The PS1 Nostalgia Thread

[FLips]

I know for most of you the greatest sound in the world might be something more personal, like the sound of your children’s laughter or maybe the chirping of birds on a warm breezy morning; but for me it’s the PS1 startup sound.
The low building hum, the triumphant peak with a transition to an old familiar jingle with a windy reverb fading out in the background.

It’s the sound of my Mum and Grandparents cooking a chicken dinner downstairs while me and my Younger Brother played Three Lions for the first time and kept running David Seaman out of goal to make him do a front flip. It’s the sound of sitting with a pile of chipped games with your mates and finding one you’ll cherish forever. It’s the sound of a time where there were no responsibilities, no bills to be paid, you would just be out playing footy all day and you’d come home and stick WWF Smackdown 2 on. Perfect.

I’ve always said in a hypothetical scenario where I was only allowed to own one games console but had full access to every game it would be the PS1, hands down.

My mental health has been pretty shoddy the last couple of months and my brain decided the best counter to that was to try and escape back to the 90s so I reprogrammed my Pi3 to be a pure PS1 emulator and filled it up with over a hundred games and I’ve been playing some old favourites and some classics I never got chance to.

So similarly to the Amiga lot I did not long ago, I’m going to be playing a load of PS1 and doing small write ups. Feel free to recommend me stuff, talk about your own PS1 memories and hopefully enjoy a trip down memory lane!

Spyro The Dragon

To this day my favourite game of all time. Along with Tomb Raider III and Three Lions, it made up the first games I got for my PS1 so it will always hold a special place in my heart.
Some of you who watched me when I had time to do Twitch will know I actually speedrun the Reignited version of it, though in almost every way the original is a different game.

What is it?

Spyro The Dragon is a platformer in which you play as the titular purple dragon and his sidekick health bar Sparx. Gnasty Gnorc hasn’t taken kindly to the dragons calling him ugly and stupid so he freezes them all in crystal, steals all of their treasure and eggs and leaves them all to suffer eternally. A bit of an overreaction to be honest.
Spyro being as short as he is manages to avoid crystallization and so sets off across the Dragon Kingdom to set things right.

How is it?

At a time where nobody had figured out 3D Platformers just yet, Spyro gets it as good as it can really. The movement is solid, the camera creates very little problems due to it’s unique Passive/Active modes and large open levels, and the levels themselves are all gorgeous to look at and explore.

Each of the 6 Worlds houses several standard levels, a boss level and a flying level.
The standard levels are the bread and butter of the game and have you making your way through open levels, not unlike Mario 64, looking for dragons, eggs and treasure. You can charge, jump and glide your way from A to B and then leave if you like, but the joy from Spyro comes from exploring these vast colourful levels and finding hidden pathways and secrets to get everything before you leave.
Finding a dragon acts as a checkpoint, and to get the eggs you have to chase egg thieves around the stage and flame them as they cold heartedly taunt you.
Some of the secret paths are genuinely difficult to not only find but actually do, and don’t let the bright colours and chirpy atmosphere fool you because the game gets pretty difficult midway through with some later enemies and levels giving a very decent challenge.

The flying levels are the only stages where Spyro can fully fly rather than glide and the aim of these is to race against a timer to destroy all four sets of objectives before the clock runs out. Do them all in one run to get the full treasure reward. Incredibly fun to play, and an actual challenge on some of them to get them done in the time limit without proper routing.

The boss levels are a strange beast. It’s a standard level only slightly more linear, slightly more difficult and with only one checkpoint and no health pickups. The boss at the end of the level is usually the easiest part, with the challenge itself making it there.

Collect all treasure, dragon eggs and dragons in each world to unlock the final secret level and a 120% completion rate.

The game looks gorgeous for the time with sharp graphics, colourful and unique worlds and very little fog to hide it. Each world has a unique and interesting theme, whether it’s a dream-like castle in the sky or a murky swamp full of hogs. They all have unique enemy types and features to keep you interested from start to finish.

