It could be an oddity of the PS1 BC on PS2.
My understanding is that the PS2’s Graphics Synthesiser emulates the PS1 GTE functions which can lead to differences from real hardware. This could be an edge case due to your motherboard revision or as you said it could be the combination with your monitor.
PS1 hdmi:
some updates from the twitter convo:
no cut
uses serial port
PSIO compatible
not PSOne compatible
I’m not sure where we’re at with self promo, but I wrote a 20th anniversary retrospective of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for EGMNOW that I think a lot of you might like to read.
Where other games at the time were going big and splashy, Lunar: SSSC maintained the roots planted in the early ’90s Sega CD original—offering a battle system that seemed simple on the surface (each character only had access to a handful of spells/abilities, there were no limit breaks, no splashy animations), but proved to be deep, tough as nails, and, importantly, fast. While many of its contemporaries like Final Fantasy VIII used smoke and mirrors to hide load times as they drew up 3D models, Lunar: SSSC thrust players into the action within seconds, and thanks to a robust auto-battle mechanic they were bashing enemies almost immediately.
It was a real blast to return to Lunar: SSSC, which has been a favourite of mine for the last twenty years. I was concerned that some of Working Designs’ more… eccentric localization decisions might not play well in 2019, but I found that the most egregious stuff was mostly tucked away in optional areas and NPC text, and the main experience/plot was just as warm, heart-filled, and exciting as I remembered. I’m still not a huge fan of how WD increased the grind, which I feel works counter-intuitively against the game’s otherwise sunny tone, but it’s a small complaint in an otherwise amazing game.
Medium promoted this article to me recently. Really enjoyable with lots of great animated GIFs.
It was a shame to see such a push to move away from that kind of style in that generation when it could do it so well. Not to say that their were not some really attractive early 3d stuff but I would have loved to have seen more pixel art games that felt like a direct progression from the 16 bit era.
Great article.
Author posting great content at Twitter
Yes, really good article.
Saga Frontier 2 has been on my radar for a bit, and I can add Breath of Fire IV, and Legend of Mana to that list.
Edit:
I meant to add that GBA, DS, and PSP are where the spiritual successors to 90s era sprite art ended up.
Legend of Mana is such a great game. I really liked it as a teen. It’s actually my favorite Squaresoft game (although my experience with their library is more limited than most).
I appreciate the highlighting the article does, but it seems like revisionist history to me. PlayStation has so few 2D games, and the company actively fought against their release. Celebrating them is ok, but it makes it seem as though PlayStation was some bastion of 2D amazement when the reality is only Sega embraced 32-bit 2D in any meaningful way.
Living through that era, it’s mildly offensive to me, but maybe I’m just more affected by it than most because I wanted so much more 2D 32-bit art and games that were made with it…
Good points. And maybe I’m misremembering, but wasn’t Sony’s anti-2d stance at the time one of the causes of Working Designs folding?
It wasn’t the cause of the company’s demise but it was a source of major friction that did start that ball rolling and it’s why they published on Saturn to start the 32-bit gen. They had to wait for Bernie Stolar to leave Sony (and ironically he went to Sega… one of Sega’s biggest missteps of the time) to even start publishing anything. Sony under Stolar did not want RPGs or 2D at all. They were adamantly against anything 2D in the US, which is why Gunner’s Heaven and Hermie Hopperhead, games that were praised in the pages of Gamefan and shown on the page linked above, never even made it to the US.
I’m sure in 2020 that anyone born after that era can’t really appreciate just how disappointing it was to see so many games left in Japan. Both Sega and Sony actively fought the western release of games that would have greatly expanded their libraries and their appeal. It was maddening for those of us who just wanted to play the games, and I wasn’t rich enough to buy the imports at the time either.
I agree the article is great in that it celebrates 32bit 2D, but don’t like that it totally ignores what was happening on Saturn at the time. Heck, Neo Geo also had some 2D capabilities that the PS1 did not and got new games during that entire generation too, and is also completely ignored. PS1, as much as we love it, was hardly a pre-eminent place to experience those types of games.
I was thinking the same but the author does somehow account for ignoring that side of video game history by pointing out that a lot of the improvements weren’t down to the PS1 but down to the maturation of the use of pixel art at the time (this was indeed the case with Game Boy Advance and DS games that used pixel art, and 3DS games like Mario & Luigi Dream Team, which had pixel art on par with Breath of Fire IV).
It would be nice to see post-Super Famicom pixel art celebrated beyond the PS1 for sure. Especially on handhelds which are generally overlooked in video game history terms. Nintendo R&D’s last games (Fire Emblem 6, Wario Land 4) are outstanding, as was Alphadream’s work to name just two developers using the medium on platforms keeping it alive.
In fairness the article does mention the anti-2D stance and notes games that were only released outside the USA because of this. But yeah I think it’s a bit of a blinkered view without taking into account Saturn etc.
They should have just got rid of the word “era” from the title and the article would have been fine, it’s was clearly written with the PS1’s anniversary in mind.
When you take the Japanese library into account are likely just as many 2d titles as on the Saturn, perhaps not as well known or accomplished, but they are there.
Right. Neo Geo was a thing at this time, but I rarely include that in discussions only because it was an arcade machine as far as most people were concerned in the '90s. I was definitely in rare company owning an AES in 1993.
I also agree with @harborline_765 that there’s a whole generation of 2D games on Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS that really hit it out of the park. It’s all part of the marginalization of handheld at that time because I think there was this concerted effort to put PlayStation on a pedestal as “The Right Way To Make Consoles” which frankly continues into 2020.
The Sony name carried so much weight in consumer electronics pre-1995 PlayStation launch that their arrival in the space brought both positives and negatives to gaming as whole. It raised the world’s eyebrow towards gaming being more than a “toy” because of their history as a company while at the same time marginalized the companies who made gaming what it was and often still is today.
Someone could write a book on the psychology of consumers as it pertains to videogames. It’s fascinating (and upsetting) when you look back on the history.
Having sold my PS1 collection many moons ago and always kind of regretted it, I decided to rebuild it recently. This is a surprisingly fun system to collect for if you’re not going after US releases of RPGs; so far I don’t regret not investing in a PSIO setup instead. I spent far too much on a CSYNC cable with Guncon port even though a standard sync on luma cable would be fine and I’ll never use the Guncon port probably but I’m in deep now I guess!
Take a photo of your pick ups!
Will do once everything arrives! Funnily enough it was the PS Classic that instigated this: I got one fairly cheap as a project for one of my days off, modded it with Bleemsync using a USB stick I had lying around and was fairly impressed with things using RetroArch (using anything else has insane input lag) but I wasn’t completely satisfied, mainly with 2D games. I thought about getting a standard model PS1 because then I could upgrade to HDMI and PSIO if I wanted to but it was the PSone that I played the most on bitd and in my experience, it was the only PSX I’ve owned that would reliably read discs and if I am going to be collecting discs well, it just makes sense. If I am going to invest in an HDMI solution I can just do that with my PS2 and the PSIO firmware thing really rubs me up the wrong way anyway.