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The PlayStation Turns 20
An anonymous reader writes: The 3rd of December marks an auspicious date in gaming history: 20 years ago today, the very first PlayStation went on sale in Japan. In that time, Sony has successfully muscled its way into the gaming scene, and seen off a few rivals as well. In a new retrospective, a writer looks back at how Sony's console series has changed gaming, from introducing the DVD and the Blu-ray disc to innovations like the second screen PocketStation and the still untapped power of Remote Play and Gaikai game streaming.
innovations like the second screen PocketStation
Not only was PocketStation released after Sega's VMU, it doesn't even function as a second screen. Both devices plug into the memory card slot, but while the Dreamcast's memory card slot is in the controller (which makes the screen usable while playing games), the PlayStation's memory card slot is in the console.
Nice try attempting to rewrite history in Sony's favor.
innovations like the second screen PocketStation and the still untapped power of Remote Play and Gaikai game streaming.
The PocketStation was never released outside Japan and most playstation owners have likely never even heard of it, let alone have made use of it. And when you go in to "still untapped power", you venture deep into slashvertisement territory.
I know there are tons of Sony fanboys here on slashdot, but this is a bit absurd.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The only real reason to celebrate the Playstation is that it dramatically increased the average age of gamers, which is definitely a positive thing.
All those 10-year-olds in the 1990's who got a Playstation for Christmas are now playing video games in their 30's. Yeah, whatever. I got an Atari 2600 in the 1980's and I'm still playing video games in my 40's. We played our video games with ONE JOYSTICK and ONE RED BUTTON!
Companies thought they could put out anything that was vaguely a game, regardless of quality and fun level, and people would buy it.
Having worked in the video game industry for six years, nothing has changed.
Yeah. Great. Now instead of having all sorts of interesting platformers, side-scollers, RPGs, etc, etc, etc. with a wide range of innovative and interesting gameplay mechanics, I can now choose between 10,000 slightly different versions of "run around shooting people in 3D" with various different graphics slapped on. What progress.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Did it really increase the gamer's age? or is that just a function of.. time?
I'm 32. I got an NES in 2nd grade at age 7. After playing video games for so many years, buying a PS4 or Xbox doesn't seem that outlandish.
But to a to a 32 year old back in 198x (or earlier for atari, etc) -- lacking that familiarity with video games and not spending gobs of their formative years zombifying themselves in front of a console, would they have been quite as inclined to purchase an NES or atari?
Sure the games are less kid oriented now, but that's only part of it.
Well, you should stop hating, it's no good for your heart. I don't buy Sony hardware anymore (except for gaming stuff ) because the quality of their products has decreased dramatically these last years. But I have to admit that the PS (portable and "desktop") is a neat piece of hardware, despite of their stupid content delivery policies and stuff like making proprietary memory cards for the PS Vita. PS is a classical example of good engineering and broken management.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
We played our video games with ONE JOYSTICK and ONE RED BUTTON!
You had a joystick *and* a button? Luxury! I used to *dream* of having a joystick. I only had a disconnected joystick cable and I'd control it by making the connections with my tongue.
And the button wire was missing. And I didn't have any games. Or a computer.
But you know, I were happy in those days, even though I was poor.
(FWIW, I was still using that type of one-button Atari-format joystick on my Amiga until the mid-90s when the Amiga died altogether as a mainstream format and I was losing interest in games anyway. That was probably the point at which the "classic" one-button 9-pin Atari stick died(?); I don't count the Mega Drive/Genesis controller, as that had three buttons even though it used the 9-pin Atari connector and was sort-of-compatible).
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You can fit a lot of savegames on a memory card.
Not on the original PS1 memory card. It was like using floppy disks again, since the official PS1 memory card held 128kB of data, divided into 15 8kB blocks. Many games required more than one block, meaning that if you had a bunch of games that needed to save, and a household with more than one user, you needed a lot of memory cards, or a "super" memory card. I had one which was 2MB I think, divided into 16 128k "pages." Buttons on the memory card itself selected what page was active and would be read by the playstation. I have not-so-fond memories of corrupted memory cards (the non-Sony ones were problematic) and of using the PS1 interface to copy saved game data between cards.