It’s a well-known fact that Stewart Copeland, the Drummer for The Police did the music for the original Spyro Trilogy on PS1 and he absolutely knocks it out of the park. The entire game carries a leitmotif throughout so while every track is unique, each individual world and level within have a familiar beat or riff that pumps through the whole game. You’ll hear it in the opening titles I posted above and then compare that to an in-game level and you’ll see how the whole thing flows. The soundtrack goes hard and it’s among the best on PS1.

Overall if you want a platformer on PS1 with plenty to collect and do then it’s hard to look past this. Looks great, sounds great and isn’t bogged down by needless janky minigames like Ice Hockey and Skateboarding, and hasn’t yet been invaded by worthless secondary characters. Spyro 2 and 3 are OK in their own right, and some wronguns will argue they’re better than this, but they’re not. This is pure 100% platforming from start to finish, minigames can get in the bin.

-----

Grand Theft Auto

What is it?

Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is a top-down open world shooting/driving game where you accept jobs and commit brutal crimes throughout three unique areas; San Andreas, Vice City and Liberty City.
Compared to the global juggernaut it is today, it’s hard to remember a time where you could fit all three cities into one game.

How is it?

It’s very difficult to talk about the original GTA and come across as serious knowing now how the franchise turns out, but back in the day this was crazy. Kids these days have done and seen all sorts of stuff thanks to the internet and things like Youtube and TikTok but back when I was a kid, things like finding porn scrunched in bushes or sneaking a peak of Robocop on VHS your Dad was watching in the other room was as close as you could get to being an adult. Then GTA came out.

The very same PS1 I was playing Spyro on, I was suddenly racing around a violent city leaving pedestrians smeared onto the path and the NPCs were dropping F Bombs left and right as was having a flamethrower standoff with police at the dock I’d just been selling stolen cars at. It was wild.

The actual aim of the game, though I’m sure nobody played it properly, was to accept missions from payphones and then do them to raise your score high enough to beat the level. The missions were basic stuff like stealing cars and killing people, though there were some of those uniquely weird GTA-style missions in there even this early, such as when you go to steal a car and a smaller remote control explosive car chases you around trying to blow you up.

The PC version that my mate had featured trains you could get on driving around the city, but on the PS1 version you were limited to just empty tracks you could electrocute yourself to death on.

Yeah it looked dated even on release, but nothing else at the time let you race around in a sports car, climb out and start firing rockets at traffic. It was grown up but incredibly goofy and you can see how important it was to the history of gaming for how it ended up. Change your name to HANGTHEDJ for unlimited ammo and health and go wild.

Like GTA today it also had it’s own radio stations, though we’re not talking the same mainstream stuff we get now. I’m sure some of these songs were licensed but I’d never heard them before or since. Still, they’re nostalgic and some of them are genuinely decent, even if it’s not Toto or Dr Dre.

Before Shark Cards too we got what was essentially DLC in the form of the GTA London expansion which was a separate disc you had to buy and then swap mid-load with the original disc to play.
It was set in London 1969 and instead of saying WASTED it said YOU’RE BROWN BREAD and instead of blowing people up in Vice City you can blow them up in Soho. It’s OK but more of the same and again has it’s own radio station which is pretty decent.

Overall GTA is an odd one. It looks rubbish and handles a bit like arse, but it’s still pretty fun to drive around causing chaos. Historically important both to myself and to the games industry, it’s difficult to be too hard on it. At the end of the day you can pop it on for half an hour and have fun and then turn it off and not worry about it, which is all you can ask for really.

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Currently Playing:

Valkyrie Profile

Developed by Tri-ace and published by Enix before it got Squared, VP is a turn based RPG that sees you play as Lenneth, a Valkyrie tasked with collecting the souls of warriors on Earth to send up to Asgard to fight for the Gods.

Medievil

Developed and Published by Sony Computer Entertainment, Medievil is a hack and slash action game in which you play as Sir Daniel Fortesque, a cowardly would-be hero resurrected by mistake and given a second chance at life to redeem himself and save the town of Gallowmere.

