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My Collection: Playstation

Tuesday, November 20th, 2018

The Playstation, Sonys first video game console, was released in the US on September 9 1995. I bought mine that very day and it quickly became my favourite console. While it wasn’t the first CD based console, and was even arguably weaker than the Sega Saturn released a few months earlier, the Playstation (PS1) was an immediate success, and in the months and years ahead would change the video game industry from a hobby aimed at children to a hobby for all ages.

That’s the third Playstation I owned, the ‘PSOne’ model that was released late in it’s lifestyle (in 2000). My first two Playstations had died in the intervening years, both due to laser failure which was a common problem for the system. The above photo shows a portable screen attached to the unit itself, but it also obviously can be used with a TV.

I bought about 150 games for the system during it’s active years, but I traded in more PS1 games than for any other system and only own about 75 today. It was a fantastic system for role-playing games, and most of what I keep to this day is in that genre. It was also the console that helped ‘3D’ games (polygon based) mature, although this was in part coupled with a detrimental effect on 2D games that took years to subside.

That said, the graphics are very crude by todays standards, and as a result many PS1 games have dated poorer than the bitmap-graphics games from the previous generations:

The console had a long lifespan though – about 6 years – and developers learned it inside out by the end. Comparing a late-generation game to a launch game is like comparing two different consoles, and some of the late 90s releases still impress today.

The system used black discs more for marketing than effect (piracy was still rampant) and while in those days we were astonished by the larger amount of content (and voice, sound and video) games could contain the drive speed was slow and this was a very common part of the PS1 experience:

It makes playing games from disc a somewhat tedious process these days, at least on original hardware. But while fun to poke fun at, it wasn’t so bad 20+ years ago assuming the game itself was good, and thankfully many of them were.

The above are three of my favourite games of all time: complex, lengthy and rewarding dungeon crawls each with a different style. Symphony Of The Night and Valkyrie Profile has since been released (in fact I purchased the PS4 port of Symphony Of The Night just two weeks ago!) but Vagrant Story remains a system exclusive. This game is notable for many ways, not the least of which is it was set in the world of ‘Ivalice’ which would eventually become the setting for FF12 many years later. It’s a true masterpiece, and I wish Square would have decided to remake it instead of FF7.

Speaking of Final Fantasy the system was also home to three main-series games (FF7 through 9), an incredibly good spin-off (FF Tactics) and a multitude of rereleases of the earlier games in the series. I bought, played and still own them all.

Few people remember that the PS1 is where the ‘Souls’ series began. The above are the first three games in the series, and while of a different genre (1st person dungeon crawls) are every bit as bleak and punishing as the Dark/Demons Souls series. King’s Field is the earliest PS1 purchase I still own, being bought a few months after the system was released.

I was writing for Working Designs during the PS1 era, and they were a somewhat prolific company known for the lavish packaging of their games. This was the early glory days of the translated RPG in America, and they rode the wave to great success.

Many of the games I own – including most I have shown – are worth a pretty penny these days. Some of the ones in my collection are valued in the hundreds of dollars and every time I do a post like this I briefly consider selling my collection. But as usual I won’t, and they’ll go back into the box for another indeterminate amount of years.

The PS1 sold over 100 million units, was successful all over the world, and spawned a legacy that has continued through 3 other consoles (PS2, PS3, PS4) and two portables (PSP, PSV). Over the years I have bought over 700 games for Sony systems, and while they’ve moved away from the portable console market now, I don’t see the Playstation brand ending any time soon.

Original PS1 hardward these days is arguably useless. The followup console – the PS2 – was fully reverse compatible and provides a much better way to play PS1 games than on original hardware. Furthermore the hardware problems (mostly, as mentioned, the laser) and issues connecting old models to new TVs mean it’s not in particular demand. However many of the games still are worth playing, and in a couple of weeks Sony is released a ‘Playstation Portable’ plug-and-play device similar to those Nintendo has had such success with recently. I personally think the game list and choice to forsake analogue controllers leaves a lot to be desired and have little interest in this new device, but I hope that it succeeds and is for many a reminder of the history of one of gamings most important ever releases.

