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S3 Ep249: PlayStation 1
76 Plays3 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about one of the big ones...the PS1 specifically. We're talking hardware, games, experiences, and generational impact in this week's episode!
Intro:
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Intro:
- PS1 Startup Sound
- Wipeout 3 - Xpander (DJ Sasha)
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Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction and Banter
00:00:13
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going today, Dave? I'm doing pretty good. I would say I'm a chipper in a sprightly mood today. That's a lie. Yeah, it's a lie. It's a very convenient lie. For pacing, I get it sometimes, right? You're just like, do you want the spiel?
00:00:40
Speaker
I don't think you want the spiel. I'm doing fine. Wow, Jake. Way to use a word that's not even from your common tongue.
Origin of 'Spiel' and Humor
00:00:49
Speaker
What is spiel from? I imagine it's Jewish or Yiddish because it just sounds like it. Like, let me give you the spiel. Spiel. Spiel, schmuck. Anything with S-H, schlomo. Like, I attribute that to either
00:01:07
Speaker
Jewish, Polish, Yiddish. Let's see. I'm looking up the origin now. German, actually. Spiel again. We all know Germans and Jews are pretty much the same. So right. There was there was there was some historical interactions between the two. Yeah, the Germans fucked the Jews. That's why we have so many German Jews in the population. Yeah.
00:01:35
Speaker
They really did have to choose, but maybe not like that. Anyways. If you thought gas lighting was bad. Oof, yeah. That's the only joke I had in the pocket. That's fair. That's fair. It's probably good. That's the only joke in the pocket.
00:01:54
Speaker
I also like that it's, you could say it as spiel, right? Or spiel. And I'd say that's German, but it's also because of the glocken. Yeah.
00:02:09
Speaker
Anyways, hopefully do a little bit better.
Solo Podcast Joke and PlayStation One Introduction
00:02:12
Speaker
Um, we can always use the uplifting and healing power of podcasts to make it through. Cause that's definitely how it works. It doesn't just continue to slowly drain you over time until you approach the one hour mark and you're just frantically, uh, visual or making the visual like cut the signal gesture. Like, please Jake, stop talking and end the recording. It's not like that.
00:02:36
Speaker
No, I would just disconnect and make Jake cover. Yeah. I actually don't know what would happen if someone just straight up left in the middle because it would start processing their audio, I think. It would have to. I imagine they can account for it because sometimes the connection would drop. Dave's looking at me with open eyes like he's like, I can test this. Yeah, let's find out. Yeah. So anyways, I'm just going to be running with the podcast today.
00:03:05
Speaker
I digress or I joke, but let's talk about PlayStation one. Now, where would you place PlayStation one?
PlayStation One Legacy and Impact
00:03:19
Speaker
Without any criteria, just like you're not even placing it like in the location or in a hierarchy or best of worst of. I like questions like that because it makes people
00:03:31
Speaker
It's going to be hard to play that one, huh? I like an open-ended question like that because then the person realizes, oh, you're judging me based off of what I say for like how I'm approaching the question that doesn't really have parameters. So just kind of get to feel how your brain works a little bit. It's like if a therapist asks you, do you think you're a good person?
00:03:56
Speaker
It's like, yes, and then you leave. I'm doing great. Thank you. I also don't think that that's probably a question that they would ask because for the most part, well, that's the difference in psychology is like versus a Turing test. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the first 90 percent of education is just not
00:04:20
Speaker
Interacting with the person's mind but instead just asking open questions to get information out of them and then the last like 10% of actually being a specialist capable of doing this is the advice part because they're You very much do not want to give people bad advice when it comes to scenarios like that Because that's on you But I would say PlayStation for me I would give it like
00:04:49
Speaker
I'd give it a solid like 8.5. Yeah. I have to give it lower just because of if you said like, what would you rate your computer? What would you rate PS2 and like other consoles? I'd be like, oh, I've definitely spent more time on those. I'm more familiar with those games. So by default, PlayStation 1 would have to be lower. Gotcha. So you're thinking more absolute ranking.
00:05:17
Speaker
No, no, no. I was just basing my statement off of your statement. Ah, OK.
00:05:22
Speaker
So the rationale I had for the eight five was kind of like, what is the legacy of it? And honestly, maybe for legacy, it should really be like a nine, right? PlayStation two doesn't exist. PlayStation three doesn't exist. The rest of them, I can't remember the names for the rest of the ordering. PlayStation makes it so difficult to keep up with. Those consoles don't exist. Or they wouldn't exist without PlayStation one.
Personal Memories and Social Gaming
00:05:50
Speaker
Yeah, it was.
00:05:53
Speaker
My initial memories were we had a, I say we, like I hung out with my parents. I considered them, you know, a part of my group. I had a neighbor. I lived separately from my parents. We lived a couple of houses down and like I was friends with the one girl, Amanda, and her, she had an older brother, Jeremiah, and he had the PlayStation and it was in their basements. Like, it's not like we'd go and hang out. I was like, yo, it was,
00:06:23
Speaker
I mean, if we want to hang out in the basement, that's cool too. Like once you have a friend who has a cool thing, you're like, I mean, we could do the cool thing. I'm not opposed to it. Uh huh.
00:06:32
Speaker
I'd mix it up from bop it for sure. I love that dynamic, too, where there's something that your friend has that's super novel to you, such as a game console. And then they exist with it enough that maybe, unless they're like us, the novelty starts to wear off. And they're like, I kind of want to go outside. We could go to the park. We could do whatever. And there's this list of suggestions. And you're just waiting for them to get to the end for their lowest priority offerings, which are
00:07:02
Speaker
Play PlayStation in the basement and you're like that one. That's what I want. I have been keeping up with the weather show. This is going to be rainy today. That's I don't know. Yeah. Well, I'm not feeling getting ammonia. Uh huh. But of course, with PS1, it was like, oh, Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
PlayStation One Hardware and History
00:07:21
Speaker
So like you'd have like the Never Soft logo come up. You have the disco and you'd have your two dual analog rumble controllers sitting on beanbag chairs. Mm hmm.