 

 

Edited August 8, 2022 by FelatioLips

[air_raid]

I absolutely loved the PS. Fair enough I only got it when I realized the SNES wasn't going to get the new wrestling or Street Fighter titles any more (Street Fighter Alpha 2 basically made the console a must-purchase) but overall it was excellent. I even played Ridge Racer quite a bit despite - ludicrously for a pack-in title - there being no 2 player. There's simply no way I can describe how much joy I got out of WCW vs The World, or on my 15th birthday when I took home Street Fighter Alpha 3, X-Men vs Street Fighter, Street Fighter EX Plus @ and Mortal Kombat Trilogy in one spree at Merry Hill.

21 minutes ago, FelatioLips said:

maybe the chirping of birds as Cartoon Network went to sleep and TNT woke up on a Friday night signalling that it was time for WCW Nitro.... THIS IS WHERE THE BIG BOYS PLAY!!!! 

Fixed.

[FLips]

9 minutes ago, air_raid said:

I absolutely loved the PS. Fair enough I only got it when I realized the SNES wasn't going to get the new wrestling or Street Fighter titles any more (Street Fighter Alpha 2 basically made the console a must-purchase) but overall it was excellent. I even played Ridge Racer quite a bit despite - ludicrously for a pack-in title - there being no 2 player. There's simply no way I can describe how much joy I got out of WCW vs The World, or on my 15th birthday when I took home Street Fighter Alpha 3, X-Men vs Street Fighter, Street Fighter EX Plus @ and Mortal Kombat Trilogy in one spree at Merry Hill.

Fixed.

My mate has Street Fighter EX Plus @ and we loved it. Genuinely good new characters like Skullomania and Doctrine Dark. Was sad when I realised they weren’t SF characters and never saw them again!

[air_raid]

6 minutes ago, FelatioLips said:

My mate has Street Fighter EX Plus @ and we loved it. Genuinely good new characters like Skullomania and Doctrine Dark. Was sad when I realised they weren’t SF characters and never saw them again!

I liked it for a while until it was pointed out to me that it was just 3D graphics and no use of the 3rd dimensional plane in the actual gameplay, which killed the novelty fairly quickly. Although in later years I realized that 2D was better anyway, and that cartoon graphics were better than polygons. Alpha 3's engine and roster and Alpha 2's art and music were the peak for me until the CvS series.

Edited August 8, 2022 by air_raid

[Fatty Facesitter]

Love this - Spyro and GTA are two of my all-time faves.

Your description about GTA and how it was one of the first ‘naughty’ things you’d come across really resonates - I remember first playing a demo of it where you could play the first four payphone missions and being utterly mesmerised…probably not a good thing for an aspergers youth who often quoted lines from games, films and television without realising the wider context! 

The character you work for in the first Vice City level - a crooked cop named Sam Deever - has some of the best dialogue in the game, regularly chastising you with colourful, sweary language. Also there are some cracking lines from Uncle Fu’s missions in the first Sam Andreas level (“Uncle Fu would like you to kill that son of a penniless whore!”). Fun fact: in the final level, there’s a mission where you have to kill the President. You are instructed to intercept the “High priest of Babylon” and as you get closer you get a prompt “CODE RED!! CODE RED!! GET THE PRESIDENT TO SAFETY!!!!” Absolutely delirious fun.

Ditto GTA London - the missions were a little more basic but the dialogue was so colourful and perfect for the setting. I might have to dig these both out again. 

Please review the Crash Bandicoot series, or more specifically Warped as that’s an all-timer. I once beat Crash 3, 105%, in a single day. It remains my greatest lifetime achievement and I’m not even remotely ashamed. 

Another recommendation from my all-time favourites - Have a blast on the PS1 version of Doom. There are lots of differences to the PC version, one of which is the tense and atmospheric music. I love the PC version’s 8-bit-metal soundtrack, but the music in this version and the echos of the monster’s screams and shots firing at you is genuinely terrifying. Play this at midnight during Halloween and you will shit yourself beyond belief when you are searching for a health pickup, turn a corner and there’s a random Pinky you forgot to kill earlier charging and barking at you in the pitch black. 

