The PS1 Nostalgia Thread

[FLips]

Diablo

What is it?

Diablo is a Dungeon Crawler in which you pick a typical class (Warrior, Rogue, etc.) and delve through 16 randomly generated dungeons to find and kill the Lord of Terror - Diablo.
The original plays very little like the Diablo games we have now and instead is a much slower paced affair with a lot more focus on inventory management and perfecting your class.

How is it?

This is my first time playing Diablo, having only previously played Diablo III and the beta of IV. I've got to say I absolutely love everything about it.
Graphically it's very similar to the original Fallout games but a lot gloomier, and there's some very lovely lighting and reflection effects that on the PS1 especially look very impressive. I'm not sure what engine it is but I love how it looks in both Fallout and here.

As someone who grew up playing Gauntlet II, this feels like a way advanced version of that. Lots of enemies on screen, secrets hidden on each floor and a lot of looting. It's nowhere near the levels of button spamming nonsense the current games are; instead here you have to strategically swap and change weapons and armour to fight different enemies and really think about whether it's worth rushing in or avoiding things until later. There are also randomly generated missions that you may get on one playthrough but not the other, and the ability to save your character for a New Game+ that you can restart at any time, really encouraging multiple plays.

The music and sound is exceptional. Lore books and NPCs are fully voice acted in that low budget but endearing early PC game way and the Tristram theme that plays when you're in town is some of the best I've heard on the console and even this late on would happily add it to my all time PS1 OSTs.

The PS1 version is also Co-op which sadly I haven't had the chance to try but I'm willing to bet is great fun.

I haven't played Diablo II but will look to get it on PC when I finish this (there's no PS1 port sadly) but I hear it's the best one. I have no idea what happened between II and III but this feels like a proper classic dungeon crawler whereas III, for as fun as it could be, was just mindlessly spamming buttons and not really paying attention. Wonderful game, and I can see why the series got so popular when this is the starting point.

[SuperBacon]

I remember the print ads in the mags for Diablo being really cool. 

Edit: Think I'm thinking of Devil May Cry. I'm getting old.

Edited October 20, 2023 by SuperBacon

[FLips]

Got properly hooked on Diablo. Unbelievably good game and one I wish I’d gotten round to earlier. I got to the final level on my original run and found it was a struggle so I saved my character and replayed the whole thing from the start to grind a few more levels.

Starting what was essentially a New Game+ meant I got brand new quests this time around so it was like playing a brand new game. I also had a good enough feel for my character to properly loot and benefit from stats. When I finally made it to the final level again I still struggled against the sheer amount of enemies and grinded my way slowly through the dungeon. 
Finally I found Diablo and somehow absolutely melted him with only a dozen or so hits. I feel what happened was my character was way overpowered but I had no elemental resistance so all the fire-shooting wizards and succubi were hammering me but then when I got to Diablo who mostly melee attacked he did next to no damage.

Brilliant game. Replayable as all hell, gorgeous (for the time) graphics and an atmospheric soundtrack with interesting NPCs and world-building for essentially what is one town and four dungeon areas. Still have a 2 player option as well if I ever go back to it. May have wormed it’s way into my Top 10 PS1 games of all time.

Edited October 30, 2023 by FelatioLips

[FLips]

Has it been this long since we talked about the PS1?

With the recent news that Sony are binning off physical discs it had me dig my PS1 back out again and as usual to probably the surprise of none of you, I fixated on something and fell into another rabbit hole.

So I was playing the odd games here and there (Crash Bandicoot 2, Crash Team Racing, Theme Hospital) but mostly I was digging through my library to find the best games I had that worked in the CD Player to listen to while I worked from home.
I have great memories from being a kid of laying on my Sofa bed round my biological Dad's (arsehole) and listening to the Mega Man 8 credits music which was on there. Back at my Mam's (she's great) where I was allowed to play GTA, I'd also listen to the full radio station lineup on the CD player.

So I made it a small project to go through my library of burnt discs to find oddities and great soundtracks and while I won't list them all, here are some of the more interesting ones:

GTA and GTA London - You can listen to the full game soundtracks of both of these, including radio station playlists. GTA 1 is all original compositions with no licensed stuff but has some absolute earworms such as the main theme (Joyride by Da Shootaz) and a country western one called "The Ballad of Chapped Lip Calhoun" by Sideways Hank O'Malley and The Alabama Bottle Boys. There's a fun mix of all genres on here, and anyone who's ever played the original GTA will find themselves enjoying most of it.
GTA London has the benefit of being the first GTA to use licensed music, though being based in 1960s London and not quite being big enough yet means that we don't get The Beatles, but do get Harry J Allstars' "The Liquidator", so great news for all the football fans out there.

