Someone posted a bit ago about the super station one fpga system and i decided to preorder one. Now I’m curious, what would all of your essentials be for the playstation system?
No need to give me a whole list, but if you can share me some of your standouts and why, id appreciate it.
i’ve played very little of ps1 and didn’t even realize it was a system until the ps2 came out!
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Besides Metal Gear Solid?
Dino Crisis.
Both Brightis and Love & Destroy are good if you can read Japanese.
Wipeout 2097 - Still one of my favourite racing games of all time and has a banging soundtrack
Gran Turismo 2 - Big enough that it needed 2 discs. A classic in sim racing.
MediEvil - Fun humorous story and great atmosphere.
Spyro - It was on the demo disc.
Final Fantasy 7 & 8 - RPG classics. Nuff said.
And a bonus game that sucked:
Command & Conquer port - Buggy, lots of lag and terrible controls
You could link two playstations and play c&c in lan, waisted so many days on that.
Fuck yeh. We used to do that but one person had to play under a duvet because both of the TVs faced in the same direction.
The Spyro trilogy is a masterpiece! It was one of the first games to use shifting levels of detail for objects in the distance, so you could see farther away.
Not a common suggestion, but the Scrabble PS1 port holds up surprisingly well, all the more so for how few Scrabble video games there are.
It would be a crime to forget Metal Gear Solid on the list.
Bushido Blade is also fantastic.
Siphon Filter
Parappa the Rapper
GexFinal Fantasy Tactics and Front Mission 3
WipEout XL, Spyro 1-3, Crash 1-3, Monster’s Inc Scream Team, Crash Team Racing, Frogger 2, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone, JetMoto, Herc’s Adventures, Rugrats Search For Reptar, Parappa The Rapper, Ridge Racer, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, The Tomb Raider games, Twisted Metal, Toy Story Racer. There’s a lot more but those are some of my favorites.
Some pretty good stuff already but no one has mentioned Xenogears.
Definitely one of my essentials. I think the gameplay is bit meh, but it’s still the best story in the genre.
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
- Final Fantasy VII/IX (not VIII)
- Tales of Phantasia (has a PSP remake with a lot of extra content but that’s JP-only…)
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1/2
But have you considered FFVIII, the best of the PS1 RPGs?
IX over VIII, my brother/sister
I feel like the major one for me (that hasn’t been listed) is Ape Escape. Growing up i played the (arguably worse) remaster of it for the PSP. Genuinely interesting to play a platformer so different yet so clearly reactionary to Mario 64. And it’s also just interesting how they handle the analog sticks in terms of controls
Like many games of the era the controls are frankly janky, but they are just so much fun
Gex
Hear me out:
Monsters, Inc. Scream Team.
For a PS1 game it was ahead of its time. Fleshed out 3D levels that are actually navigable, decent camera angles, solid platforming + puzzles, and level revisiting that does not feel excessively repetitive. The difficulty is also not a god-awful sudden cliff like some PS1/2 games of the era. It’s one of the few, maybe the only PS1 game I’ve played multiple times through.
As a plus the soundtrack is banger.
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - because it’s literally one of the best games ever made. So good that when it borrowed the Metroid formula pretty much wholesale, they renamed the formula Metroidvania.
- Metal Gear Solid - because it sits in the Goldilocks zone of Kojima-ness. Nutty but not impenetrable.
- Silent Hill - because everyone should know what it’s like for seventeen pixels to make them shit themselves in fear.
- Metal of Honor - because Call of Duty used to be the whippersnapper upstart. Know your roots, son.
- Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 - because there were THPS games with more, but there were never THPS games that were definitively better.
- Resident Evil 2 - because hitting your stride while defining a genre is a beautiful thing.
- Valkyrie Profile - because the world is ending but I really want this mermaid to be happy…
- Fear Effect - because it’s a seven hour game across four CDs but my best friend and I couldn’t put it down until we finished it on day one.
- Vigilante 8 - because they out-Twisted-Metaled Twisted Metal.
- G-Darius - because sometimes you just gotta blast a giant robot fish in the face with a screen-filling laser beam.
- Incredible Crisis - because we all have bad days.
- Tenchu - because Solid Snake shouldn’t be the only one who gets to have fun sneaking around and killing people.
- Rakugaki Showtime - because before there was Smash Bros, there was bashing the Smiley Ball for super moves and launching ICBMs against your foes.
Some additional deeper cuts:
- Trap Gunner - because sending your friend on a trip around the entire level into a nest of bombs and mines never gets old.
- Syphon Filter - because, how about… the taser? (The commercial is for 2, but the first one has a better taser… trust me.)
- The Unholy War - because it‘s basically chess but with flying bladebots and chompy little toothbastards.
- Die Hard Trilogy - because it’s 3 games and one of them is inexplicably one of the better light gun games ever made.