For me, I’ve still got my 2000-model PSOne and screen, as well as a big box of amazing games. I reckon I’ve got at least another playthrough of Vagrant Story awaiting me some time in my future…

Posted in Collecting, Games, History, Otaku, Tech | Comments Closed

My Collection: Neo Geo Pocket Color

Saturday, September 8th, 2018

Neo Geo was well known for high-end and arcade quality home game consoles when it decided to enter the handheld market, and expectations were high for the Neo Geo Pocket Colour when it launched in mid 1999. I bought mine later that year with six of the launch games. I immediately fell in love with it.

That’s my original handheld – I chose the ‘anthracite’ color – in it’s box. I hadn’t played it for many years before preparing this post, and had forgotten just how much I loved it.

The system is smaller than the original gameboy, and very lightweight. Though entirely plastic it feels very solid and professionally built. Special mention must be made of the tiny 8-way joystick that utilizes microswitches than click when used. It’s extremely satisfying. Oh and if you wonder about the specs, they’re printed right under the screen!

The screen is reflective rather than backlit, which was fine in those days but is charmingly old fashioned now. The contrast however is excellent and there’s almost no blurring. Here’s a shot of the bioryhtym calculator included as part of the basic OS:

The games came in cardboard boxes (as did gameboy games in those days) with the cartridge itself in a tiny plastic box. Manuals were full colour.

The cartridges are on the small side. Of course compared to Switch and Vita games they’re not but in those days these were quite a bit smaller than the competitors games:

The Neo Geo Pocket Color failed as a system, due mostly to the financial woes of the parent company. It was demonstrably a better system than the Gameboy and was priced competitively but poor management coupled with competition from the juggernaut known as Pokemon helped seal it’s fate in less than a year. As the months passed games became increasingly difficult to find (this was before such things were easily purchased online) and I recall it was a bit of an effort to buy games into early 2000.

All in all I managed to obtain 14 games:

Most are boxed; some are not. All were purchased new. The reason for the lack of boxes is that there were games that had been produced but not distributed when the system was pulled from stores in early 2000 and boxes for those games were never made. I bought them online (for almost nothing) years later.

As you can see there are many Neo Geo arcade ‘ports’. These have been mostly redesigned to fit the different style of control and display, and are almost without exception excellent. The Metal Slug games in particular play very well, and Gal’s Fighters is probably the best handheld fighting game I have ever played. The standout game though is Card Fighters Clash, a strategic collectible card game with astonishingly good graphics. I loved this game to death, and am strongly considering (yet) another playthrough from scratch for old times sake 🙂

As with most of my games, my NGPC collection is in virtual mint condition and is complete with all boxes and manuals. I don’t think much about it though, and was surprised in preparing this post to see how much this once-clearanced and mostly forgotten system has appreciated. Consulting my database I see that I paid a total of $389.71 for the system and the 14 games I bought (the system cost $70, the games averaged $22 apiece). And yet these days the boxed system alone is ‘worth’ about $180 and one of the games (Evolution) may even fetch more than that! A brief tabulation at one of the internet price charting sites values my collection at just shy of $1000 so I’ll be sure to keep it safe and sound for many years to come 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech | Comments Closed

Air Port Panic

Sunday, July 8th, 2018

In Inverness, a quick search on the information superhighway led me to a used game shop only a few hops and skips away from where we were staying. Of course we wandered over, and found a most intriguing and messy little shop full of records and games.The walls were decorated with album sleeves, mostly examples of 1970s Top Of The Pops ‘cover girl’ compilations like this:

There were loads of records and singles, and even a few cassettes. Disorder was the name of the game, and actually finding anything specific would have been a matter of luck. And yet I reckoned there were treasures in the boxes, and had I not been overseas I may have dug a bit through the vinyl.

Happily the games were sorted, but unfortunately 99% of them were 16 bit or older. I spied a few old Spectrum and CPC computer games, and may have even purchased them if they hadn’t been lacking their sleeves. There were no signs of actual 8-bit computers, or magazines from the 1980s. It looked like I would depart without making a purchase.

And then I saw this:

Its an LCD handheld from 1982! The last game in Bandai’s LCD Solarpower series to be precise, and one of the very few released outside of Japan. I’d never heard of this series of games before, and was intrigued to find that they rely completely on solar power to run.

The Japanese box (mine didn’t come with the box) also shows how it has two layered screens for a very subtle 3D effect. This works well and makes the screens look busier than in the Game & Watch units from Nintendo.Unfortunately the technology requires actual solar power, and doesn’t function at all under artificial lighting!