00:07:32
Speaker
Uh, what else can I throw in here for nostalgia? You were listening to the Shrek soundtrack. Um, but that was probably my first instance of ever hearing ska was just a lot of Tony Hawk. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:53
Speaker
It was good stuff. I will admit upfront that I'm basically role playing someone who had more experience with a PlayStation for the purpose of this episode. I'm just going to make a bunch of stuff up. Not actually. I did play at a friend's house, but that was my experience. I didn't have a PlayStation. When we finally got a console, it was in 64 so that I had more experience for the previous episode.
00:08:20
Speaker
but PlayStation brought a lot to the table. And we're gonna talk about a little bit about that.
00:08:27
Speaker
I have technical notes. I never read technical notes on the podcast. This is experimental, but I'm just going to go through them real quick. So interesting background. I didn't know this until I looked it up research. Some people call it and try not to do it for the podcast, but it happens accidentally. Sometimes a PlayStation wouldn't exist if Nintendo and Sony had actually gotten along a bit earlier.
00:08:53
Speaker
and completed an add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which was a CD-ROM drive plug-in, basically. That failed. And Sony was like, we still think we have a good idea. Let's make a game station competitor, basically. And that turned into the PlayStation, which blows my mind, right? Yeah, it is a little odd.
00:09:21
Speaker
I guess it's like today, if you're like, hey, big PC company, we're going to offer you this cubic drive. You just kind of pop the cube in and then all data is read from the cube.
CD Innovation and Anti-Piracy Measures
00:09:35
Speaker
It's a little bit different from what we've been doing, but it's like a new thing. They're like, it's not really working out. They're like, we're going to make our own thing that only runs off of cubes. Yes. Yeah.
00:09:47
Speaker
There was a lot of concern, actually, like four CD-ROMs back then because they were very easy to copy. I don't know if you were around in the 90s in their early 2000s. I don't know how you thought we were listening to that Shrek soundtrack, but it wasn't true.
00:10:08
Speaker
legitimate through legal entertainment media or whatever. I can't remember who published. I know DreamWorks. It's DreamWorks. I made Shrek. But yeah, there was a big deal. They were like, we're not sure how we can actually use CDs because it was better data wise than a cartridge. You can fit more on a CD than a cartridge.
00:10:32
Speaker
But there is a big question of copy protection. They're like, someone's literally going to take the first copy of this game that we send to the United States and then they're just going to make 100,000 of them and we will sell nothing. Right. We will sell one copy to the United States before it's gone. So apparently what Sony did is they actually introduced like a reader device and I'm not going to get all of the technical details in here.
00:11:00
Speaker
But for their CDs, when it started, when they created a PlayStation game, the first sectors of the device had some encoded bits that are necessary for it to be detected is like a valid PlayStation game.
00:11:17
Speaker
But the way that they wrote their CDs was they introduced it kind of like a low frequency or something like that is basically a wobble in the desk. So what happens is if you were to burn a PlayStation CD with like a traditional CD burner, it would actually not include those little wobble bits because your burner is just going to interpret this as like the CD just wobbled a little bit.
00:11:43
Speaker
And so it thinks that it's not necessary or something that shouldn't be included in the data. And so it was missing from all of the burned copies of the disk. And that was their copy protection, like ingenious. But basically, if you burned a PlayStation disk, it would be missing that key data.
00:12:03
Speaker
So they actually really smart. Yeah. The way you had to get around it was the way you get around a lot of things, which was, uh, like homebrew or jailbreak or whatever the term would be bootleg your system. So that it, the, the CD reader was not that PlayStation official one that was looking for those encrypted, that encrypted sector of the desk. And then it could run like burned discs, no problem, but that's more effort than your average consumer was going to put into it.
00:12:35
Speaker
So that's pretty cool. Came out in 1995.
Controller Evolution and Design Standards
00:12:39
Speaker
So I was the old age of four when this when this happened. It had Dave. Dave thumbs himself right there. So I think he was also four. Don't say thumb to myself for an audio listener. That sounds wrong.
00:13:00
Speaker
I pointed to myself with my thumb going, hey, me too. Right. It had excellent hardware by today's standards at two megabytes of RAM.
00:13:10
Speaker
One megabyte of video RAM and 16 bit sound. Um, which is really funny, you know, going back to, I was just talking about how I have a virtual machine in some other location that I have access to. And it's like 16 bucks a month with 16 gigs of RAM. And that's a lot more than two megs. So how far we've come.
00:13:34
Speaker
Two controllers, so a bit fewer than Nintendo. It's where it's worth noting here. PlayStation was just like, how many friends do you really have? Nintendo's like, yeah, get four. No problem. What's the first time that Nintendo had for the 64? Yeah. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure SNES was still to the blue. So.
00:14:01
Speaker
Um, and then we talked about the CDs already, but they beat Dreamcast to the CD market by three years. And you can see the effect of that. Nobody talks about Dreamcast anymore. Nobody talks about Sega. Real talk. Sega is a publisher now. They're not like, uh, they don't make hardware, but like.
00:14:23
Speaker
I mean, obviously the Sonic games, but some other games they'll publish for Nintendo and maybe Windows, I'm not sure. And then it was around for a ripe old age of five years before being superseded by the PS2. A couple more games continued to come out. I think one of them was actually Final Fantasy IX came out after the PS2 launched.
00:14:50
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, good luck trying to sell PS1 games after the PS2 came out, if people had it, right? I think the PS2 is better in literally every way. Yeah. I mean, it still had the same amount of controllers. But they did have an external piece you could get to add additional controller slots, which I thought was comedically funny. I've only ever used it once.
00:15:17
Speaker
There wasn't that many games that supported it, right? Like when the base console is like you have two controller slots, why are you going to make a game that supports 16 players? Like didn't didn't make a lot of sense to the controllers, though. Correct me if I'm wrong in saying this, but I believe that they actually kind of pioneered everything for the controllers going forward. Yeah, because in 10 to 64, I was doing some wackadoodle shit. Nobody understood.