- Ghost in the Shell - because find me another game where you drive a tank that climbs walls.
- Return Fire - because if playing Capture the Flag with military vehicles while listening to classical music isn’t a good time, I don’t know what is.
- Star Ocean: The Second Story - because an epic JRPG with 86 possible endings and dozens of different skills like Musicianship, Blacksmithing, Cooking, and Publishing most certainly is not overkill.
- Blast Chamber - because all sports would be better if they were played in a room where you can rotate gravity.
- Future Cop LAPD - because sometimes I’m just tired of conserving my ammo.
- N2O: Nitrous Oxide - because 90’s techno and lasers.
because an epic JRPG with 86 possible endings
Wait, what?
A lot of it is that depending on who your party ends up being, it stitches together each one’s ending, so beating the game may let you watch several of said endings. You don’t have to beat it 86 times.
That said, it’s still a crazy game.
i love your single sentence pitches. im sold on most of what you suggested.
You’ve sold me on several of these. “Fear Effect” looks wild.
It’s one of the best, most coherent video game stories I’ve ever experienced. Super fun, utterly engrossing. The unfortunate part is the tank controls, but the story makes it totally worth it.
There is a remaster coming! Hopefully they update the controls.
I know! But it’s been “Coming soon” for ages now. I hope it’s still going to come out and not suck. Fear Effect Sedna was pretty damn weak.
I loved the original! I should load it up on an emulator on my Vita. Ya don’t hear about it very often!
Glad to meet a fellow traveler. It’s a gem. I should play through it again too. I have so many little retro emulator handhelds I’m sure I could get through it on one of them in my spare time.
Original Spyro trilogy (Gateway to Glimmer first, Year of the Dragon second, Spyro the Dragon third. Although they are all so good it’s hard to choose an order.) The first two games were a part of my childhood, I think they both came with the console when my sister and I bought it. £20 second hand from Game with three games I think, we each saved up to pay half. Very cool worlds to run around and explore, especially Treetop Village I think it’s called (the supercharge level from Spyro the Dragon). I love these collect-them-all games where you know where everything is - it’s very comforting to me. And skateboarding and playing as Sparx in Year of the Dragon still feels special, because it’s the one game I didn’t own as a kid.
Crash Team Racing is the ultimate carting game IMO. “Start your engines for a Sony Computer Entertainment Europe production! Fasten your seatbelts for another Naughty Dog creation! Bwam bah bah bamp, bah da dam da da da dum”. Absolutely iconic loading screens and music. I don’t think I’ve ever beat the campaign mode completely, but it’s a lot of fun. Several years since I’ve played now, which is a bit of a shame. My PlayStation needs to be repaired but no-one near me has the expertise and I didn’t want to go inside and make things worse…
Hogs of War was on a demo disc I had and it seemed quite fun, but I never got to experience the full version.
I seem to remember Driver 2 being challenging but cool, but not much else other than those two emotions.
Final shout-out to Worms Armageddon.
I’ve got Hydro Thunder still. I literally played it like a couple weeks ago. When I was a kid I would use the GameShark to unlock all of the boats and tracks.
I don’t know that I ever made it past the first mission of the second city in Driver 2. I remember getting into that baseball field in free-roam though. Cops and Robbers was a hell of a multiplayer game too.
Worms Armageddon was way more difficult than it had any right being. I remember their challenges being nearly impossible. Like shoot a rocket through a pinhole using the wind.
I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I went back to Worms Armageddon as an adult and found it too difficult to be enjoyable. I know I’m out of practice now but I have to assume I just didn’t mind constantly losing to the AI when I was younger…
I’m curious, why that specific order for Spyro? I’d personally just go in release order, same with the Crash games.
I was ordering based on my favourite, rather than what order to play them. I phrased it ambiguously.
But why that order? Gateway to Glimmer is my favourite because the world feels so much more open with being able to swim, and then (spoilers) especially when you can swim underwater.
I’m actually going to change my ranking and put Spyro to Dragon as second best, because it has some really cool level designs like Treetop Village and the Magic Crafter’s homeworld. Also the neh-neh-neh-neh-nehs (blue thieves).
Spyro 3 is also very good too
Ah - in that case, I’m going YoTD, Spyro the Dragon, Ripto’s Rage! (I do like 2 a lot, but it’s always felt weirdly disjointed to me. Ripto is a very good villain though.)
Such a shame that the crash team racing remaster suffered such brutal load times and had such poor networking online play. They put so much time and effort to keep it faithful to the original, but minute long load screens so frequently really sapped the fun.
Final Fantasy IX, one of the last classical FF experiences. Quite hard though.
Final Fantasy Tactics, a very enjoyable strategy game.
Mega Man Legends, this was one of my favorites but the CD was damaged so I couldn’t finish the game.
