An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.

Post 001: Air Combat, Battle Arena Toshinden

Post 002: ESPN Extreme Games, Kileak: The DNA Imperative

Post 003: NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, Power Serve 3D Tennis, The Raiden Project

Post 004: Rayman, Ridge Racer, Street Fighter: The Movie, Total Eclipse Turbo

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The Sony Playstation launched in North America a little over 9 months after its initial release in japan and about 4 months after the Sega Saturn's North American launch. The 1994 Japan launch was only 3 weeks after Saturn's and it was outsold 500k to 300k. That isn't bad if you look at it as being in a similar tier of upstart consoles as the TurboGrafix and 3DO, but it wasn't the obviously dominate product we all know. By the time we get to 9/9/95, Sony had pulled out all of the stops to make this thing a massive hit in the US. They put their best foot forward at E3 four months earlier, undercut the Saturn on price by $100, and most importantly they supposedly dropped tens of millions of marketing dollars to blanket the youth media in ads.

While I personally would have been turned off by that "edgy" advertising, I guess it was the popular style of the time. This thing sold out the first run of 100,000 units on launch day and permanently made Sega an afterthought in this hemisphere. But what kind of games did this hot new piece of tech actually run?

Of the 11 games (12 when counting The Raiden Project as two separate games) that I am considering as the canonical launch games on the PS1, only Air Combat, Ridge Racer, NBA Jam, and Raiden II can be described as "good" games. The rest are some flavor of crap. Now just because a game is crap doesn't mean it can't be fun and likewise a good game can give no enjoyment whatsoever. As such I ranked the games I have looked at so far by how much I subjectively liked playing them, and I plan to update the list as I go along in this series. I foresee no negative long-term repercussions in doing this.

(The List insert feature isn't working for me, so here's a link to the list)

Of the games on that list, I only really enjoyed the first two, but I also only actively hated the bottom three. The middle six are some variation of a soft pass for me. When I try to look back and think about the value of this line-up and what it would take for me to stab someone for a new game console, I'm having a hard time seeing this as a good deal. The top games on that list are strong rentals at best. Some of them, such as The Raiden Project and Power Serve 3D Tennis, would be complete rip-offs at any conceivable price.

It should be noted that the only games on this list that could have exclusively been found on a Playstation at the time are Kileak ("kih-leek" for anyone who forgot), Power Serve 3D Tennis, and ESPN Extreme Games. That's a dire group of exclusives, but I'm trying to remember to not discount the value of having arcade games available at home so maybe those should count to some degree.

It's impossible to really place myself into the mindset of a hype cycle that I never participated in. The new hotness will always be worth buying for its own innate novelty if anything else. Long term success comes from whether a console can justify itself in whatever "launch window" the buying public will tolerate from it. I'm not going to pretend to be in suspense on the outcome here, because we all know that at some point this thing more than makes the case for its existence, but I can only hope that a few of the games along the way are still any good.

I'll check back in at the end of 1995 with another Round-Up to look at how the first holiday season went for the Playstation.