Loaded, Wipeout 2097 and Wu Tang Taste The Pain - First of all Loaded has the full game soundtrack, which is a great futuristic-y, grotty industrial rock vibe to go with the violent shooting game it's providing for. It has two licensed tracks from Pop Will Eat Itself (RSVP and Kick to Kill) which are both ace.
Following in GTA London and Loaded's footsteps though are the final evolution of the licensed music game disc, and that's Wipeout 2097 and Wu Tang Taste The Pain. Both of these are full top-to-bottom licensed audio CDs. Wipeout has a couple of original CoLD SToRAGE (Tim Wright of Amiga fame) compositions but then has Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Underworld and a few other huge electronic names. The highlight (for me) being the instrumental of Firestarter.
Wu Tang is just a Wu Tang CD. Unlike Wipeout, it's less of a full album and has a couple of repeats and game tracks but does include several full Wu Tang tracks which are all pretty decent.

Tomb Raider 1-3, Die Hard Trilogy, Fighting Force, Lifeforce Tenka - These ones are odd because while you do get the full game soundtracks, you get the full soundtracks. Some tracks are things like helicopter sound effects, score-screen countdowns, or full cutscene dialogue in the case of Tomb Raider. Going from the iconic Tomb Raider soundtrack to Lara Croft just talking her way through one of the game's cutscenes is a bummer and prevents the disc from being as instantly playable as the rest. My copy of Lifeforce Tenka must be a European PAL copy because the first playable track was what sounded like Spanish cutscene dialogue.

Tekken 2, Castlevania Symphony of The Night - Similarly to Mega Man 8 and a couple of others, some games such as these two feature only one or two playable tracks rather than a full soundtrack, and it's at this point we enter "the developers know what they're doing" territory. Tekken 2 features a track not feature in the game, so it's a unique easter egg for those who play the disc on a CD player. Symphony of The Night does similar, but has the voice actor for Alucard open the track by stating not to play track 1 as it contains game data, then leads into another unheard possibly beta track, which you can hear how it evolved into something that does feature in the final cut. Really fun easter egg this one.

Rayman - This is maybe the most complete soundtrack of the ones I've listened to and you get a lot of value here. You get the full in-game soundtrack, plus a ton of unused tracks cut from the main game. No cutscene filler, no sound effects, just music. Really interesting and it helps that the game has some nice tracks.

Demo Discs - These are a grab bag, but have one fantastic feature which I'll get to. As you may recall, maybe I mentioned it in this thread, but during one of my last PS1 fixations I started collecting demo discs. I love them, always have. They're a brilliant time capsule for playing lesser known games, pre-release alpha and beta versions and being to see what changes were made to final releases. Well it turns out a lot of the ones I tried, including the McDonalds discs I met up with a stranger in a LIDL car park to buy, work in the CD player. They're all basically "however the developers burned the demos to disc" pot lucks. Some of them you get a mix of game music and sound effects, some of them you get one music track followed by 10 versions of "Kabal Wins...Fatality/Babality/Animality" from the Mortal Kombat 3 demo on there. Demo One has the T-Rex and Manta Ray music on it which is really fab.

The big addition with the demo discs though, or more accurately Demo One, is the V-CD feature which lets you access a trippy 3D effect visualiser made by Psygnosis, so you can have it blasting away while you play music discs. This works better with proper CDs (we'll get to that) than it does game tracks, because of the previously mentioned Track 1 of Game Data making a horrid screeching sound if you try and play it.
This visualiser is a life saver for me though due to the model of PS1 I'm using (we'll get to that too).

There are dozens of others I've got that work too but most of them are just straight up game music with very few oddities or easter eggs. Die Hard Trilogy has a lot of bang for it's buck with what seems to be the full soundtrack, also Re-Loaded which isn't as good as Loaded for either game or sound, and Street Fighter Collection which has what seems to be arcade quality, or at least CD quality versions of the full Street Fighter II OST, which is decent. Earthworm Jim 2 and Twisted Metal 2 also work but aren't much to write home about.

So as I've said, my model of PS1 is known as the "Audiophile" model. It's the SCPH-1002, more commonly known as the PAL Launch model. It's not my main PS1 (including one I have for parts and my wife's old console I have 4 of them) One of them, the SCPH-9002 is my main one and I think I spoke on here about my hunt for one for it's superior disc drive to play my chipped games on. The SCPH-1002 I got before it and is also chipped but being a launch model it has a worse disc drive for loading games, but apparently a way superior sound chip and sound hardware. It's the only model with the red/white/yellow RCA ports in the rear of the console too.

Apparently there's a whole group of people modding this launch model to basically be a CD player, with some gnarly modifications to the casing and installing a receiver for a PS2 media remote among other things. It's apparently not top-end sound quality, but good for the time and has a soft sound similar to vinyl. Personally I don't know enough about sound quality to tell the difference, but I had one spare and figured using it as a CD player rather than having to listen to all of this through my TV would be pretty fun.

