PS1 essentials

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?

second grind session. thrasher: skate or die was awesome too. matt hoffman pro bmx. THPS4 was indeed on ps1. gran turismo 2 brought me as much pleasure as gt1, i think. dance dance revolution 3rd mix + ps1 + two cheap dance pads duct taped to plywood = a fifty dollar ddr machine with the best mix. i remember enjoying 3xtreme a bit. no love for coolboarders 2 and 3?! I'm so sure that ps1 = the reason that "extreme" sports exist because those games were usually the funnest :/

oh, and syphon filter. although that probably feels mad dated by now (hell, it even felt dated after MGS)

gah reading stuff about colony wars: vengeance (which i never played) makes me want it so bad:

Examples of missions include defusing mines that lie in the path of the mothership you are guarding. Free floating asteroid rocks must be found and then mined for an essential crystal. Collect radioactive objects with your grappling hook and then drop them off at the entrance to a black hole. Of course there are several dog fights and planet-based missions, where the battles will take place across a range of highly detailed landscapes.

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

so hard. i never got very far, but i still thought the game was cool. it was a good wing commander substitute.

have there been any similar games for gamecube/ps2/etc.?

second grind session.

THERE WAS A SEQUEL?!??!?!

I remember my roommate playing through Colony Wars with an invincibily code and unlimited weapons on THE WHOLE TIME.

Resident Evil 2 not on here yet? It might be a little annoying to play now, as there's a lot of backtracking in it, but it's the first game I ever really had the experience of total cinematic immersion. It's also the first game that scared the shit out of me (the licker in the interrogation room). I played the whole thing through THREE TIMES.

(the licker in the interrogation room)

So much money! I have probably related this story, but owell, I was playing a friend's house where I got to that part of the game, had the gooseberries scared out of me and everyone watching me, and where I promptly died. I played through again, and my friend's bro came in and I guess wanted to show off their then-advanced hi-fi surround sound system. He put the sound on the speakers, and I was all, "WTF are you doing? This is the scary part!" And he was all, "What scary part?" CUE LICKER CRASHING THROUGH GLASS AND EVERYONE FREAKS!!!!! I think I had to give up the controller at that point.

Is that the one that only appears when you walk past it the second time? Great trick. Silent Hill has a room where you can here something moving in a cabinet, but if you open it it's just a cat. Then when you go to leave the room along the same path as you entered it, a monster pops out of another cabinet.

I just loved on Grind Session how every time you timed out on the Detroit level, you heard "No hip-hop connection between us and Janet Reno."

When I said "second grind session" i meant, like, i second the motion. i did not mean to get your hopes up. i always liked it more than the tony hawk games!

yeah, resident evil 2 was pretty sweet. i guess it has been eclipsed in my mind by res evil 4, which is all-time.

I kind of forgot you can download some ps1 titles pretty cheap via the ps3. In the US so far there isn't a lot (but there are some titles from the essential list)...

2Xtreme ($5,99)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ($9,99)
CoolBoarders ($5,99)
Crash Bandicoot ($5,99)
Destruction Derby ($5,99)
Hot Shots Golf 2 ($5,99)
Jet Moto ($5,99)
Jumping Flash ($5,99)
Medievil ($5,99)
Rally Cross ($5,99)
Spyro the Dragon ($5,99)
Syphon Filter ($5,99)
Tekken 2 ($5,99)
Twisted Metal 2 ($5,99)
Wild Arms ($5,99)
WipEout ($5,99)

Resident Evil 2's definitely the best RE on Playstation 1

AWWW JET MOTO!!!!! That game ruled! Well, the second one anyway. Twisted Metal also k-classic.

BET was incredibly stupid in all of the right ways.

There was some game called Iznogoud, which reviewers hated and loved saying so using the obvious pun over and over and over again.

You know what else is the Point Blank games!!! This is now sullied by the moronic DS port, but these were some majorly awesome games, probably the best shooting gallery-type games, i.e. nonviolent light gun games, ever. Better than Duck Hunt by a mile. Was it only the first one that was on the PSX with the Namco gun bundled in? God what a great game. I wish I was playing it right now.

The original Warhawk is up for download this week in the US. Did anybody on here ever play it before? Is it worth checking out (for six bucks)?

Man. It's a trap. It's all a trap. None of those are worth getting except maybe Symphony of the Night, and EVEN THEN, there's a superior updated version on Xbox 360 Live Arcade, or you can get it on the PSP with Dracula X Chronicles. But if you don't have those systems, then it's definitely worth $10.

<i>You know what else is the Point Blank games!!! </i>

i bought one of these but then could never find a gun peripheral - a year later i sold it on ebay for 3 times what i bought it for!
a Point Blank Wii is a licence to print money, why have they not released one?

Parasite Eve!!

And I second Xenogears.

I can't remember what it was like, but I do remember that I liked City of Lost Children.

I hated Parasite Eve! First play-through was ok, but the Chrysler Building in the second play-through equals giant eff you.

I was checking out the going Amazon prices for JRPG stuff the other day - suikoden, suikoden ii, xenogears, etc - INSANE

well not insane but HIGH

i too hated parasite eve, never even came close to finishing it

Funny, I loved that game. I beat it in one extremely long sitting in first-year uni. Why did I love it so? I remember cool weapons and being dazzled by the recognizable real-life environments, which I don't think I'd seen up till then.

I also loved it; but I did finish it and in another massive two day stretch. I loved the world and the creepy shit and the great cinemas and the odd attach scheme.

"attack"

"ghost in the shell"!!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!1111!!!11

not "single cell complex" or whatever

one of the top 10 ps1 games ever without a doubt

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

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