Edited August 8, 2022 by Fatty Facesitter

[Hannibal Scorch]

Funnily enough i mentioned in the retro thread about moding a PS classic to become an emulation machine. So I played a few old games to bring back some nostalgia. The Playstation was the first proper console we had which wasn't portable ( I had a Game Gear, all we had before was Commodore machines from the C64 up to a CD32 which I guess kind of was a console?). I still remember christmas morning opening it, it was the present for my Dad, brother and me as it was pricey (£400?). And that sound it made upon turning on was amazing! 

Firstly Ridge Racer. This and Tekken were the games we got when we pre-ordered our Playstation from Software Plus (Was that the mail order place?). So hadn't played it in years. Firstly I thought how crude it looked and played. But I was still playing 30 minutes later trying to beat my lap time and I realised how amazing it was at the time, and enjoyable it still is even if it is limited.

I moved on to a game I never had but was always desperate to. Batman Forever the arcade game. This was at the time when Midway were making all their games in the arcade with digitised graphics so this and Wrestlemania always stood out. It is pretty rough and frantic with limited controls, but not bad as a Streets of Rage style fighter, abeit no way as good. 

I then loaded Sheep Dog and Wolf, a game I loved as a teen. A platform puzzler based on Loony Toons. BLOODY ROM DIDN'T WORK, so I'll have to find another, or dig out my original copy from the loft and play it the old fashioned way. That is a game I recommend though. 

I finished it off with a bout of Mr Driller. This was a fun little puzzle game from Namco that was an arcade title by the looks of things. Quite fun, need to play it a bit more to get to grips with it, but my daughter enjoyed playing.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Hannibal Scorch

[Your Fight Site]

Absolutely loved the console and firmly entrenched me as “Team PlayStation” by the time the PS vs. Xbox era came around. Especially when the PlayStation 2 had backwards compatible and able to play PSX games. It made no sense to buy an Xbox only to be limited to the games I could play on it.

I got the PlayStation with Rayman as the first game, and built up a library of platformers, racing games, and—of course—pro wrestling titles. The Crash Bandicoot titles (particularly Warped and Crash Team Racing) were favourites and me and my brother would spend hours playing them.

I’ve actually rekindled my love of the original PlayStation as the past year or so, I’ve been dabbling in reverse engineering PSX games: taking the game ROMs and trying to disassemble them into working C code. There’s been people who have reversed other PSX games (and games from other platforms). I’ve picked WCW Nitro as a target to reverse, not because I think it was the best pro wrestling game, but because it was an early game in the PSX’s history and fairly simplistic (few games mode, few wrestlers, each wrestler only having three signature moves). The developers did me a solid though by using examples verbatim from the PlayStation SDK for some things; I’ve also managed to find out how and where models for the wrestlers and ring is being loaded.

Why am I doing it? I don’t really know; I’ve just found it a fascinating endeavour as my career’s been spent writing web-based software and not “proper” software that has to be compiled and runs directly on a CPU. I’ve just found it intriguing reading up on the technical aspects of something I took for granted over 20 years ago, and seeing just how those games that brought me hundreds—if not thousands—of hours of joy were made.

[pitseleh]

It might not have aged well as the SNES or the PS2, but the PS1 was my console of choice growing up. I have fond memories of my entire family huddled around the TV after receiving our PS1. We only had a demo disc to start with, but I remember playing the demo to Crash Bandicoot: Warped over and over again. Those demo discs were the tits. I can still hear that menu music playing my head many years later. 

[simonworden]

Back in the 1990's the PS1 felt like the most hi-tech thing I had ever seen. It felt more digital than my SNES as it had a basic loading menu and could play CD's. Our house wouldn't get our own PC for a few years so this was the most advanced thing in the house.

I'd add my love for some of the games mentioned, Crash Bandicoot 2 was a particular favorite in the house as was Crash Team Racing (IIRC and it wasn't a PS2 game).

But the first 2 games that spring into my mind is one obvious classic in Metal Gear Solid more so than Final Fantasy 7 this was the game for me that took console gaming on the journey for many games to be more like movies and less level based. When I got my PS1 these trailers were all over the demo discs of the time 

 and then a few weeks later I got my hands on the playable demo. That was smashed in an afternoon and then it was pure obsession to wait for my birthday money and grab the game. I picked it up in London on a day trip with the family and all I could think about the rest of the day was getting home to play through.