00:15:46
Speaker
I would play stations like, hey, here's this setup. You got your D pad on the left, you got your four buttons on the right, which is something that Nintendo had done with a Super Nintendo. Right. But then they added the the analog as well. Yeah. So weirdly, like I have a pro controller here. Now, technically, the analogs are a little bit split. This follows more of like an Xbox model where my left analog is a little bit higher up.
00:16:14
Speaker
than my right analog. But PlayStation has always had the model of your analogs are lower by where your thumbs would be if you just kind of grip something by the hands. And it's always had those two there, which is crazy for a while because I would never considered PlayStation to ever be the pioneer for first person shooters, by any means, because there wasn't like a whole lot of titles on PlayStation.
00:16:44
Speaker
Whereas in things like Xbox, Halo was like gigantic and always had like the slightly skewed analog. But PlayStation was first to have those analog sticks, which is God here, because having more more points of directional input versus just here's your D patch for directions up left.
00:17:07
Speaker
I was about to say down and right. Forward, left, right, and back. Yeah.
00:17:15
Speaker
And it's worth noting, when PlayStation first came out, I like the comparison to the SNES controller, because it was a lot closer to that. They didn't have the analogs on launch. It was a controller that came out three years later. And the original controller looked a lot more like a SNES controller. But it had that more ergonomic, I would say, controller feel, where instead of folding like. Well, it actually had handles that came out of it. Exactly, right. Whereas Nintendo stuff was always, I mean, for Nintendo and Super Nintendo, just fucking flat. Yeah.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, in 64 probably I'm discounting other publishers that you could fact correct us in the comments if you want. But like for the the big the big video game consoles in 64 introduced the idea of kind of holding the controller as something that rather than like a flat piece of garbage, I'm sure Sega Genesis, whatever, did some similar stuff. But like,
00:18:09
Speaker
I say flat piece of garbage but that's how I imagine those old Nintendo controllers right that SNES controller where it's like it's flat it's like how do you hold this in your hand you like you cup it like you put your hands out like you can just hold something place in them no grip it and PlayStation embrace that grip the controller
00:18:28
Speaker
They got so close with that first controller type, even without the analog sticks and just the D-pad and the buttons. Also, the buttons stayed the same across all of this, which is excellent. But once the sticks came out, it was big. Actually, there was a middle one, too. Between the dual analog controllers you know and love, there is apparently a flight stick variant with large
00:18:55
Speaker
grips, and that was a little bit less popular. Very, very niche. Yeah. But I didn't get the impression that they really had a tremendous amount of, maybe faith is the wrong word, maybe it was compatibility concern or something going back then. But there was a button on the dual analog controllers that just disabled the analog sticks.
00:19:20
Speaker
They're just like, OK, well, if you're not used to it, you're not comfortable. Maybe you bump them on accident while you're playing a game. You want to just go back to just using the D-pad. Just hit the button, turn it off. You don't have to use the feature that you're paying more money for. It'll be fine. Should we have these modular with here? I can just remove them? No, we just have an on and off switch for it. If people don't like it, I don't have to use it. Man, that would be awesome. It's kind of a pain to remove controller sticks.
00:19:47
Speaker
by design, right? You want people to just buy a new controller, but. I will say that with a PlayStation, obviously more so with PS2 and PlayStation as a console series, as progressed, I always associate PlayStation with fighting games because a lot of them were just released on there.
00:20:07
Speaker
Part of my thought was, it's probably, oh, it's easier to do certain inputs with an analog stick where you can roll some of the inputs. If we're talking like Street Fighter, Street Fighter Turbo 3, you could literally just do down and roll forward, and there's your down, down forward, and right, sorry, forward input. So then you can do your Hadoop and whatever.
00:20:33
Speaker
I'm sure a lot of professional people don't use analog sticks. They like to do very explicit inputs. But anytime that I would do fighting games, primarily Soul Calibur, it felt very fluid to use those instead. Yeah.
00:20:50
Speaker
I think that there's definitely different camps there and there's a lot of videos on YouTube. I remember when I was looking at Guilty Gear, people were talking like, do I need to buy a fighting game pad to play this game? And they're like, probably not. But if you do, expect it's going to take a long time to get used to it.
00:21:11
Speaker
But like those game pads had the one sort of arcade cabinet joystick with fixed directions. And those fixed directions are probably the best way to do it. Right. Like a modern joystick or modern analog joystick has a lot more movement, maybe not fully 360 degrees, but close to it instead of like just notches. But.
00:21:36
Speaker
The notches are definitely better than a d-pad because you can transition through them faster, particularly for moves like roll forward or something like that.
00:21:49
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, analog is better for everything else. You mentioned shooters, like we technically had thumbsticks, you know, while shooters were
Shooter Controls Evolution
00:22:00
Speaker
out and things like that. But until you had two and the idea, one of them is for moving your character and the other one is for moving just for looking around. Yeah. Yeah. Like.
00:22:09
Speaker
We take for granted how ingrained that is in shooters, but if you go back like 20 years, a little bit more now, I barely exist, but also like the shooter's control schemes were so freaking weird.
00:22:27
Speaker
It's awful. The PC comparison is like, what do you do for PC shooters now? WASD in your mouse. Literally two separate forms of input for movement and looking around. But if you go back to something like
00:22:42
Speaker
I like to go to Descent for MS-DOS. That was all done with the Numpad. You had your separate look around. Or if you go back to, from a console standpoint, a GoldenEye, it's all like, hey, you have this one thing. And we'll do our best to automatically track onto things for you. Or if you need more precise input, I guess we can give you the C stick pad. You figure the rest of that shit out.
00:23:11
Speaker
And it's so mechanically awkward. But at the time, you're like, that was new and the thing. And then we found a better way to do it. Yeah, it's easy to forget that we basically had tank controls for shooters for a long time. Yeah, it's crazy.
