(This article was originally from my old blog Sega Freaks, which is now dead. I've mysteriously moved it over here to the Junkyard. Whoo~)
I'll apologize right now for that terrible pun but hey, what's this? What are a bunch of Playstation games doing within the collection of anti-Playstation Sega Freak Gagaman's? Well, if you didn't already guess from the title, I finally got some games to try out the Bleem Beta that has been leaked across the net. If you haven't heard of it, it lets you play these ol' games on your Dreamcast, with smoother graphics too. Because it wasn't complete, however, only some games work well whereas others are either riddled with bugs or just give you the black screen of death. And thus the hunt for compatible games begins.
Firstly, how does it work then? Plain simple, it's just a case of disc swapping. Modeled by my cat above, all you need is a copy of the beta burned onto a disc, and any PSX you can find to try out on it. I've never actually owned any PSX games before, due to going with the Saturn for the 32-bit era instead (I don't regret it, the Playstation's games libaury has never really excited me quite as much, and, to my possible mistake, made me buy a Gamecube instead of a PS2, even though hat has turned out to have a lot of interesting games), but luckily the games are as common as muck at bootsales, and can picked up for daft little sums of money. For example, just today I picked up Cool Boarders for 50p, Driver 2 for 25p, and Time Crisis, which I will be demonstrating with, for £1.50). Stick the disc in and this below is what you get.
Here's Time Crisis running on it. I always have loved these games in the arcades, and would even go as far as to say it blows Virtua Cop 2 out of the water. The game runs almost perfectly, except unfortunately it's not compatible with the Dreamcast light-gun, so the controls can be sort of awkward. The other obvious problems is the DC pad lacks three buttons - L2, R2 and Select. For games like Driver 2, it prevents you from getting where you need to, although you can grab a PSX/Saturn controller to DC port off Ebay. The other obvious problem is not being able to save, although luckily that's not such a big deal for arcade titles like Time Crisis anyway. Below is some shots of Cool Borders 2, which doesn't have sound and looks major buggered in any mode other than championship, with textures going mad including black and green snow. Gran Turismo 2 is another game that runs almost perfectly, which is nice.
Ok, so it's a totally geeky and almost pointless way of playing Playstation games, but the games that do work look bloody brilliant, much better than they do on a PS2, and hey, it's a fun novelty and saves having to own a console that looks like a toilet on your desk. Also, if anyone does decide to hunt it down and try it out, here's some guys' incomplete, but very handy compatibility list.
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