G-pinions

The next generation retro gaming battle has finally begun. Microsoft started dumping crap from the late '70s on us last year and gamers resisted. It was a valiant effort on their part to attract an audience that doesn't play First Person Shooters, but I have no interest in Joust or Robotron. A year later, Nintendo has followed suit. Though they have actual games in their library to release, they are holding them all back for a rainy day while they milk gamers $5 at a time with Pinball and Soccer. Clearly, we need someone to intervene. Surely Sony must have a better plan to introduce their own classic games, right? They don't have anything approaching Nintendo's catalog of hits, but they've been doing this for 10 years already. They can still save us, right?

Yes and no. As far as games go, the initial offering of PlayStation One titles is both less entertaining than Nintendo's VC games and in even shorter supply. When the highlight of your five released games is Crash Bandicoot, well, you have some issues. But Sony has done something quite admirable. They are only charging $6 for these games. To compare, Nintendo is charging $5 for NES games, $6 for TG-16 games, $8 for SNES and Genesis games, and $10 for N64 games. The PSX lineup may not has aged as gracefully as the SNES library, but $6 versions of Jumping Flash and Twisted Metal 2 sound incredibly temping to me.

I honestly can't believe Sony has gone the cheap route with their downloadable titles. Their online service may be piss poor, but they aren't charging people so much as a dime to play online. They aren't even pushing nominal upgrades for their PS3 games. There is no Horse Armor or overpriced, relit maps available for purchase. As far as I can tell, Sony is not nickel and diming consumers at all. The console may cost $600, but everything else is either free or cheaper than the competition. I am floored. And, if you look at the picture located just below this paragraph, it seems like Sony is actually offering the occasional online deal as well. $2 off an original title for a limited time sounds like a fantastic idea to me.



Sony has had a lot of problems in the early going for their new uber-console. And it should be noted that these PSX games can only be played on your PSP right now, though that should be amended at some point. However, it is nice to see signs of improvement. Sony has a lot of ground to make up and I honestly don't know how they will ever manufacture enough systems to overtake the Wii, but this is at least a hint of what we can expect in the future. MS and Nintendo were content releasing old games for way too much money. Sony, as the reigning market leader, may be able to bring a little order to this chaos. We'll have to see what happens in the coming years, but I can't imagine Sony will allow EA to rape consumers with $50 worth of microtransactions for lame racing games. It almost feels like the parents had been gone for a weekend and the kids have thrown a disastrous party. A little discipline is just what this next generation of gaming needed