A Gaming Diary
PSP
WipEout Pure (PSP)
Jun 24th
Just to check that it was WipEout being too hard and not me being too rubbish, I dug this out. I started it up, selected a race and won it. (I’d played about five or six races in WipEout and come last in all of them.) Tried another race, a class up, and won that. Tried another race… and got blown up while I was about sixth with only about half a lap to go. Still, yes, WipEout Pure is much, much easier and a better game for it.
Also, I thought WipEout wasn’t looking too bad for its age, and maybe it’s not, but the difference when I started up WipEout Pure was amazing. It looks incredible. We’ve come a long way.
WipEout (PS3/PSP)
Jun 24th
Even Sony don’t seem to know if it’s WipEout or WipeOut or whatever. I’ll stick with WipEout, as it’s the stupidest way of spelling it.
Anyway, this is unplayable. It’s not bad, not at all, it’s just way, way, way, way, way too hard and the only reason it took off must because the graphics and sound were so amazing at the time that people were prepared to put the time in to learn to play the game properly.
It was a different time back then, eh?
Crash Bandicoot (PS3/PSP)
Jun 24th
Looks much better on the PSP screen than on the PS3. There’s something odd about on the PS3, as if the colour and contrast are turned up way too much, or something.
Anyway, what’s it like to play? Well, it’s a bit rubbish. Certainly not unplayable, but it’s very unfair and the controls don’t quite work. Still, it kept me playing for quite a while, so it has got something, even now.
Jumping Flash (PSP)
Jun 23rd
Hooray! World 3′s boss finally fell.
Unfortunately, I’m now stuck on level 4-1. The exit doesn’t appear to exist.
Jumping Flash (PSP)
Jun 23rd
A slight problem. The boss of World 3 is quite hard and losing all your lives dumps you back at the beginning of the first level of the world. Which is a bit annoying.
Jumping Flash (PS3/PSP)
Jun 23rd
There are now some classic Playstation games available to download from the Playstation Store. Three so far, in fact. WipEout, Crash Bandicoot and Jumping Flash. I’m tempted to give Crash a go, as I never did play more than the demo, back in the day. WipEout is quite tempting, too, but I fear it will have aged very, very badly.
Jumping Flash, though, I like. I grabbed a second hand copy a couple of years ago and enjoyed it, so I knew it still stood up today. Graphically, it’s really quite nasty technically, though there’s some charm to the design. The controls could do with some updating now we have two sticks. But the core jumping gameplay still stands up pretty well.
There aren’t many first-person platform games and jumping bits in first person shooters tend to be rubbish, so this still feels different, twelve years later.
I wish I’d known that to save my game I had to create a virtual memory card before playing, though. Didn’t take me very long to do World 1 a second time, though.
After playing it on the PS3, I decided to try it on the PSP. Took a while to get it copied across – you need to use a cable and I had to update my PSP’s firmware – but I got there in the end. Looks much nicer on the small PSP screen, but the d-pad isn’t quite as good, which meant I had to do some readjusting.
Also, there doesn’t seem to be any way to keep save files in sync between PS3 and PSP, which is odd. I thought the idea was that you could play the game on your PS3 and then take it with you when you’re gallivanting about town, so I might be missing something.
Anyway, hopefully more people will discover Jumping Flash now it’s on the Playstation Store. I’m not sure it quite deserves full “lost classic” status, but it is an interesting and entertaining trip down one of gaming’s evolutionary cul-de-sacs.
MLB 07 The Show (PSP)
May 27th
Well, MLB 08 The Show should be fantastic.
This almost is – I’ve just started playing and the only reason I’ve stopped is that my PSP battery has run down – but it’s spoiled by some very rough edges. I’m playing The Road to the Show mode, where you create a played and play as that player alone. I’m a second baseman on the Braves and I hit when it’s my turn, control my baserunning and if the ball comes near me when I’m playing defense I’ll have to get the ball and throw it. The rest of the game isn’t shown – it just jumps to those moments where I’ve got something to do.
It’s almost great.
The first trouble is the load times. They are truly atrocious and quite possibly the worst I’ve seen yet on the PSP. You simply can’t just sit down and play this game. You need something on TV to watch while it loads, or a magazine, or some cake, or something.
The second problem is that there’s not a lot of feedback. If you go for a double play when you’re fielding then you’ll know if you got the first out, but not the second. Without pausing the game and waiting for a text display to scroll across the screen you won’t know whether the last pitch was a ball or a strike while you’re on base. (This may possibly be better with sound, but I’ve been playing with sound off and I think all handheld games that aren’t music-based should be designed with silent play in mind.)
The third problem is that sometimes rules don’t seem to be applied properly and now and again the post-game box score won’t agree with what’s displayed on your stats for that game. I’m sure I’ve had a run credited before that shouldn’t have counted and in my last game the box score said I had an RBI, but the summary screen after that said I hadn’t. Odd.
Still, despite all those problems, it is incredibly addictive. The PS3 version might fix a lot of these flaws and be a good buy and, as I said, MLB 08 should be great. They can’t keep those load times in the next version, they just can’t.
Test Drive Unlimited (PSP)
May 22nd
This is now starting to get tricky. Either that or I’m just rubbish tonight.
Test Drive Unlimited (PSP)
May 11th
I’ve just driven around the island for seventy miles or so looking for a Class C car to buy. Finally settled on some sort of Aston Martin, which seems okay. I need to do a for more challenges before I can be sure.
Anyway, yes, I just wanted to point how odd it is to spend an evening just driving round an island looking for a new car – and to enjoy it.
