I have the exact same walkman, and I played around with a bunch of other options in store before settling on it. TBH the UI in comparably priced units with nice audio is even worse, or the whole thing runs Android and I just can’t trust that not to screw something up.
Even more fun is the whole thing is in Japanese only because the JDM model doesn’t support other languages.
I really thought about getting an old ipod, which had a simple but slick interface, and replacing the hard drive with a large SD card but having an externally accessible SD card was more important than the UI being slow and janky.
I don’t know that the same can be said of the PS classic. There are so many better options available today, most of which don’t cost as much.
The PlayStation Classic is a neat collector’s item that will look great on a shelf in your games room, but it’s a much more attractive ornament than it is a viable gaming system.
Ha, maybe they’re onto something here: Sony should have just made Christmas tree (Festivus Pole) ornaments shaped like an og PS1. Priced $99 still.
Half the games will still be 50hz though! Will be interesting to see what the SOC is, could be it just isn’t good enough to run PCSX-R if they are getting these performance issues.
Of course I have no real idea, but the unspotted this in the Eurogamer review:
PAL games also tended to feature obtrusive black borders at the top and bottom of the screen (the PAL system does have a higher resolution than NTSC, but it’s only rarely utilised) but at least the PlayStation Classic clears this up, resizing the output to full resolution at the proper aspect ratio.
They’re wrong there saying ‘resized to full resolution’.
PAL games never had lower resolution than NTSC, in fact often they were higher res (in 2D games they had extra tiles, 3D games could be rendered at higher res). It’s just that they had the aspect squashed if the same number of lines were sent to a PAL field, as it had extra lines spare.
This is one of those Sony things where the curtain gets pulled back on how they really operate IMO. They aspire to be like Nintendo in the videogame business and so try to copy or one up their stuff. Only when they do, they forget that Nintendo iterates behind closed doors over and over until they have the right product and not just something half-assed to fill a space.
Yeah, Nintendo makes mistakes too and there are examples where something was rushed or hubris had them believing something would connect better than it did, but even then the quality of that product is of a level that you can’t just discount it completely. It still works correctly which this device from all accounts simply doesn’t.
Realistically though they know it doesn’t matter. People will buy it. Most won’t notice it’s a mess and those that do won’t really care enough to skip PS5.
This is really what separates Nintendo from the other companies. Sega, Microsoft and Sony have all had their unreliable machines. Nintendo has consistently produced hardware that is a step above everything else on the market. They have also made get little large software mistakes. For the most part, their systems are reliable, stable, and easy to use (if a little simplified and locked down).
In the case of the Wii U, they had a pretty large marketing misstep, but the machine enjoys a pretty great cult following.
With this product, Sony has seemingly got the hardware in check (yet to be seen, really), but they are failing in the software HARD.
Can pops do save states? As I can see that as a feature they were making sure the system had to match the features of the Nintendo classics and why they went with the open source emulator. If that is the case then it could be a hardware issue at running the emulator that also caused them to run the 50hz versions of some games if the 60hz versions were too demanding.
Just some random thoughts I was having to try to explain the choices made. Still puzzling to me since the vita tv was $100 years ago and runs ps1 stuff fine, though it may have been sold with less/no profit with the profit being in software/memory cards.
That’s the thing, though. If there are hardware reasons for picking the 50hz versions, then you screwed up and you have to hold onto this product for awhile until you can do it right. There’s no point poisoning the well like this, which is what Sony never understands as a company.
To put a finer point on it, Nintendo would have sat on it until they could do it right. Sony just doesn’t care about that.
Reggie just told us that the NES Classic was created specifically to get them through that holiday season where Wii U was essentially done. They weren’t going to push through a lot of Wii U systems when Switch was four months away. Despite that, they locked down a really good selection of the right games from their partners and internally and made sure it was a product people wanted. They did so damn good with it that it’s now a major part of the business since they’re selling both NES an SNES Classics alongside the Switch! They might’ve done TOO well!
Sony can’t figure that out. They didn’t need a PlayStation Classic this holiday season, and when you see the quality of the product, it looks even more cynical and cash grab oriented than it seemed when it was announced and they hid the full list of games! I mean, damn, even they knew that the lineup wasn’t very good!
Well yeah. I’m just trying to think of actual reasons behind the poor choices that arn’t “the pal games came up first on the download list”, which is all I could think of before.
Aside from that it is clear that this was an fast attempt to cash in on the classic console popularity and it may be argued that they did in fact “need” it this holiday season, or rather that was the executive mandate. I think that is pretty obvious since even when it was announced it was so early that they didn’t even have a game list to go with it. The people that were actually working on it made do with the time they had is a good explanation for the poor quality, though not an excuse. I can easily see how both a deadline on the release (the holiday season) and feature checklist (save state) could have let to the product we got even with the best of intentions. I mean the fucking thing looks and feels exactly like how I want it to right down to the menus (though they could have offered the other ps1 menu styles as options you could switch to as well).
And yeah, the well poisoning is real as well. From the same aspect of me no longer caring about any Sega mini console untill they prove they care enough to do it justice to a few additional ones. Like the game choice already plays into the point of view that the PS1 era of games age badly/were all early 3d with nothing unique past that/are clunky and control poorly.
It is literally impossible to make everyone happy with the game choice or to even hit enough of the games that represented the generation to everyone but they could have made more of an effort with some of the more timeless stuff. Games like Tomba/Megaman Legends/Parappa could have provided more examples of unique experiences that had unique styles. Clearly there are reasons for the omission of some of the bigger staples, remasters and all, but there is a lot they could have pulled from.
I hope that this doesn’t kill the effort completely since I do like these classic consoles and am still interested in a better version of a PS1 Classic.