PSone – Los Havros

Retro Gaming Memories: Gran Turismo

: Image via Wikipedia

I’d like to share with you some memories of gaming days gone by, when times were simpler, and true 3D gaming was a novelty…

Schoolboy shenanigans

In the mid 90s, I’ll always remember finishing school on a Friday, and spending it with my mate. First, I’d go out with him and help him do his paper round, munching on some sweets we’d got at the newsagents. Later on we’d fire up the PlayStation (original) and play Gran Turismo- with a difference.

We weren’t gamblers by any stretch of the imagination, but we’d place ‘penny bets’ on each race which made things interesting. Every so often we would up the stakes by placing all or nothing bets on one race. In times like those, it felt like the world was on my shoulders- if I lost, I could end up losing as much as 50 pence! But I digress…

Ready, steady, go

For a young lad then, Gran Turismo was a slice of gaming heaven. You had gorgeous 3D graphics, with hundreds of cars rendered beautifully. And they were fast. That’s what mattered. But the Gran Turismo series heralded more than just racing, it brought out the whole ‘driving experience’. The music was perfect; it varied between being fast and satisfying, to having some haunting melodies. Just thinking about it is sending shivers down my spine.

They say the car’s the star, but the racing tracks were equally impressive. Each track became a thing of legend; Trial Mountain, Grand Valley Speedway, and Deep Forest Raceway to name a few. Sure, the AI was a bit unforgiving as they never made mistakes, just following their own perfect racing line flawlessly. Quite a strong constrast to AI behaviour in the games of today such as Race Rriver: GRID in which yes, your competitors can and do make mistakes.

Everyone will remember saving up and buying their first car. The patience required to hold off on any rash purchases, holding out for the high-end model that you really wanted. I would be doing Gran Turismo a disservice if I didn’t mention the detailed customisations you could make to your car: fitting turbos, racing chips, choosing the right tires and tweaking the suspension. This was to many people, including myself, a level of detailed never seen before in a racing game. But Gran Turismo was never just another racing game, was it? It was the real driving simulator.

A vintage

So, do I think that Gran Turismo has aged well? Of course it has. It is a classic game that showed everyone just what a driving game could be. The series has gone from strength to strength, gathering new fans with each successive game. Whilst I do admit to prefering to sample the delights of Collin McRae: DiRT, and Race Driver: GRID for my driving fix these days, I will always look back on my gaming memories with Gran Turismo fondly.

Do you have any retro gaming memories that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear your stories!

My experience with the PlayStation Store (PC)

This post was originally written on the City In The Clouds blog.

This isn’t a review or an in-depth analysis. I just liked to get that out of the way before dispensing with some brief and concise thoughts and opinions on the availability of the PlayStation Store on the PC. Shall we begin?

Firstly, the availability of the PlayStation Store on the PC is very welcome. I had been growing increasingly frustrated that only PS3 users were able to download PSone games to their PSP. Now that the store is here though, I find my thoughts on it somewhat divided.

Whilst I now don’t feel as much as a second class PSP citizen (due to not owning a PS3), I have to admit that the site runs like Linford Christie… slipping on a banana skin. That’s just not well at all, if you need telling. It is sooo slow, which is unbelievable. Neither am I keen on the design- looks almost crude, if that makes sense.

Buying games is easy enough, if you have already have a PlayStation account. As is the download process to your PSP which is done via a special PSP download client. The other content is free, but sparse. That goes for the store as a whole (in the UK anyway), in that there is not really much there. Simply put more on there and the people will come. The store has great potential, I figure it just needs time for more content, but to be honest this should have been available a lot sooner.

The games are a different matter; I have purchased one PSP game and an original PSone game. My conclusions? Find out next time…

New slim line PSP info-splurge(tm) and critique

This post was originally written on the City In The Clouds blog.

It is slimmer, lighter, loads games faster (due doubling the RAM) and outputs video to TV screens etc..

But what about the owners of existing PSPs though? Sure, you had the PSone redesign and the PS2 redesign but this is a substantial change. All’s the PS2 redesign did was slim the unit down, add networking and get rid of the (mostly) unused hard drive expansion bay.

So, what makes the PSP so different? Well, this time Sony makes software updates as well to its systems. Take Sony’s upcoming 3.60 firmware upgrade for the PSP- all the features I’ve seen so far are just for the slimmer PSP (mainly due to the new hardware) like UMD-caching, and options for outputting video. I suppose my argument is what if Sony only creates more firmware updates for the slimmer PSP or possibly even hardware that is only compatible with the new PSP? Maybe unthinkable, but surely possible.

In the past, hardware revisions weren’t much of a problem, but now major new features are being incorporated into software updates (via firmware). Is it really fair to (pardon my upcoming language) shaft current hardware owners in this way? I think Microsoft has done well in this regard with its Xbox 360 revisions.