Last Wednesday Sony announced their small and mighty PlayStation Classic, an homage to the original PlayStation, offering fans a cherry-picked collection of some of the best PlayStation games. Sony confirmed that the 20 titles were chosen for their popularity within the original PlayStation fanbase, however, the title list is tailored to each region. You’ll soon be able to pre-order it here.
These are a few of the confirmed titles:
- Final Fantasy VII
- Jumping Flash
- R4 Ridge Racer Type 4
- Tekken 3
- Wild Arms
While the regional tailoring does make sense on some level, it’s frustrating to think that players from different regions won’t be getting the same experience, especially in a time where region locking is becoming less and less favourable for companies and players alike. People have been complaining about Nintendo’s irritating region locking habit for decades and now more than ever it’s simply seen as an unnecessary barrier between gamers and the games they want to play, especially with the Switch being Nintendo’s first console to banish region locking.
Sony has also confirmed that there will be no games added to the library after the console’s launch and it will have no online capabilities whatsoever, including connections to PSN accounts.
As expected, some Nintendo fans are getting a bit angsty in the wake of Sony’s announcement, seeing it as nothing more than a copy-cat move after the NES Mini’s substantial success. And, with the NES Mini boasting 30 pre-installed games at a £49.99 price point, Sony will really need to nail the PlayStation Classic’s game library to compete with Nintendo.
There have also been suggestions that simply porting these classic PS1 games to the PS4 through some sort of ‘Virtual Console’ platform would have arguably been a better move for Sony, but there’s no doubt that this console will still be in high demand at release.
The PlayStation Classic will retail for £89.99/$99.99 and releases on December 3rd, just in time for Christmas! You’ll want to get your pre-orders in now though because we’re betting this bad boy will disappear quickly
Rosalind Griffiths is a full time gamer, geek and Creative Writing student. Raised on Nintendo, when she’s not earning gold trophies in Mariokart 8 or freshening up in Inkopolis, she’s writing songs/poems/short stories, or watching cartoons and Lets Play videos.