoluted plot to u) - not really sure i could recommend it, but fool around with it for a couple hours and you'll probably have an idea of how much you'll dig it

Valkyrie Profile - idk

Vagrant Story - top 50 all time, any platform

Xenogears - the worst JRPG ever released in north america (keith olbermann voice)

actually went back and beat xenogears in 07 or 08, as i was cleaning up old games that i'd never beaten and my save before the final dungeon had remained untouched since 99 or 00 - there's a nice element of strategy to the gear fighting, since your attacks all draw from a limited supply of fuel and if you run out you are fucked, but the gears themselves are so powerful that you're really never in any danger. one of the most persistently irritating/infuriating random encounter systems ever, one that would famously interrupt you mid-jump during some of the game's ill-advised platforming sections. you play a guy with a ponytail, who is often naked for no reason you can discern, and whose best bud is another guy with a ponytail. filled with insidious pedophile pandering bullshit (not as bad as xenosaga in this regard). hideous sprite based characters. every smidgen of action is bracketed by hours of goopy bullshit like this:

Krelian:And what if that 'Will' itself was predetermined? What then? Oh what
folly!? Humans
are just primitive life forms that have no such thing as free will... Mankind
has merely been
allowed to live in an imperfect state... "as is", "as will be"... It is for
this very
reason... because humans have this wretched 'will' or whatnot... that humans
must experience
sadness and loss. For someone to gain something means another must lose it...
It is impossible
to make humankind share limited "things" and "affections"... So I came to the
conclusion that
everything must be reverted back to where it all began. To go back to when all
was one...
waves, and nothing else... It is not my -Human's- ego... It is the will of the
'Waves' ...
the will of -god-...

that's some verbatim dialogue, dogg

positives: music, one subplot towards the end of the game references 'soylent green'

brave fencer musashi is a game that is basically made to 'sell' u on the gay lifestyle idk how else to describe it

Thanks for the opinions, guys! I definitely fear Xenogears but want to give it a shot for at least Mitsuda's score. Cool that Vagrant Story seems to really be liked, I was very unsure about that one.

I still haven't really gotten into these yet, since my knowledge is really spotty on PS1 emulation. I have to boot into Windows and use ePSXe or just PSX, and get distracted by the kajillion other games I can play. Anyone know a working PS1 emulator for Mac OS X? I've looked into it but couldn't find one that has been developed since the transition to Intel.

you can get a real one for 18 pounds:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-PSone-Console/dp/B00004YWK9

I'll sell you one, or http://pcsx.gpost.dk/

I've tried that one, sadly I haven't gotten it to work.

just played the first couple of tomb raider levels again, PS1 version - such a great game

i tried the TR1 remake (legend, or something?) which looked fantastic but which was RUBBISH

It was anniversary, which I thought was pretty good, one interminable sequence aside.

It was suggested that I bump this over here, hello!

Laugh and Peace - Vib-Ribbon OST