00:23:36
Speaker
I imagine, though, like this is what I think of when I think of that little button on the PlayStation controller that told you whether the analog sticks were on or off. There was an LED, I think, in there, some sort of light. So if you push the button to disable them, either toggle the light on or off. I don't call, but.
00:23:53
Speaker
I imagine the people who are looking at keyboards for the first time and thinking about what the control scheme should be for a shooter. And then they saw, excuse me, geez, they saw the arrow keys and they're like, that makes sense. There were arrows on those, right? Like people will know what this means. And then someone's like, no, no, you should use WASD. Like they must've got the weirdest looks, right? You're like letters that you want to use.
00:24:24
Speaker
letters from the QWERTY keyboard for this. Like, that doesn't make any sense. You're insane. You're fired. Right. Also, something that's hard to wrap your mind around is if you look at the the arrow keys, they are perfectly in line with each other. So your forward or up is directly above your down or your back. Now, with W.A. and SD, because keyboards are not in perfect row columns,
00:24:51
Speaker
The W is a little bit off center from the W A S or I guess from the S specifically. But like for me, it's been doing it for so long where I'm like, Oh, that's where W is. Like you've been on a QWERTY keyboard. You're like, I'm going to shift my hands over. It feels perfectly natural. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine.
00:25:11
Speaker
But first time around, any of this stuff's happening. People were like, that doesn't conceptually make sense. How are people going to latch onto that? But then if you just look at the spacing of your hands, right now, if you're listening, put your hands on the arrow keys and the one on your mouse. This works a lot better if you're right-handed. Maybe if you're left-handed and you had your mouse to the left side like a sociopath and you had your right hand on the arrow keys, maybe that makes sense. But again, I don't know how you function as a human being.
00:25:41
Speaker
Being able to have that space and just more of an ergonomic sense of what a gamer is going to be doing as they play the game Has just improved leaps and bounds over time. Yeah Yeah, I mean it's part of that is the right-handed concern right actually the arrow keys plus the left-handed is a semi-viable rebind control scheme what you lose is you lose all those this has nothing to do with PlayStation you lose all of the
00:26:08
Speaker
adjacent keys that would be nice to hit for reloading, use special, changeability, cast your spells, whatever the crap. You have so much to work with if it's right there in the middle of the keyboard as opposed to all the way over here on the right.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah, we got there eventually. And I think PlayStation was proven right. And in their designs, like they came really close to basically setting the standard for all future controllers, if not for Nintendo's nonsense, like the GameCube controller, which is also a little bit out there. And then the Wemo or whatever Nintendo is never going to do anything reasonable up until like the pro controller for the switch.
00:26:58
Speaker
True. Even the joy cons are nonsense Briefly to GameCube's credit and again does have the split analog. Yes. Yeah The reason it's so popular is because it's the most conventional controller That Nintendo actually released up until the pro controller It's just as funny to think about
00:27:21
Speaker
But PlayStation nailed it and they barely changed the design after the original PlayStation controller. All of them have that similar form factor, similar grip style. I think they went from single trigger to like double trigger at some point. They added the buttons and the analogs. But otherwise, you know, that's what you're dealing with. Triangle, circle, square X and same layout.
Graphics, Sound, and the Golden Age of Gaming
00:27:45
Speaker
Press X to Jason. It depends on which controller you have. Where the fuck that's going to be located. Right. They got to PlayStation 4 and eventually they added the speaker so like babies can cry at you from your controller to make you uncomfortable. But we already covered that game, I think.
00:28:07
Speaker
But yeah, that was the hardware. And the CDs did mean that before we were talking about the N64 games, for PlayStation, they got a little bit more, a little bit more out of them. You could have slightly better graphics. And the disks were a bit faster than cartridges.
00:28:27
Speaker
And in general, if a game came out for the N64 and the PlayStation, it was better on the PlayStation. Yeah, you just had more more space to work with. Yeah. Tony Hawk was a good example of that.
00:28:42
Speaker
Um, I think you mentioned Tony out Pro Skater two already. Um, one also came out, but two was really the one that just like, they hit it, right? Like never soft really hit it with two. Um, and I had it for the N64 and I could feel the limitation. Like the draw distance was terrible. I don't think the sound was as good. The graphics weren't as good.
00:29:05
Speaker
And it's not like the graphics were great on the PS2. Because PS2, I feel, is like the era of like, here are the polygons you're most familiar with. You got your Hagrid from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, Constance of Skin, obviously. But from the Harry Potter games.
00:29:25
Speaker
Yeah, everything in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 felt very smooth because you have people riding on skateboards, going off ramps, grinding on rails, and doing a lot of these moves very quickly and just transitioning between them as you're accumulating a score so that nobody can ever beat you on this one half pipe ramp during a game of tag. If I ever beat Chad at Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, I'd be so happy.
00:29:56
Speaker
Yeah, it all ran very, very smoothly. It was just an insane game at the time. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And also like a bang and soundtrack. Again, I'm not a scout person. I very much grew up like a metalhead into my later years. But holy fuck, it was a catchy, fun time. The whole experience is very, very notable.
00:30:19
Speaker
I think this is also part of the golden age of gaming or the start of it for me. Obviously, when I say for me, that would just mean my opinion. Based off my age, there was just a set of consoles I didn't really interact with, but it started to pick up more around PlayStation and 64 times. Then I got a PC and I swore off consoles until PlayStation 4.
00:30:46
Speaker
Like the games that started coming out for this, like talking about Tony Hawk in particular, like, uh, advanced 3d, right? Like there's 3d in 64 games that receive a lot of credit for their scope and world building, things like.
00:31:01
Speaker
Super Mario 64 games like that, but they were not unlike the graphical fidelity of PlayStation they weren't up to the same sound design as far as quality is like PlayStation I Say that the tracks are great in Super Mario and for Super Mario 64 but the
00:31:26
Speaker
Tony Hawk like experience, the idea of playing with your friends, tagging all of this stuff like you didn't have like a degraded multiplayer experience. It's like this was part of the the kit was you would have a split screen. You would have people engaging like at the same time in the same space with something that wasn't like a throwaway secondary mode. Or rather.
