Mini Consoles: PlayStation Classic Dream Line Up

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Players

Squidge

Jay

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Content Warning

At 1 hour 3 minutes and 3 seconds, Squidge says:

Hard as balls

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

In a similar vein to our recent episodes

both 68 and 69

in which we covered the Mega Drive Mini, we decided to talk about the PlayStation Classic.

We have the same basic challenge from last time, with one change:

Jay:

Imagine that you have an unlimited budget (to deal with licensing issues), go through the games on the Mega Drive Mini and replace the ones that you’ll never play with ones from your dream line up

We originally decided to do a few episodes on the mini consoles because of the recent blog posts that I’d written on them

in case you’re wanting to read what I had to say about them, click here for those blog posts

and, just like in that series of blog posts, we decided to start off with a quick description of the hardware used in the PlayStation Classic. Hardware which proves that Sony had phoned this project in. The other reason that we wanted to do this is because the Arcade Attack folks

them again?!

had recently released an episode (which had been recorded quite a while back) where they discussed the PlayStation Classic. In fact, they had recorded their episode only days after the initial announcement, but had waited until Jan 8th, 2020 to release it.

they haven’t added show notes to their site for this episode, so I can only link to the episode directly: here

As a quick reminder, the PlayStation Classic has a MediaTek MT8167a SoC with a Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A35, which was the same SoC in the Lenovo Tab 7 Essential and the Acer Iconia One 10. For those who aren’t hardware heads, this essentially means that the hardware isn’t strong enough to emulate the PlayStation for this form factor.

But do you know what is strong enough? The SNES Mini, which was released 2 years prior.

50Hz (PAL) vs 60Hz (NTSC)

Because it’s important to have a visual for the point that I raised about how some of the games on the PlayStation Classic run and 50Hz and some of them run at 60 Hz, here’s a comparison video of the original Sonic The Hedgehog running in both modes:

And just to drive the point home, here’s a comparison of how the original PlayStation handled that difference:

On The Resident Evil Director’s Cut Dual Shock Soundtrack

During this episode, Jay brings up the story of the composer of the soundtrack for Resident Evil Director’s Cut Dual Shock - a guy called Mamoru Samuragochi. The story of this guy is fascinating, and you should totally go read his wikipedia entry. But the following set of tweets from Jay provide a condensed version of the story that he wanted to tell on the pod:

Due to the recent changes at Twitter, we are unable to embed tweets at this time. We apologise for the inconvenience.

The whole thread is worth reading through, for sure.

Our Dream PlayStation Classic Line Up

If you want to skip over the content of the episode

which I wouldn’t recommend

I’ve added a table here, which shows off each of our dream line ups for the PlayStation Classic.

Honourable Mentions

Jay didn’t have any honourable mentions, but Squidge had two:

• Parasite Eve 2
• Battle Arena Toshinden

Extra Stuff

When we brought up Soul Edge, we talked about when we’d talked about a time when Squidge whooped Stormin’ Norm’s butt at this game. That episode was episode 47 The Cupboard of Shame with G. Also, be sure to check out Jay’s blog post on the Parasite Eve novel

the PlayStation game was a direct sequel to the movie, which was a badly told version of the novel

as we’ll be revisiting the Parasite Eve series soon. And because you’ve been lovely and stuck around for so long, here’s the promised Opera Scene

the scene which stopped the game from getting a release in the UK, back in the day

from Parasite Eve:

One last video to share: videogamedunkey explains the entire Metal Gear series

and I joked that Kojima lost his mind after making Metal Gear Solid

What would your dream line up for the PlayStation Classic look like? Is it the default set of games, does it look like ours, is it completely different? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook, we really want to know.

External Links of Interest

• Support us on Ko-Fi
• Our Facebook page
• Us on Twitter
• Bonus Podcast: PlayStation Classic Wrongness
• Parasite Eve – I Got Science In My Fiction
• Mamoru Samuragochi on wikipedia
• Arcade Attack Podcast - Lost Games: Thrill Kill (PS1)

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

• Intro music is Behind the Lines by Ian Sutherland
• Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
• Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
• Outro Music is I N e e d Y o u 私の側て by G.H (removed from BandCamp)