Although the graphics quickly became dated, I still like to emulate the game now as the gameplay felt so smooth and enjoyable. There's not a single part of the game I dislike playing or is so hard it burns you out. Vulcan Raven probably gets closest and even his battles are great fun over and over. The stealth element is still fantastic fun even today. Pissing off guards, hiding under tables and in boxes or using the stealth mode to slap them about. There were so many things that to do and try out that kept me coming back for more. I tried to play some of the sequels on the PS2 and PSP but they just didn't have the same feel, I think there attempts to add layers to the controls especially in the PSP one I tried simply put me off. The PSP one was also far too unresponsive on the emulator I used. This all doesn't matter though as Metal Gear Solid will be up there number 1 whenever I think of the PS1

 

The other game (or games but I'll focus on the first) is Medal of Honor

Another game that for me started to adjust genres into what the would become for many years. Admittedly Goldeneye came first but that's the N64 and can piss off from this thread. I bought this game actually as it had 2 play first person shooter ability which I hadn't encountered before on the PS1. This was fun but unfortunately got boring a lot quicker than 4 player. Luckily however single player was full of exciting levels all over occupied France, an excellent array of missions, talking Nazis and weaponry. The standing machine guns being one of my favorites. The cheats made the game even more fun especially switching the Nazis to English.

The graphics and music are also brilliant for the time and lets not forget the informative before/ after mission mini-documentaries that genuinely helped me have more appreciation for the evens of world war 2. They released Medal of Honor Underground shortly after and this was also a brilliantly fun game but just didn't have the originality level wise of the original games 2nd and 3rd levels. 

 

[HarmonicGenerator]

Echo the love for the first Spyro game, I loved that game - freeing the trapped dragons and catching those bloody egg thieves!

We got our PS1 probably around 1997 - the first Gran Turismo had recently come out, and the big platform game was the Disney Hercules one that we had but I never got past the first few levels.

My fandom picked up several gears when I started getting this wonderful publication every month:

Issue 39 to be specific. I’d read it cover to cover. Demo discs every month got me so hyped for upcoming games - I played the Tekken 3 demo constantly until the game was released and saved up the £45 to get it on release day. The demo of WWF SmackDown is the thing that got me back into wrestling in 2000.

I really hoped the new PS Plus system that’s promised hundreds of retro games would include the PS1 games I played to death. Not yet, but if it does, I’ll happily pay that subscription.

Edited August 9, 2022 by HarmonicGenerator

[FLips]

48 minutes ago, air_raid said:

I liked it for a while until it was pointed out to me that it was just 3D graphics and no use of the 3rd dimensional plane in the actual gameplay, which killed the novelty fairly quickly. Although in later years I realized that 2D was better anyway, and that cartoon graphics were better than polygons. Alpha 3's engine and roster and Alpha 2's art and music were the peak for me until the CvS series.

A longstanding opinion I've held over the years is that Tekken 2 is the best 3D fighter on the PS1 but that's because I never owned Tekken 3 or could ever get a ROM to work so my memories of it are getting smashed in by Eddie Gordo by my mate's brother. Having finally gotten Tekken 3 to work I can confirm that it's way better than 2 on everything except soundtrack. Tekken 2, 3 and Soul Blade will likely show up in my reviews in the near future.

17 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

Firstly Ridge Racer. This and Tekken were the games we got when we pre-ordered our Playstation from Software Plus (Was that the mail order place?). So hadn't played it in years. Firstly I thought how crude it looked and played. But I was still playing 30 minutes later trying to beat my lap time and I realised how amazing it was at the time, and enjoyable it still is even if it is limited.

I then loaded Sheep Dog and Wolf, a game I loved as a teen. A platform puzzler based on Loony Toons. BLOODY ROM DIDN'T WORK, so I'll have to find another, or dig out my original copy from the loft and play it the old fashioned way. That is a game I recommend though. 

I finished it off with a bout of Mr Driller. This was a fun little puzzle game from Namco that was an arcade title by the looks of things. Quite fun, need to play it a bit more to get to grips with it, but my daughter enjoyed playing.