00:31:52
Speaker
a single screen where you were a tag-along character from the main character. So it didn't have to process two separate video feeds. Yeah, back to Sega Genesis and Sonic and Tails.
Iconic Games: Tony Hawk, Spyro, Metal Gear Solid
00:32:04
Speaker
The other thing I really remember and enjoyed with Tony Hawk, although I didn't have a bunch of friends to really play it with, and again, I think it was better on PlayStation, was the skate park builder.
00:32:16
Speaker
where you could just take geometry, slap it down. And I think this was added in too, specifically. And make a park to play around in. Which is like, it still blows my mind that that wasn't a game for the PlayStation, right? They're like doing all these things for resource conservation, all of that. And they're like, yeah, let's make it so people can build their own skate parks.
00:32:41
Speaker
Hey, did you think our level design that we spent, you know, years on was shit? Make your own then. All right. I'm sure that's what they thought at the time. It's like, but if you wanted to be able to dark slide between every single also the dark slide sound or like when you hit a what were the names for the specials, I think there were special moves.
00:33:03
Speaker
Um, in a combo, it would show up as like a golden text and you'd have like a special sound when you pulled it off. Um, so great. Loved it. I don't even like skateboarding, but this was just such a great game. I grinded ground. Yeah. I did. I did a ground. Um, I went up a half pipe. I was too afraid to turn it all. So I just went back down the half pipe.
00:33:32
Speaker
I didn't get a lot of points in that game, but very fun, very fun game. Yeah, it was legit. It also paved the road for Splatoon, right? Splatoon wouldn't exist without tag. It's the entire game. Yeah, honestly. It's like Tony Hawk, but we have squids. Yes, which obviously we don't have skateboards anymore. Natural improvement. So what outside of Tony Hawk was like a big PS1 title that sticks out for you?
00:34:03
Speaker
So there's a lot, and we have the list, so we won't pretend that the list doesn't exist. If I were to pick, again, some of this is from like the, could I demo it at Walmart too? Because I didn't have a PS1. I really enjoyed Spyro when it came out.
00:34:20
Speaker
I think that it's just a novel video game character. You're just like, oh, let's just play as like an attitudinal, that's not the word, a dragon with an attitude. Small, not big, you know, not like this is something that the D&D party is gonna kill and feel good about. But it's an adventure game, right? Fly around, do stuff, flight, also awesome, you can do it in a 3D space.
00:34:48
Speaker
Maybe it's just kind of hovering or gliding for most of it, but falling with style, falling with style. Yeah. To quote, to quote Mr. Lightyear. Um, and also Woody, I guess, technically the line was originally from Woody, but I like that. Yeah.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah, PS1 had a weird birth of a lot of different franchises that stuck. Spyro definitely had its saga or time in the sun. But I think it was like a direct, I don't want to say competitor, but like it was an early platformer, similar to like the Rareware games of N64. But the fact that you had more freedom of movement with that, and again, analog to control something like flight versus just having like
00:35:40
Speaker
four to eight cardinal directions. It was huge. I never played too much of Spyro. I remember watching people played a lot, but I missed out on a lot of the. I don't want to say collectathon adventure games, but a lot of those early games were kind of like that, where it's like, hey, you're some platform incision collectibles. Here's like a level we designed and you're going through it.
00:36:04
Speaker
Yeah, and they apparently, I looked this up real quick, because it was like, who made Spyro? It was Insomniac. So they produced Spyro, they made Ratchet and Clank. They went, you know, beyond that, I think, did they close eventually? I'm not sure. I'll have to find that eventually. But like, this is the era of
00:36:24
Speaker
You're like, hey, I know that developer. And they made three games for this console that came out, right? A lot of the games on our list actually came in threes, which is sort of crazy when you think about it from a console that existed for five years. It's like, this is kind of rapid development. But that happened a lot back then. They're like, we have the core of what we need. Maybe we can expand on things a little bit for the sequel. But for the most part, we're just going to do more of what we've got.
00:36:54
Speaker
And Spyro was definitely that, but it came out on Steam eventually. I think I have it on a wish list, not like high. It's low on the wish list, but it's like, maybe we'll play it someday.
00:37:06
Speaker
Jake's birthday recently happened if everyone wants to buy him the Spyro collection on Steam. We'll put his details below. Pick something higher up on the list first. We'll work our way down to Spyro. What about you? Anything you remember or stand out as a solid game from the PlayStation 2 era? Or PlayStation 1, even if you want to talk about what we're currently talking about.
00:37:34
Speaker
I mean, the normal classic, but I did not have any direct experience with, but definitely pioneered a, I'm going to keep using pioneered, pioneered a successful franchise, which I think is now dead permanently, but Metal Gear Solid started off on PlayStation one. Yeah. And that was huge because you had a,
00:37:57
Speaker
third-person adventure game with like stealth and espionage, like so many other mechanics. You're like, why'd you even put this in the game? And they're like, we thought it would be funny. You're like, OK, like smoking a cigarette to reveal lasers, like having to switch out your memory card so you could beat a boss, like stuff that was just, again, so fucking unheard of and so unorthodox. But I think really obviously helped Metal Gear Solid take off.
00:38:25
Speaker
But then allowed for other games to think of like, hey, maybe we can do some unorthodox things too. Maybe not as unorthodox as like having to switch your memory card all the time. Just allowing people to design outside of the box a little more. Yeah. It's actually it's really hard to like one up Kojima when it comes to thinking out of the box or something. Interesting ideas. I will say that. Yes. Yeah. Not all of them are good.
00:38:54
Speaker
But they're interesting. Yeah. I actually saw a Nakey Jakey video on YouTube recently where he talked about game disks, demo disks. And like there were the Metal Gear Solid 1 demo, like an opening section.
