Posts Tagged ‘psone’
Podcast: Birth of the Playstation
This week Fred goes solo and discusses the new format for the podcast, promises more media content on the site, and then tells the history of Sony’s famous powerhouse the Playstation, which premiered this week 17 years ago.
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Generation Gap Pt. 4: 32-bit (with a dash of 64)
By the time the SNES was dominating and the Sega Genesis was locked in an endless sea of add-ons to save the dying console, electronics manufacturers began to step up and create many of their own consoles. As a result, the market was flooded with overpriced horrendous hardware. They seemed to have everything a gamer wanted: new media format (the cheaply priced cd was preferred by developers to reduce production cost and retail price), impressive graphics and processors, and lets not forget the large numbers like “32” and “64” prominantly displayed on the startup screens. Unfortunately they lacked one important thing: good games. Still, that didn’t prevent many manufacturers from creating a loose version of the video game crash of 1983. Thankfully one lone electronics company entered the foray with the next step in gaming – that company was Sony.
Electronics Companies Go Bananas (or Pre 32-bit Gaming)
JVC’s Xeye
I’m guessing somewhere around the Sega CD, boasting the ability to play your new audio CDs through your television as an added feature, electronic companies started to take notice of gaming systems. As you guide through the progression of consoles the consumer electronics market grows stronger with gamers – let’s face it, they’re the perfect early adoptors. Quickly companies scrambled to enter the gaming market including JVC, Phillips, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony and even more. Some of these companies licensed existing hardware, like JVC did with the X’Eye, a Sega Genesis/Sega CD hybrid that was re-branded with JVC’s logo. On the other hand, Phillips, Panasonic and Pioneer – imagine keeping these companies straight as a consumer – released their own hardware with a (arguably) library of games. In the end, they all sucked and had ridiculous price tags pushing back the concept of consumer electronics meeting gaming for at least another six years. Below are the early disc-based consoles that failed so horribly.
Now & Then: Resident Evil 3 Nemesis
Now & Then is different from both a retrospective and a review. It tackles games you probably already know and is a place for gamers to discuss these games. Below is an overview of a game’s presence in the market then and now. Authors of these articles share their personal experience, so we encourage all of you to do the same in the comments.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (RE3) gets the worst treatment within the series because it was released on the tail end of the Playstation cycle and as the third release in as many years (most people remember RE‘s re-release, the Director’s Cut, more than the initial release), there really wasn’t that much new brought to the table. Having said that, it was the most polished title on the Playstation and finally made the concept attempted in RE2 a reality. With a few slight tweaks, like the ability to flip a quick 180 and a much more agile Jill Valentine, RE3 felt a lot more like games of the time. Unfortunately with the diluting of the franchise via frequent releases and the fact that the game looked identical to the first two on the box, it just didn’t hold players’ interest.
Now & Then: Resident Evil 2
Now & Then is different from both a retrospective and a review. It tackles games you probably already know and is a place for gamers to discuss these games. Below is an overview of a game’s presence in the market then and now. Authors of these articles share their personal experience, so we encourage all of you to do the same in the comments.
Resident Evil 2 (RE2) hit the market with a steep price; like other series favorite RE4, this title was scrapped and redone after it was more than 60 percent complete. In order to keep hype and demand strong for the series after the extremely popular original, the sequel began production one month after the release of Resident Evil. This first version, dubbed Resident Evil 1.5 by Capcom when production stills and videos released, featured a similar plot without crisscrossing paths. Leon was still the male protagonist and Elza, a motorcyclist college student, as an early version of what would eventually become Claire Redfield. Graphically the game was much uglier, looking the same (or worse) than the original, but only so that more zombies could appear on-screen. In 1.5 Umbrella had already closed down, the outbreak still occurred, and the police station looked a lot more modern. Players could equip different clothing, which changed their appearance (as did combat damage). There were also many more survivors for players to encounter along the way, some of which played new roles in the final version of RE2. Producer Shinji Mikami scrapped the project when it was near beta (60-80 percent completion) because he found gameplay and locations to be “dull and boring”¹. Originally the series was supposed to end with the sequel, but supervisor Yoshiki Okamoto wanted a more open-ended series. As a result Elza became Claire Redfield to connect to the first game and the plot was made more big budget movie style to get Capcom to the 2 million copy sales goal. Graphics were updated, adding more polygons to each character, and items were made much more scarce to increase tension and fear. Since it would miss the planned early 1997 release date, the Resident Evil: Director’s Cut and Complete Edition were released instead and included a demo of RE2.
Now & Then: Resident Evil
Now & Then is different from both a retrospective and a review. It tackles games you probably already know and is a place for gamers to discuss these games. Below is an overview of a game’s presence in the market then and now. Authors of these articles share their personal experience, so we encourage all of you to do the same in the comments.
“You have once again entered the world of survival horror…”
Those famous words set up a genre that has undergone more definitions than probably any other in video games. Depending on your personal taste in titles, survival horror can mean different things but it was used first and defined by Resident Evil¹. This game was basically a haunted house brought to life and has spawned a series that many gamers, myself included, follow endlessly. Despite the direction of the series not holding well with fans of the originals and a slew of poorly made films, Resident Evil lingers on, if only in our nostalgic minds.
Gaming History 101 