Sunday, February 1, 2015

Playing PS1 Classics on the PS3..... The Good, the Bad, and the SURPRISINGLY SLOOOOOW

     Everyone knows my love for retro games. I am particularly fond of the systems I grew up on as a child and played into and shortly after my high school years. Namely the NES, Genesis, Playstation 1 and PS2. Of course I played Mr. Woodgrain himself the Atari, and many of my friends in Elementary School had the SNES , which made for great sleepovers as we would bring our respective systems and games and play the gems we didn't get too on an everyday basis. I also had a Gameboy (won during the launch contest  where Nintendo partnered with Pepsi to give them out to lucky cola drinkers under the lids of 2 liter bottles (a great memory of winning I will have to write in a later post) and I even had a Game Gear, the beauty of having divorced parents at Christmas :)....... I still collect for these systems and have some of my original consoles from those many years ago. The cartridges all work amazingly well for their age, with many still holding their saves even though the battery backup should have died long long ago.
     Now I admit as a kid, I was always into more the action genre, fighting games, platformers, anything with bright colors and cool graphics. But as I got older and received my first CD based system the Sony Playstation, I started to take the games more seriously and become more engrossed in their stories. This most certainly had to do with my age as the PSOne came out when I was a teenager, and I worked at a comic book/hobby shop, where wonderful stories of all kinds where at my fingertips to read, or with a simple bag of dice in my head to act out . What I am getting at is story became really important and although I had tried several RPGs before, as I've said before FF7 turned me into a lifelong fan of the genre. Here's where I start to get into my problem, solution, then problem with the solution....
     While I still collect cd/dvd/br based games, that dread two words that put fear in any gamer have started to creep into my collection....... thats right.... DISK ROT! A perfectly fine copy of Chrono Cross sits on my shelf, besides some scratches on the case it is in remarkable condition. However when it starts your in for a roll of the dice as it may freeze before game play starts, it may freeze less than a minute in, it may wait till you engage in the first battle, but most of the time not very much longer before it simply freezes. I have gotten lucky twice and played between 45 minutes to about an hour before it froze, but it finally did as soon as I got my hopes up that I may have beaten the CURSE!
     The disk media is dying, and honestly I can not figure out how to save it, as other collectors have spoken themselves that there is no real rhyme or reason to it, climate can effect it but even then if a disk decides to start breaking down it will, and once it does we have lost that ability to play these games on their original hardware. I think if you can prove you have a real copy of such a game that Sony should provide you with a free backup copy to play on your PS3 or PS4 at your leisure, but this presents my next problem.
     Having finally bought a used PS3 after the 4 came out, I have been really surprised by how much I enjoy it, and was able to pick up on the games much quicker and less frustrated than I had expected. I started slowly buying games I had heard where good, with deep stories and easy to pick up ,hard to master game mechanics. A collector always looking for a deal, it wasn't long before I had games like Last of Us for 10 bucks, the Mass Effect Trilogy for 15, and some quality titles from all different genres in my collection. They where great, hell are great, it doesn't mean I am gonna rush out and buy a PS4 (why should I, I have years of PS3 games to catch up on) but I still wanted to play those games from the past, and not have to go threw the hassle of HOPING they would play, and the let down when they didn't.
     So when I started really downloading a lot from the PSstore after a HD upgrade gave me the extra space, I was surprise dto find many many of my favorite titles really cheap. Even cheaper after I joined PS Plus which for a gamer on a budget is quite a great bargain.
    SO I jumped in head first and purchased two games I had played but never had gotten to finish over the years, and one game I wanted to play simply because I had part two  as a physical copy for the PS2. Those games are Chrono Trigger PSOne version, Final Fantasy 9 (probably the MOST CRIMINALLY OVERLOOKED entry into the FF series) and Grandia 1 , which was a must since part 2 is begging me to play it, but my OCD forces me to play part 1 first. 
     I ADMIT, I have never owned Chrono Trigger before..... I was a Genesis kid what can I say, and I never even played the many remakes except for short sessions at friends or families houses. But whats the use in playing an RPG at a friends house, your only going to get started when you have to quit, and the odds of your saved game being there next time you visit are slim to none. So  YES    I emulated it instead of paying the war ransom prices it fetches online now days. I played both the SNES version and the PS version on emulators and besides the slightly fuzzy cutscenes that were par for the course in the 90's,  found both versions ran well, and played spot on (and that is saying something for the PS version since my computer is slightly older and some games run a little slow on PSX, the emulator I use)
     Needless to say I xpected these games to run with hardly any load times, andwith the picture as clear as possible considering the resolution each game ran in and the differences in tv's and resolutions between then and now. I admit, the picture was fine, actually better than anormal PS2 hooked up to my tv for the most part, but what really baffled me where the loading times. Grandia seamed close to the original PS loading times, faster onsome parts but the area changes seamed about the same amount of time, FF9 seamed slightly slower all the way around with load times but the most anoying being the load times for battles and just HOW EXTREMELY FUUUUUUCKING SLOOOOOW the battles could be. I loved FF9.  And I thought maybe my nostalgia is getting the best of me and it was this slow before but I just never noticed. Thats when I took a old, dusty, beat up PS ONe frome my shelf and saw for myself......... low and behold I was right, it was slower on certain parts.
     But the one game that really really just aggravated the shit out of me has been Chrono....... DON'T GET ME WRONG! I love the story, the sprites, the combat, the everything ! Its a classic as we all know, NOT WORTH THE FIRST BORN CHILD YOU WOULD HAVE TO SELL FOR A BOXED COPY! but certainly one of the best RPG's ever made nomatter which era . But a PS version, of a SNES game..... you would think it would run spot on, with no real loading at all, it should basically be the SNES version with cutscenes, no loading times, no awkward stopping and stuttering of the sprites or animation, no 5 or 10 seconds of the enemies mid movement frozen with dumb stares before they finally finish their last few frames of animation and a battle begins. How is this possible? At first I chalked it up to emulation, but then I thought.... "wel I emulate this game, on a much less powerful machine than a PS3, and it plays much faster" thats when I become STUMPED!...... I'm sure there is some extremely technically feasible reason for it, but like all tech problems, with a little ingenuity and outside the box thinking, they can be fixed in no time.
     With such a beloved RPG, and one that without a doubt PSN has sold thousands of copies of to people eager to play a copy they feel they OWN even if its just 0's and 1's...... you would think Sony would put a little more effort forward and show their customers they are not just there to shovel whatever port is most convenient out the door and we customers can take it or leave it. And lets face it.....most of us have to take it, its that or emulation, our HOBBY HAS BEEN USURPED! It has grown from a thing of passion , to a thing of greed, where resellers prowl their flee markets snatching every good game from unsuspecting people, and jacking up the prices far higher than the rarity of the game calls for. So guys like me only pick up a game here or there, whenever we find that diamond in the rough for a decent price. So we are forced to download, and play these games that look so familiar, that sound so familiar, that almost take us to a time that seams sooooo familiar, but make us shake our head in pain........ because they aren't what we remember.