I got Ridge Racer when the 3DS launched and it looked like garbage on that too, but let me tell you I can completely agree with the gameplay. Smooth, arcadey racing. I'll look into the PS1 version and hope it's the same! 

2 minutes ago, pitseleh said:

It might not have aged well as the SNES or the PS2, but the PS1 was my console of choice growing up. I have fond memories of my entire family huddled around the TV after receiving our PS1. We only had a demo disc to start with, but I remember playing the demo to Crash Bandicoot: Warped over and over again. Those demo discs were the tits. I can still hear that menu music playing my head many years later. 

I would argue the PS1 has aged way better than the PS2, but I'll concede on the SNES. PS2 had some great games and I have some top memories of it, but it's definitely where gaming steered into the yearly sports releases and endless sequels so now when I go back to play it, there's only really a handful of games I'm keen on like Timesplitters, FFX and GTA. The rest of them are series I never got into like God of War and Devil May Cry.

Crash 2 is my jam but I do have a soft spot all of them except Bash. As you might have seen from my Spyro review I'm not huge on platforming minigames so Crash 3 is hit and miss for me.

I'll definitely be covering some demo discs in the future too as I also had tons of them and loved everything about them. The thumping EDM music, the kaleidoscope visuals, getting to play actual big name games over and if you found one you liked it was only £3 to get the full thing. My wife still rips into me now and again because I told her when I was a kid and saw the T-Rex and Manta Ray visual demos, I genuinely thought graphics would never get better than it. Better graphics happened before the end of the console's lifespan so what do I know?

[BomberPat]

it was my first non-Sega home console, and the first home console that was really mine (or at least mine and my brother's).

Before that, we'd had a Commodore 64 and a Master System, but they were both technically my half-brothers', and we needed to ask permission to use them. Later, my Mum ran the local youth club, and they got a Mega Drive there, and during the months that the club wasn't running, we took it home with us - we just had the handful of games that Mum had bought for the youth club, and then my Dad worked at Ritz video, and we'd get cheap/free rentals on anything else we wanted. 

By the time the Playstation came out, it was ours, my half-brothers had both moved out, so we got to play it all the time. I'd guess that 1997 would be around the time we got it too - long enough after release for the price to have come down a little, and I remember being really excited for Gran Turismo coming out. My dad and brother are big motorsports fans, so we also had a lot of driving games - the only games my Dad's ever played are TOCA Touring Cars, Colin McRae's Rally and Championship Manager - and the magazines were hyping up GT as an absolute world-beater with a mind-boggling number of cars and options and so on. Every now and then I'll play a modern driving game and never really get on with them - I'm sure people who are really into the genre could argue otherwise, but for me the PS1 felt like a real golden era for racing games.

 

Demo discs, and the Official Playstation Magazine, were something really special. I used to get SEGA Power magazine every now and then, but the addition of playable demos meant that now magazines were must-have; I used to go to my grandparents' every Sunday, and for years they'd get me a copy of the Beano every week, and later some Marvel comics. I decided I'd forego my weekly comics in favour of getting the Playstation magazine once a month. Half the games I have fondest memories of I probably actually never played in full - I don't think I ever actually owned GTA 1 - but I played the demos to death. Armoured Core, Deathtrap Dungeon, Bloody Roar - all games my brother and I reference to each other pretty regularly, but never actually owned. There's some lines from a couple of Net Yaroze games that are a guaranteed laugh between us to - "I'm really, really scary", and that's just a niche within a niche.

It was a real gateway drug for a lot of broader interests and fandoms, too. When I started a new school, the kids I made friends with there were really into Final Fantasy 7, and I'd never played a JRPG before. That game became an absolute obsession for me for years, as did - to a lesser extent - the franchise as a whole, and it informed a lot of what I wanted/expected from games in the future. I'm doing a playthrough of it now thanks to PS+, the first in well over ten years, and I still remember so much of it so vividly. Then there's Metal Gear Solid, weird novelties like Bishi Bashi Special and Parappa The Rapper, countless hours at mates' houses playing Tony Hawk's, there's Abe's Oddysee, Silent Hill...what a console! Most of all, though, there was WWF Smackdown. That's the game that made me a wrestling fan - it sounds daft, but without that game, my entire life would have been completely different.