00:39:12
Speaker
Those are just really cool. This was the era for it, right? This is where the internet doesn't have that much video game content. Maybe you have cheat code central or something like that eventually. You just don't have access to just grab everything that you want, digital downloads and stuff.
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, MGS, obviously, formative for Dave. He's the most MGS head amongst the people I know. Maybe that's true. Because I don't actually have that many friends that are into Metal Gear Solid, but that was Dave at the top. I feel like a couple of us have played five.
00:39:54
Speaker
And I played three and maybe that's like my only extra extra credit there. And you played Revengence, so you tied with me for that. The core Metal Gear. Let's play some. If you didn't beat it, then then. Yeah, I mean, you beat three. So yeah, that puts you well ahead. But I climbed a goddamn ladder, Jake. It was a very long ladder. Mm hmm.
00:40:18
Speaker
It's great for memes and stuff like that still. Anytime I'm climbing the ladder in the game and it's above average height, my brain's just, oh. But yeah, MGS, start of massive franchise, obviously. The shadow of which is honestly so large that
00:40:42
Speaker
Kojima had to make the ridiculous nonsense in Death Stranding to escape it. The expectations were so much in this direction of this entity that he's developed that Death Stranding is absolutely off the walls and it's the only way you could distract people from the fact that it's not Metal Gear Solid.
00:41:08
Speaker
Nobody talks about survive. Screw Konami. No. Konami sucks a big a big pack of testicles.
00:41:17
Speaker
But I mean, the Final Fantasy VII was also on here. And again, I played it on some initially on PS1 at a friend's place. I'm like, holy fuck, something like this can exist. And so when it came out on CD-ROM, I was like, yes. Again, it was CD to CD. I don't know how much they had to do to port it specifically, because I'm not a game dev. But that was hugely formative in my early years.
00:41:45
Speaker
Final Fantasy 7 was the thing. I still have like a very old or maybe I got rid of there. It's just someone in the closet. An old original like box art type thing, a poster of cloud. If you know, he actually had good resolution. So not in game. It's like an artist rendering. Right. And I got that when I was like 14. But he was like the cool character outside of like Sephiroth, who is the coolest character. Oh, my gosh. He had a much longer sword. And that's how you gauge that.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, we talked about it a little bit in our, um, we had a guest episode to talk about the final fantasy seven remake part one. I don't know exactly how they're naming those things now, but now we know it was part one. Um, and we talked a little bit about some of the classic final fantasy, and this was just, it's just such a good game. So I played this either. I think they had a PC release at some point. Um,
00:42:42
Speaker
And I definitely played that a bit. And at some point, I might have played an emulated version of it. I can't recall. That's my legal defense there. I do not recall. But I remember it was split across multiple disks. And it would be like, all right, you've reached this main point, time to insert disk two. And it was weird to think about, because the open world's still available. But it was split between chapters and things that tried to break out. Hey, that's what we didn't even cover yet.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, I know there were external packs for other consoles, but the concept of a memory card, was that around before PS1?
Memory Cards Revolution
00:43:23
Speaker
I'm not certain. I know PS1 had it, N64 had it. So I guess N64 definitely would have had it first, but I think it's been around for a while. I don't know what the first would be. I'm going to try to find out.
00:43:39
Speaker
We can I can at least say definitively, cartridges did not do this to where you had multiple cartridges to play a game. Whereas like this were so big, they could handle so much space and much memory, all of the audio and video you needed for the game.
00:43:55
Speaker
But then to also have a, hey, we couldn't fit all of the content of our game onto this one disk. You know that new big thing that we said was gigantic? It's three big gigantics. So if you can put in the second disk and we can continue on, that would be cool. Anyway, sorry to interrupt. Please keep playing our game. Thank you. It was bananas.
00:44:19
Speaker
Because I think for the CD-ROM, it came in like those dual, I won't say dual cases, like it was like the thin one, but like the type you crack open and like the plastic would always break after like a week, it would chip on something. But it had two different CD inserts for like essentially three to four discs. And I think the first transition is when you met the first weapon.
00:44:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was like, um, I think. Yeah. Um, that sounds about right near golden saucer or something like that. Um, so I looked it up real quick. Cora says, uh, Neo Geo was potentially the first console, but we played that. So if we discount that one, they actually was PS one. Right.
00:45:08
Speaker
There you go. Because I say I'm dabbing for the audience. There's an implied dab. Then it came out a year before the N64. So anything that PlayStation had in its opening offering would have been before Nintendo released their stuff in the US, at least. We're still a year ahead in general, other places, but in Japan, things tend to release one year before they release in the US.
00:45:37
Speaker
But yeah, Final Fantasy was freaking big. I still remember dying in the tutorial section and like, that's dumb. And then Sephiroth revived me and I'm like, thanks buddy. I'm glad you're on my side and will be for the rest of the game. Hopefully someday I can be as powerful as you. And that aged incredibly well. So.
00:46:02
Speaker
He seems to be getting along with all of my friends, especially the females, which I wasn't sure. I was getting kind of misogynistic vibes at a point because of weird relationships with his mom.
00:46:14
Speaker
It is really just about that if you think about it. But yeah, obviously the other Final Fantasies as well, eight and nine, I have less to say about those, but Gunblades are cool.
Survival Horror Genre on PlayStation
00:46:28
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, Final Fantasy is a big deal. It was a big deal more in Japan back then, but like in some of these games, this is especially for Sony, right? Being a first console out here.
00:46:43
Speaker
They're like, we're not really sure if we should release this in the US. Like, is it even worth the effort? Americans are temperamental and they have a lot of guns and stuff like that. But a lot of the games on this list were the right call to release. So. Yeah, I'd say Final Fantasy has been pretty well adopted over here now. Yes. Also Resident Evil. Yeah. Two. Two.