So for the low price of about £90, I bought a cheap LCD display with AV compatibility and a second hand pair of PreSonus Eris 3.5 speakers from Cash Converters and have set my launch model up as a CD player. My plan was to also start collecting CDs again similar to DVDs thinking they'd be abundant but somewhat unfortunately it turns out people still care about CDs more than DVDs so despite visiting a record shop and multiple charity shops yesterday, I left with 0 CDs because despite seeing hundreds for 50p-£1 they were all pretty shitty. Anything with name value either were long gone from the charity shops or marked up to £5 each in the record shop. I'm sure they're good prices for some of it, but I can get 10 DVDs for £5 at market, or in CEX between £1-3 for huge titles. I can't afford to be dropping £5 a pop for CDs.

So I'm pirating. 

I booted up a pirate proxy and utorrent and just downloaded and am currently burning a bunch of CDs. Doing it this way means I can have a mix of proper music and also game soundtracks that don't have an unplayable track 1). So yeah I really am back in the late 90s/early 2000s with this now. It's a shame Kazaa, Ares and Limewire aren't still around.
They're just going into my game disc sleeves at the minute, but my wife handily got a printer off her sister a couple of months back so when I can be arsed I'll buy some clear crystal cases and print covers for them. 

The cheap LCD display I got was somewhat of a necessity and also a fun toy to play around with. Playing the game discs as tracks means that I have to start the PS1 with the lid open, pick the CD player, close the lid and then start from track 2. Doing that without a screen is a chew on. Audio CDs play instantly, but I couldn't see track selection, pause or anything like that. In some cases, one my CDs wouldn't auto play so I had to treat it as a game disc and start with the lid up. So yeah, a necessity.

The bonus to that, is I can also display my visualiser on it. Sadly the launch 1002 model has no built in visualiser like the later models. It has a basic grey interface which is a real shame. I did look at changing the bios chip to keep the hardware of the 1002 but having the OS of a later model for the built in visuals but sadly this is a soldering project I have neither the skill or courage for.
So this means I'm limited to the Demo One V-CD option, which now I can display on my little LCD screen which is neat. I could also technically play games on it too, like that screen you can get for later PS ONE models but aside from trying it out of curiosity I doubt I'd bother with that as it doesn't look the greatest quality.

So yeah. A bored day at work listening to GTA on my PS1 CD Player turned into a full digging through my PS1 collection and eventually transforming my spare launch model PS1 into a CD player with a standalone LCD screen and speaker system. There are further modifications I can look at like a clear lid so you can see the disc spinning, or one that keeps the lid close button pressed so you can keep the lid open entirely, but we'll see. For now I'm happy with my work.

 

Edited July 5 by FLips

[DavidB6937]

Nothing pleases me more than a random @FLips fixation gaming journey.

[HarmonicGenerator]

I'm going to miss discs. I'm part of the problem because I so rarely buy games these days (2-3 a year tops) but I'll always get a physical copy. There's something about putting the disc into a PlayStation that makes it feel yours... and lets you lend the game to others if you've enjoyed it.

I miss demos as well. Best part of getting the old Official PlayStation Magazine. I know the PS Store has some but it's just not the same.

[Jazzy G]

Joyride ended up on the GTA3 soundtrack as well. There's a funky dance tune on the original GTA that was good. If memory serves the original, at least on PC, assigned different radio stations to different types of car, and I unconsciously made a list of which songs played in which cars so I could make sure to avoid the ones I didn't like. We also would sometimes take the GTA CD out and stick a random audio CD in  the drive so the tracks would be replaced by them. 

[TibBo]

When I think of the best PS1 songs this always comes to mind:

Absolute banger!
 

Pretty much everyone I knew got a PS1 for Christmas 1997.
I think they released a value pack where you got 2 controllers, the console, and a memory card in the box.

Dixons had an offer where you could get the console and any game you wanted for about £125 (this was my Christmas price limit as a kid), so I got WCW vs The World. I remember my folks stressing because the stores were selling-out of the console, and the game got delayed until mid-December.
Somehow they managed to talk the store into putting a console aside for us until the game came in-stock.

I would love to know how much money ‘dads mate from work’ made the year everyone got theirs chipped. 

[SuperBacon]

52 minutes ago, TibBo said:

would love to know how much money ‘dads mate from work’ made the year everyone got theirs chipped. 

If it was anything like who did ours (a mates brother) it can't have been much. He charged a tenner for the chipping and 50p a game. Actually scratch that, we all had about 300 games each so he probably made a pretty penny!

I got Die Hard Trilogy with mine, which was a superb game wasn't it?

[TibBo]

56 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

I got Die Hard Trilogy with mine, which was a superb game wasn't it?

I only ever completed the first part in the building.

The 2nd part at the airport was so difficult!

[Jazzy G]

I never had my PS1 chipped. I used to do the disc swapping trick where you'd hold the lid open using the inside from a biro and switch your original game with the copied game as the disc speeds up and slows down. Was a piece of cake once you'd gotten it down pat. 

[BarryOVega]

7 hours ago, TibBo said:

I only ever completed the first part in the building.

The 2nd part at the airport was so difficult!

Much like the films themselves, first and third were quality and the second one was shite