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30 years of the PlayStation!
Dec. 7th, 2024 09:07 amSo Sony are celebrating 30 years of the PlayStation brand, and good for them. To enter for the first time into a crowded marketplace and put out two of the biggest products ever is pretty impressive and while returns have certainly been diminishing since then, it's worth stopping to note just how cool the first two PSs are.
The PS1 (or PSX as we called it at the time, for reasons I can't remember) is a console I've rather neglected over the years. Sure, I've played the early Tomb Raiders and Resident Evils endlessly, and I've even returned occasionally to the over-praised FFVII, but a lot of the second rank of the system - games like Pandemonium, Parappa the Rapper, Devil Dice, Rage Racer, Broken Sword, Spyro the Dragon, Oddworld, etc - I've been content to rest in memories. Partly the reason for this is how transitional the PS1 was, with its flimsy, cardboard textures so insubstantial that when Lara climbed on a box you were always surprised when it didn't collapse under her weight; but the PS1 was revolutionary, being the harbinger of the cinematic, free-roaming atmospheric adventures of today, and deserves celebrating as much for its shakey newness as in spite of it. While the N64 was focussing on 3D versions of its colourful, cutesy adventures, the PS1 was experimenting with Wipeout, Silent Hill and the aforementioned Final Fantasy. One thing you couldn't fault it for was a lack of ambition.
But I'm not the only one to rather neglect the console. The PlayStation Classic mini console came out in 2018 with a whimper, hampered by a mixed-bag of games and a lack of future possibilities for addition. No PS2 mini console has yet followed it. Sure, we get remasters and remakes from time to time, though the degree to which they capture the feel of the original varies enormously. And that may hold the key to the problem - games since the PS3 era have become increasingly bloated, cosmetic and pretentious, focussing on their frankly generic settings and characters at the expense of actual gameplay content. Is it any wonder that Sony don't, right now, truly appreciate their own history?
Enter Astro Bot! A game that's a sequel to a free game that I never played doesn't sound that promising, but it turns out to be enormous fun. Based around the concept of rescuing hundreds of robots who often bear uncanny resemblances to well-known PlayStation mascots, the game has the feel of an early Ratchet and Clank, with a large number of short, linear platforming levels in which you are assisted by various cool gadgets. Shorn of the contemporary crust of stats upgrades, consumables and skill trees, Astro Bot is lean and efficient, perhaps a little too lean and efficient. The settings are minimal; you can't, for example, adjust the controller volume to balance with the main volume, leading to a slightly excessive assault on the senses at times. But in other ways, the crispness of the game pays dividends. There is no health / lives system, for example. Make one mistake and you're history. That's not a big problem early on due to the frequency of checkpoints, but the later levels have no checkpoints (and some have strict time limits too). Expect trial and error to be your constant companions. At around 25 hours of content with little to no repetitive busywork, it's not too short or too long, and the homages to PlayStation franchises past and present is charming. There's a trophy for getting rolled up in a Katamari; there's a level where you can fling Kratos's frost axe at some spectral ravens; a cute little Jill Valentine bot is labelled the "master of unlocking". It's all quite adorable. Perhaps, having now rediscovered how good PS games can be, we might see a renaissance of quality. Or maybe just another fifty games of hunter-gathering in crumbling city ruins. Who can say?
The PS1 (or PSX as we called it at the time, for reasons I can't remember) is a console I've rather neglected over the years. Sure, I've played the early Tomb Raiders and Resident Evils endlessly, and I've even returned occasionally to the over-praised FFVII, but a lot of the second rank of the system - games like Pandemonium, Parappa the Rapper, Devil Dice, Rage Racer, Broken Sword, Spyro the Dragon, Oddworld, etc - I've been content to rest in memories. Partly the reason for this is how transitional the PS1 was, with its flimsy, cardboard textures so insubstantial that when Lara climbed on a box you were always surprised when it didn't collapse under her weight; but the PS1 was revolutionary, being the harbinger of the cinematic, free-roaming atmospheric adventures of today, and deserves celebrating as much for its shakey newness as in spite of it. While the N64 was focussing on 3D versions of its colourful, cutesy adventures, the PS1 was experimenting with Wipeout, Silent Hill and the aforementioned Final Fantasy. One thing you couldn't fault it for was a lack of ambition.
But I'm not the only one to rather neglect the console. The PlayStation Classic mini console came out in 2018 with a whimper, hampered by a mixed-bag of games and a lack of future possibilities for addition. No PS2 mini console has yet followed it. Sure, we get remasters and remakes from time to time, though the degree to which they capture the feel of the original varies enormously. And that may hold the key to the problem - games since the PS3 era have become increasingly bloated, cosmetic and pretentious, focussing on their frankly generic settings and characters at the expense of actual gameplay content. Is it any wonder that Sony don't, right now, truly appreciate their own history?
Enter Astro Bot! A game that's a sequel to a free game that I never played doesn't sound that promising, but it turns out to be enormous fun. Based around the concept of rescuing hundreds of robots who often bear uncanny resemblances to well-known PlayStation mascots, the game has the feel of an early Ratchet and Clank, with a large number of short, linear platforming levels in which you are assisted by various cool gadgets. Shorn of the contemporary crust of stats upgrades, consumables and skill trees, Astro Bot is lean and efficient, perhaps a little too lean and efficient. The settings are minimal; you can't, for example, adjust the controller volume to balance with the main volume, leading to a slightly excessive assault on the senses at times. But in other ways, the crispness of the game pays dividends. There is no health / lives system, for example. Make one mistake and you're history. That's not a big problem early on due to the frequency of checkpoints, but the later levels have no checkpoints (and some have strict time limits too). Expect trial and error to be your constant companions. At around 25 hours of content with little to no repetitive busywork, it's not too short or too long, and the homages to PlayStation franchises past and present is charming. There's a trophy for getting rolled up in a Katamari; there's a level where you can fling Kratos's frost axe at some spectral ravens; a cute little Jill Valentine bot is labelled the "master of unlocking". It's all quite adorable. Perhaps, having now rediscovered how good PS games can be, we might see a renaissance of quality. Or maybe just another fifty games of hunter-gathering in crumbling city ruins. Who can say?