00:47:13
Speaker
I mean, Resident Evil, like I just watched a video on it yesterday because they're re-releasing four and it looks again, not like it played the original, but just watching like the comparison. Fucking impressive how far it's come. But like that is a huge franchise. Like they've been doing really well with like the remakes and also just the releases of seven and eight just for like next gen Resident Evil stuff. And as far as how they're approaching it.
00:47:40
Speaker
It's all Silent Hill. I don't know if it's still going, but that also had its start on PlayStation. There was I was going to say on Resident Evil real quick. Nobody cares about Resident Evil one, right? Like there's a house, I guess, or something. I don't know. But like nobody cares. It really took off with two. And then Silent Hill is obviously the same franchise, but you don't have a gun or if you have a gun, it's not as good. So actually, no, they are making another one, aren't they? They had a trailer at a
00:48:10
Speaker
Jeff Keeley's house. That sounds so absurd that I believe in you. Yeah, Silent Hill never played him, but I spent some time on the wiki for two, which is really fun because one of my favorite tidbits about Silent Hill is that two is actually
00:48:33
Speaker
the favorite of a lot of people in the series, and it wasn't even originally supposed to be a Silent Hill game. It's development was just co-opted and they turned into a Silent Hill game. But that wasn't originally what they were aiming for at all. So it's a little bit more. What's the word? It's a little bit more thoughtful and what's the word if it's like more in your head or more neurally stimulating?
00:49:00
Speaker
I don't know. It's a lot more contemplative and things like that. I'm going to think of the word later and it's going to kill me. But then a lot of the other Silent Hill games where it's kind of just like action plus horror. This one was like the monster is you. And so, you know.
00:49:21
Speaker
It stuck with people a lot longer. So I just love that in this game series, the die hard fans love the game that was not originally supposed to be in the series. So good, though. Big deal. I have a personal one. Yeah, but I didn't play the N64 version of again or sorry, the PlayStation version of again. But I love the Wipeout series.
00:49:51
Speaker
Very fun, high-speed anti-grav racing league.
Wipeout Series and Rhythm Gaming
00:49:55
Speaker
And their naming convention's stupid, so I'm not even gonna talk about that, but the first game had an E capitalized in Wipeout, and then they were like, why did we do that? Does that mean anything? Why is the letter in the middle of this word capitalized? Whippy out. Whippy out actually, I don't have a lot of trouble, so they stopped doing that.
00:50:16
Speaker
I went to a wipeout, Excel wipeout three, finally. But again, talking about like cool music, this was the this was like the the techno or house or trance music that would be playing while you're doing these futuristic races. And it was it was great. And I was not hearing that anywhere else as a kid. I have to show you, but I've actually on my little emulator box, I do have I did get wipeout.
00:50:45
Speaker
Um, for legal reasons, huge. Um, Dave can't remember if he actually has an emulator box or not, but I, somebody gave this to me. I'm holding it for, I didn't know who the person was. Uh, I accept things from strangers. I don't know why it's just a weird habit I've formed over the years. Uh-huh. But you have a, you have a copy of wipeout or an alleged copy of wipeout.
00:51:12
Speaker
I have something that looks like wipeout on some... I'm not good at this. Which one though?
00:51:23
Speaker
I figured I'd have to look at the naming convention for whatever the specific file may or may not have is. Whoopi out. 2097. I thought this was for me being sick, but now I realize it's for me being nervous for not wanting to perjure myself. Well, you're not under oath, so you can't do that at least.
00:51:48
Speaker
Cool game though. Obviously some other ones. Crash Bandicoot had a release here as well as some other consoles. And Parappa the Rapper is I think the way to read this.
00:52:06
Speaker
I will say it's had a couple of games. I don't know many people who have played it, but dear God, the meme legacy has lived on. That was the only reason I wanted to bring it up. I'm looking at Jake and I think we're thinking of the same video of a certain Daffy Duck.
00:52:23
Speaker
Uh-huh. That one's good. And the more appropriate one for the podcast, I'll say, uh, this is where my parents died. This is the place where my parents died. Yeah. But with Batman.
00:52:41
Speaker
incredible meme potential. It's all I know about that series. It's not really the type of game I would normally play, but it was very entertaining to insert that character into other stuff. Yeah, it was one of the early versions of like, hey, we want to have some type of rhythm game. What can we do to make it interesting and fun? And they found a way to do it. And it was different from some other stuff where it's just like, hey, here's
00:53:05
Speaker
I guess like your beat hazard or no beat has the shooting one. Yeah. But if anything, it's like, hey, here's your notes coming down that you have to hit or something going across the screen. We have to hit it in the sequence like a rock band or guitar hero. Yeah. Which I mean, even the I feel bad, I don't remember the name of this, but I haven't been to around one in a very long time.
00:53:27
Speaker
There is a drum game with like a cute little drum as things come across and you have to hit either drum or simultaneously or go fucking crazy, whatever it is. Donkey Kongos. Donkey Kongos, yeah. Having games like that were always like big at arcades.
00:53:47
Speaker
So you get licenses for whichever music and then just go to town on making like these beat map files. And that was like the pattern for everything, even newer things like where you're essentially touching around the screen in a circle and dragging it in. This just gave it a lot of personality, which I don't think as many arcade games have. Right. And that's a shout out to music Gun Gun, if anybody has played that.
00:54:16
Speaker
I haven't, but I acknowledge the shadow. That's the other thing to mention is like for this golden, again, my golden age of gaming. This is the point where like home consoles really started to eclipse what you could do in an arcade, right? Like you're talking about Spyro, you're talking about Silent Hill, you know, Final Fantasy. No one is going to play Final Fantasy 7 in an arcade.
00:54:44
Speaker
No one with a limited amount of money. It would cost them an infinite amount of quarters. It's going to do this, right? You have to go home. Hey, when you've done this machine, you know where my save file is. Give me another 60 hours. Fuck off. Talking about the memory card, talking about the save file,
00:55:02
Speaker
This is essential if you want to persist some of these games. As soon as you get to Emerald Weapon, you don't want someone else to come in when you have to go home at the end of the day and wipe your save file from the arcade. This was a divergent point, and I mean, arcades really didn't come back from this.