Edited August 8, 2022 by BomberPat

[Carbomb]

It's such an odd thing to talk about the PS as a retro console, for me, because I'm still playing PS1 games on my PS2. I've been backlogged for years, and am determined to get through some of them at the very least. There are some that I really should just get the remade or ported versions, like FF7 and FF8, but I've also got some vague classics like Team Buddies, Wild 9, Resi 2 and 3, and Overboard to get through.

Plus, my first ever purchase on the PS was Deathtrap Dungeon - I got to the last boss, Melkor, but have never been able to beat him. Partly because I was so spent from beating the penultimate boss, I don't have the equipment to beat him. Thinking of replaying from the start, as it's been years. Decades.

[air_raid]

Let’s not forget a wonderful bit of trivia…. Sony were working on the Nintendo PlayStation, when Nintendo realized Sega were going to beat them to market with their new 32 bit disc based system (the Saturn) so decided to go full bore with the attention on getting the 64-bit cartridge system to market and really batter them in the console market. So Sony decided to use the hardware themselves. And thus did Nintendo create their own worst enemy and shoot themselves square in the wallet.

Post script - the Saturn was rushed to market several months before the PS launched, too fast for many development houses to have games ready. The PS then sold more units in its first week.

Edited August 8, 2022 by air_raid

[The Gaffer]

The PlayStation will always be my favourite console ever. I'm not sure how best to construct the sheer depth of my nostalgia for it into something readily digestible so I'll just horse out a few memories as they come to me:

- Doing the rounds to my aunt and uncles houses for my post-communion shakedown in 1999 and seeing my PlayStation money build up whilst also getting to see and play it in virtually every house I went to. Most of my cousins were older than me, and they were already firmly entrenched in camp Sony. Seeing these older kids play Wipeout and blasting the monks in the monastery of Tomb Raider II with friendly fire was unlike what I'd thought of gaming as. They kept their PS1 CDs in carry cases like DJs and it was more akin to hearing cool new music than seeing cool new games. This was trendy. 

- The next day (probably) booting up my own console for the first time and popping in the demo disc for a few minutes as I thought it was something the console actually needed to warm up. 

- Going around the gaf in Rugrats: Search for Reptar with its awful draw distance, jaggy lines and weird music. It's an overdone thing to say but it was sort of like having a first acid trip before ever taking drugs.

- Drawing my own - much shittier - cover art for games on the white reverse side of the actual cover art cards that came inside those CD jewel cases. 

- Net Yaroze. Playing through each and every one of them, wondering what perverse development dungeons they escaped from. 

- Absolutely sucking - I'm still 8 years old here - at Metal Gear Solid's controls and stealth system to the point where when I finally got on the elevator in the docks, it was a moment of pure joy. Then seeing the rest of the game's areas - that I'd previously only seen previewed in magazines and trailers etc - gradually reveal themselves to me. Everything about Metal Gear Solid. You're nuts if you don't at least love the first one. 

- Final Fantasy VII. It was my Star Wars. If you know, you know. 

- ...but not having it be sacred ground enough to not absolutely massacre with Xploder discs, going dizzy with glee at having 9999 hit points and Knights of the Round before leaving the first reactor. 

- Being the first on the block to unlock all of the characters in Tekken 3. Who could live with the shame of having their mates call around to their gaf and they only have the 10 standard characters ready to play? Where the fuck is Bryan Fury? 

- Proudly telling my parents I just played the weird opening bit of Silent Hill and - y'know what? - it didn't scare me at all. 

- Endlessly renting stuff like Syphon Filter and Kensei Sacred Fist for one more go, because they were good but they weren't that good. 

- Getting the first episode of PSW magazine. It was about the size of an encyclopaedia and had lavish, full colour walkthroughs for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation and really great sections at the back of the magazine that ranked the best games by genre. 

- Actually just being obsessed by strategy guides in general, and getting more than one for games I'd already beaten. 

- Flying around loads in the opening section of G-Police, not doing anything else with it, and wondering if it's actually decent or not. Still unresolved.