What? More Bleem?

I have a confession to make.

I, the GagaMan(n), anti-Playstation extraordinarie, have bought myself a PSone.

Before you all come charging down to my house with pitch folks and axes, I have my reasons. First, it wasn't the butt ugly early model, but the cute as puppies smaller model that looks a little bit like the Dreamcast. Second, it was in next to brand new condition. Third, it came in a cool little official carry case, and forth, and most importantly, it only cost me five quid.

Now I would give any console a go for that kind of price, so here I am, plugging up a console I swore I would never own, but hey, I already have games for it, remember? The one's I bought dirt cheap to try on the Bleemcast beta emulator? Yeah, those. Now I can actually save my progress for them! Sadly, I can't run the burned discs of rare Japanese games I've got, as I'd need to get a mod chip in it to run them, but at least I can compare how the games look on the console they were made for and the console they weren't. I had gotten used to the smoothness of Time Crisis running on Bleem, so sticking the game into the PSone gave me a bit of a shock as everything is much, much more pixellated. It's all to do with the fact that in Bleem the games run at twice the resolution they do on the PSone and even the PS2 (and, by the sounds of recent news, the PS3 as well). Haha!

Now don't get me wrong, the Playstation had some true classics and under rated gems on it, but you try finding proper copies of them. Browsing through Gamestation and GAME in various towns, it seems that everyone has held onto these gems and given these shops nothing but football games. I swear to god, the PSone has about a million of them, even one just focused around David Beckham! Compare this to the six or seven that the Dreamcast has. Not being a fan of Football myself, I'm kind of glad I don't have to bury my way through every month's FIFA release when searching for good Dreamcast games, but it could have had at least one really good one, like Worldwide Soccer 98 on the Saturn. If it's not football, it's some other sports sim, wrestling, or one of the early racing games like Porsche Challenge and RIIIIDGE RACER. Sigh.

I was lucky to find one gem last week, however, at a boot sale for £1. R-Type Delta, a rather lovely 2.5D (Read: 2D game with 3D graphics) shump. Although I am a big shump fan, I never really got into the R-Type series, so this is a first go at it. For the fun of it I ran it through the Bleem Beta and, what do you know, it worked almost perfectly in it! With it being an arcade game and all, you don't really need to save this game unless you want to keep your rankings, so it's the prefect kind of game to run well in Bleem. Here's the clip I ripped from it, in which I do pretty terribly.



Thanks to that Portable Video thingy I won last week, it's now easier for me to rip this stuff. before I had to record it to video, then record that video through a DVD recorder, then rip that DVD footage onto the PC, which took bloody ages. Now, I can just plug this little device into my telly, rip the footage, and drag it onto my computer! Hurrah!

Another game I burned for the PSX recently with Bleem self boot built in was, funnily enough, another 2.5D shooter from a series I never got into when it started out: G-Darius. This game has the odd music issues, like most games in this emulator, but looks perfectly fine. Playing it on super easy mode so I don't look like a plonker blowing up a lot, which commenter's on YouTube would soon point out, as they always do. Here the clip:



Finally, there's been some interesting news recently at dcemu.co.uk abouts developments with another Playstation Emulator, known as PSX4ALL, which is in it's beta stages and is looking great so far. The post at the forum shows some screen shots and videos of it's current progress. It's slower than Bleemcast at the moment, but it does have the potential to surpass it. For starters, it looks like it may be able to run those dreaded video files Bleem hates so much, and it may, after some tinkering about, be able to save memory card files to the VMU too, in he future. Keep your eyes on this!

5 comments:

fatherkrishna said...

Sublime posting! Excellent stuff!
Don't feel any guilt about dipping into the world of Sony... Been playing Tekken 5 on the PSP with my boys and it's ace!
Plus will be dipping into Powerstone Collection on said console very soon... Very tempted
to purchase a PS2 with flip up screen thats been sitting unloved in my local Gamestation for some time... like an ugly Treamcast inferior unloved cousin.
Loved the post, awaiting more!

Caleb said...

Nice post. I too know the joy/pain of finding a playstion for really really cheap.

$8 for a playstation still in box was just too good to pass up. It's the old clunker gray model but those can play CD-R's easier with a bootup disk.

I have a nice selection of Playstation games bought for really cheap. I gotta look up some shumps.

Oh and guess what else I found new in box this weekend?

A dreamcast mouse! FINALLY! after a crapload of waiting to have it to go with my keyboard to play Quake 3 and Outtrigger. $10 American. (And they had more than one.)

For anyone who wants to play Quake on dreamcast please please wait until you have a mouse. Because crap. It's just sooo much better.

Does anyone know if the mouse works on Half Life?

Why I didn't buy them all you ask? Since they had controllers new in box (as well as a Street Figter six button controler-too expensive). And copies of Unreal, Zombie Revenge, Illbleed, Flogian Bros and Giga Wing. With limited funds I had to pick and choose those and leave the rest there. *sob*

When I am back in that area I am gonna clean them out.

Anonymous said...

Father- Go look at that character again... You missed something..!

Anonymous said...

There is no other way to play Quake III without a mouse and keyboard, I tried playing it for a few minutes with the controller but I was getting over whelmed by Anxiety and highblood pressure!

Anonymous said...

Don't be such a silly fanboy.. There IS a world outside of Sega and it's not as if there weren't any decent offering on that grey console after all there were a LOT of games released for it.

Hell if you want to play the latest offering from Sega's stable then you HAVE to buy a non Sega console..