00:55:28
Speaker
But in the past, if you look at like the older game consoles, you're looking at Sonic, you're looking at like SNES and NES and stuff like that. A lot of those games were bite sized enough or constrained enough that you could play them in an arcade. Wouldn't have been a problem. Cyborg Justice. I like to mention it all the time because no one knows what it is for the Sega Genesis. Great arcade game. But we're going beyond that.
Shift from Arcade to Home Gaming
00:55:51
Speaker
And PlayStation One and N64 kind of helped push that along.
00:56:00
Speaker
So big deal. Thank you, Sony and Nintendo. We appreciate your efforts. Please stop closing down Smash tournaments. Please improve your netcode. Thank you. Please make a PS4 version of Demon Soul. Thank you.
00:56:19
Speaker
That's not going to happen. So, tangentially, related to the legacy of the PlayStation 1, I was reading an article where people were talking about Sony's plans for release of the PlayStation 6 and when they anticipated doing that. I think it was something like five years from now.
00:56:41
Speaker
Can't recall exactly. Look it up. But it came out from court documents that they had to provide because they were challenging the merger of Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. And basically the court was like, are they going to continue to compete with you
00:57:01
Speaker
based off of your offering, something like that, some sort of question like that. And so Sony had to release a document that's like we plan on supporting or we plan on releasing games for the PS5 until this year, which is just like it's crazy that that's how the information comes out because it's the least type thing you could possibly do.
00:57:24
Speaker
Uh, but it was just very funny. Um, 2028. Yeah. Is when, uh, they're aiming for releasing the PS six. So you haven't picked up a PS five, you know, just wait another five years. Not a big deal. Um, maybe with the PS five goes on sale, they're like, Hey, here's like a refurbished one or like, uh, here's one that's like covered in grape juice. I don't know. There's like a cheaper price point.
00:57:54
Speaker
There's initially it was, hey, we don't have enough supply to go around. Yeah. Also, if you do want to buy one, it's a billion dollars. Oh, maybe not then. Yeah. And I say billion, but realistically, it's 600 for the console. If you get a game that's going to be sixty to possibly seventy dollars now, usually that will give you a game with the console. That's a nice little incentive. The controllers, I believe, are always separate now. I don't think they come with. They might.
00:58:22
Speaker
But typically, you're going to have more than one. There's another $60 right there. If you're lucky, good controllers can get expensive, yeah. So if you ask the average person, hey, do you have $700 you want to spend on a new game? You're like, no. Does that seem like a good idea for me?
00:58:43
Speaker
That's crazy about all of that. All of that is true and they still subsidize the games with the cost of the console, right? Like the tech is just that expensive, but also that good that like most modern consoles sell at a loss because they know the profit margins on the games are so high, which is crazy to think about, but.
00:59:05
Speaker
Um, again, related to the legacy of the PS one. Um, if you are still waiting on the PS five, as I know myself and Dave are, um, there were reports that the PS five slim and the PS five pro PS five pro. So we'll be coming out in the next year or two. Um, some rumors there. So maybe that's the, maybe that's the entry point. That's what I did for PS four is I waited until the pro version came out and was like, here we go.
00:59:35
Speaker
Better deal. But it really depends on what games exist for it at that point. I saw Dave Wave raise his hand, but then he actually just muted to cough, I think. What's the point of me doing it if you're going to call it out? Well, what was funny is we've never used the raise our hand function. And it says, like, a person has something to say, or in this case,
01:00:02
Speaker
about to be in gravy has something to say. For those who are unaware, I try and change my name every couple of weeks. So like Jake's is always Jake. And mine will depend on like what I'm thinking at the time. So I forget what the initial one was.
01:00:23
Speaker
But a couple of weeks ago, like I trimmed up my beard and shaved, got a haircut. It's like all be Davey post-shavy. And I did that for two weeks. And then I felt obviously sick this weekend, which is why we changed our recording time to weirdly when I feel more shitty, which is unfortunate on my part.
01:00:41
Speaker
So it's gonna be Davey about to be in the gravy, joking I'm going to die for my sickness. But it's too many characters, so it's just about to be in gravy. I can't even put the E, so it's just brown sauce we put on a turkey. Okay, that makes more sense because I only read it as the turkey gravy. Yeah, I only read it as the turkey gravy and I was like, this is definitely something the kids say, I assume, but I don't know what it means.
01:01:11
Speaker
Somebody's about to give Dave the gravy. I'm going to assume that's appropriate. Let me go to Urban Dictionary real quick and check. But PS1, heck of a console, deserved its own episode. And even though, again, I never had one, I'm glad we had the time to talk about it because we need content.
01:01:35
Speaker
I'm not saying I disagree with Jake, but I will say there are a lot of other good titles on the PS1. I'd say more so on the PS2 because like PS2 took off and has so many fucking titles. But there are a lot of old good fighters on there. If you look at some of like the 2D Gundam games, I was a fan of those. I forget if that was specifically PS1 or if that just came out on PS2. But even if you're not going to go back and play them, it's fun to look at some of these lore around some of these things like
01:02:05
Speaker
A classic one is always going to be for Silent Hill and why they had the fog or other things like that. It's just it's fun to see how far gaming has progressed from a technology standpoint, at least if you're nerdy enough in that way, like we are. But yeah, you probably are. You made it this far in the episode. You probably are.
01:02:28
Speaker
I dub the nerd. Excellent. Well, as a newly united nerd, if you have any suggestions for future content, maybe a console we haven't covered yet that you would like us to talk about that actually had games we can talk about, because a lot of them kind of just trash outside of the big ones, feel free to send those ideas in to soapstonepodcast at gmail.com.
01:02:53
Speaker
Or if you're the kind of nerd that's still on Facebook, you can always check out our page there at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. The comment section is both hip and happening. Again, according to what the kids say. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.