Hi y'all,

I owned a PlaySation as a kid, but I don't remember playing it much. I was much more stuck to my Nintendo 64 playing Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and MegaMan 64.

Well, I got it in my head that I wanted to play MegaMan Legends 2, which only came out on PlaySation as far as I can tell. I've started playing through MegaMan Legends again before I get to the sequel, and I'm having a really good time.

I was hoping I could hear form y'all about some of your favorite games so I could dip my toes deeper into the PS1 library. What are some of your favorites? Anything particularly odd, unique, or with a very specific point of view? I'll try any genre. Some games I've dabbled with or had my eye on to play: Parasite Eve, Vagrant Saga, Xenogears, Koudelka, and most notably perhaps, Metal Gear Solid. I've never played any Metal Gear games, but the story and world building is so interesting from what I know about it that I really want to give it a try. Also, if anyone knows of some cool Japanese only fan-translate games, would really love to hear about those.

tldr: favorite ps1 game? any weirdo shit i should play?

edit 03/31: the love for ps1 is HUGE. thanks to everyone for all of the great responses. will respond in time. been taking time to sample a bunch of these. my experience with tildes's gaming community has been awesome.

This is what everyone always says. It's the big punchline of this console generation.

They say it as if they meant "Sony hasn't made or published any games worth playing since November 2020." That's definitely not true. Sony's released several great, critically acclaimed games on PS5: Returnal, Horizon 2, God of War Ragnarok, and just recently they had Helldivers 2. They've had a PS5 game get nominated for Game of the Year every year.

What people have really complaining about is "Sony doesn't keep their games solely on the PS5, instead they've also been bringing them to PS4 and/or PC when able." Isn't that... good?

I remember during the PS3 and PS4 generations, it sucked that you'd have to buy a whole console for that 1 exclusive you were interested in. I had a friend who got a PS4 solely to play Bloodborne. I saw a lot of people back then interested in these exclusives coming to PC. For convenience, for better graphics and frame rates, for the novelty, for game preservation, for any number of reasons.

Now it's finally happened, Sony's big IPs are pretty much all on PC. You can go buy God of War or Ratchet and Clank on Steam. That's awesome! 15-years-ago me would've never believed that could happen in a million years.

And how did people react? "Why would I buy a PS5? It has no games!" It has games, they're just not keeping the games locked up there serving a life sentence, maybe getting a remaster 20 years later if they're lucky. I also find it odd how the Series X has even less exclusives, releasing games day-and-date on PC, but nobody jokes about that.

The Bleem v. Sony case is often brought up whenever legal action against emulators happens, and I got curious, so I dug a bit deeper. It's quite hard, as most of the actual source material is not publicly available for free, only the appeal decision by the ninth court. But from what I've gathered from secondary sources, this is what actually happened.

1. Sony sues Bleem on one count of unfair competition and one count of copyright violation for the use of Sony game screenshots in Bleem advertising.
2. A judge dismisses the unfair competition claim. Sony wins the copyright violation.
3. Bleem appeals, and the Ninth Court reverses the decision on copyright violation for advertisement material.
4. Sony sues again, this time for unfair competition and also patent infringement for using their BIOS.
5. Sony and Bleem settle for an undisclosed amount. Bleem declares bankruptcy.

As far as I can tell, the only precedent was on whether or not you can use a competitor's screenshots in your advertisement, and indeed that's all I've ever seen the case referred to in future cases. The first unfair competition claim was dismissed (so cannot be a precedent) and the second case was settled. I see a lot of people say that this case set a "precedent" that "emulation is legal", but I don't see how?

Is this just another case where through a game of telephone and rumors people just take it for assumed fact that somehow or another this case "set a precedent that emulation is legal"? For over 20 years?

On whether or not emulation is legal, generally things are legal unless they are made to be illegal; there is certainly no specific law that says that emulation is legal. The question, then, is whether or not emulation is inadvertently made illegal by an existing law.

In that respect, Bleem v. Sony is a useful indicator in that Sony's lawyers couldn't really find anything concrete to nail Bleem on. But not really more than that, unless you really care about whether or not an emulator can use screenshots in their advertisements.

Developer:

• Team Reptile (Megabyte Punch, Lethal League, Lethal League Blaze)

Platforms:

• Steam, GOG, Nintendo Switch (August 18)
• PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One (September 1)

Trailers:

• Official Release Trailer
• Official Special Trailer

Reviews:

• OpenCritic page

Description:

Team Reptile brings you Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a future world from the mind of Dion Koster where self-styled graffiti crews equipped with personal boostpacks are battling each other for control of the streets. Start your own cypher and dance, paint graffiti, collect beats, combo your tricks and face off with the cops to stake your claim to the sprawling metropolis of New Amsterdam.

(What the official description won’t say is that this game is an unofficial love letter to Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast and Jet Set Radio Future on the Xbox. Hideki Naganuma even contributed new songs to the soundtrack.)

I'm a little over halfway through and I really have to force myself to keep playing it. Some of it is really cool and a lot of it drives me crazy. Sorry to rant a bit but a lot of the discourse online is extremely positive and I just wanted to let this out.

• So many cutscenes. They're pretty good cutscenes. The acting is largely very good, most characters are really enjoyable (although maybe one day FF will realize that antagonists can be multifaceted and not just generic evil badman). But so, so many hours of cutscene -- run over there -- cutscene -- go to the one map location that's unlocked -- cutscene.
• So much time wasting slow running around. Sometimes the maps are designed like a (linear) maze for apparent reason except to make it take longer to get somewhere. I see a quest marker and I just immediately "ugh" at how long it's going to take me to plod over there.
• And as a corollary to the above, exploration sucks. I learned very early on that there's no reason not to beeline to the next goal, so it makes the slow running that much worse. Dungeons are basically right out of FF XIV, which means one straight line and a very clear pattern of trash mob, trash mob, boss, rinse, repeat.
• The gear and stats are a non-entity. You go through the story, it more or less hands you periodic levels and gear. It feels like they thought including these things was obligatory, but for what they put in the game, they could have just not bothered.
• Combat is pretty fun! A little repetitive. A little samey. I wish there were more options for using all the skills you get. I have all these things I could unlock, but the very limited set of slots you get make they basically a non-option once you've picked the ones you like. The system just feels kind of half baked.
• And in that same vein, the big quick-time-event boss battles are neat too. I don't love them, because it feels a lot like I'm not playing a game anymore, but they do look pretty fantastic. Some of the latter ones go on for way too long. Just like, I was done with punching this fantastic looking beast 10 minutes ago.
• Maybe I haven't heard enough of it or listened long enough, but the music is disappointing. Which is sad because I love the tracks in XIV from the same composer. So much here is just ambient or otherwise underwhelming. A bunch of critical moments are just remixes on the classic theme, which is nice, but not really selling me on the new score overall.

I'm probably going to stick through to the end (slowly, with many breaks for Dave the Diver), at the very least because it was so expensive. I just wish it were better.

Curious to hear what the people of tildes think.

As we close in on 3 years of use with these newer consoles, what are every one’s thoughts? Has “next gen” been what you thought it’d really be or are you kinda just feeling whelmed?

I have a PS5 and I use it every now and then for pretty much the first party games. PC is my main platform but as I think back, I’ve been pretty happy with my PS5 and the games to come so far. I also really enjoy the UI (although custom backgrounds would be great).

I don’t know how the Xbox side is so I’d love to hear your thoughts to!

Thanks for taking the time to read.