Furthermore, it’s incredibly difficult to get good photos due to how reflective the screen is, but here’s my best attempts:

Air Port Panic is ridiculously difficult to the point where I suspect it’s slightly buggy. The action seems to lag the processor slightly and you seem to die moments before being hit by a projectile. But this can be accounted for somewhat, and success – reaching the hijacked plane in screen one and reaching the terrorists in screen two can be achieved with practice.

Sadky it’s not much fun, and not just because of the stupid difficulty. You also need to be standing in direct sunlight to play, and even then can hardly see the screen. I can see – impressive tech aside – why Bandai didn’t beat Nintendo in the early 80s handheld wars 🙂

I paid a mere £15 for this gem, which is considerably less than I see then for on eBay. As a game I’ll rarely return to it, but as another for the collection it was a happy find!

Posted in Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Music, Otaku, Retro, Tech | Comments Closed

Videogaming Illustrated (Issue 4, Feb 1983)

Sunday, April 8th, 2018

At a convention a few weeks ago for the princely sum of $5 I bought this:

It’s one of the very earliest video game magazines, dating to before the ‘crash of 1983’. It’s from the same publisher of the old sci-fi magazine Omni, and the format is very similar (silver pages, yellow pages with fiction, somewhat pretentious tone).

This was very much a magazine without an audience. The inclusion of fiction, the monthly news round up heavy on business content and the (repulsive) interview with Don Imus suggests they were going for the Playboy approach. So much so I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake photos!

That said it’s also an interesting curio from the earliest days of my favourite hobby! For instance I was surprised by the lavish adverts for Atari 2600 games:

(By the way I’m ripping off Ashens here and taking photos of the magazine on a couch rather than scanning it. Hey I’m lazy!)

And the lengthy strategy sections – which take up a decent amount of the magazine and cover arcade and 2600 games – are charmingly low-tech:

The middle one is a four page guide to the arcade game Kangaroo which was probably mostly forgotten even when this issue shipped!

There’s also a guide to third-party 2600 joysticks, a lengthy but superficial article about pinball machines, too much fiction and a lot of uninteresting (even then I suspect) ‘monthly news’.

What isn’t well-represented though are advertisements. I’ve shown some above, but there are very few in total and many of them are clearly there as part of some paid-content promotion:

That’s just one of two ads for Cosmic Creeps, an Atari 2600 game profiled and given a strategy guide in this very issue…

The other element common to today’s magazines that is almost entirely absent are screenshots! In fact, in the entire issue, there is a grand total on one real shot (as opposed to drawings of the screen) and this is it:

Can you name the game? (And yes, I suspect it may also be fake…)

Anyway this mag was sold at the con by a guy who flogs old magazines of many kinds, and at the same time I got some very old Dr Who magazines as well as a bunch of cheesecake horror mags. Why was he selling this one issue of a 35 year old gaming magazine? The cover!! It features a preview of sorts of Revenge Of The Jedi (tied to an article about the 2600 Jedi Arena) which includes this gem:

It was all mostly true, if a bit off with the date estimates!

Anyway a curio from the dawn of gaming time. This magazine would run another year and change names twice before becoming another victim of the crash that almost sunk the US industry, but from what I see here I struggle to wonder who bought it even then?

Posted in Games, Movies, Retro, Tech, Time | 1 Comment »

The Tiny Arcade

Sunday, February 11th, 2018

Bernard gave me this for Christmas:

It’s a tiny arcade machine. Better yet it’s a kit that needs to be assembled! Here’s what it looked like out of the box:

The critical components are indeed tiny, and fit easily into the palm of my hand:

Here’s the screen being tested:

Assembly of the case was tricky but not difficult, and I actually had more trouble affixing the super-adhesive ‘cabinet art’. Once finished, it’s tiny (about 8 cm tall) and very impressive:

The back is open to access the electronics, which include on/off switches, a plug to charge the battery and a micro SD card port:

The unit runs off an arduino-derived chip (I believe), and supports a tiny OLED screen that is very sharp and bright. There’s several basic games included but to be honest most are little more than tech demos. Amongst clones of Flappy Bird, Tetris, Space Invaders and even R-Type there is however a charming little roguelike by a Japanese dev: