Thanks to Stuart I am now the proud owner of a PlayStation and Playstation 2.
(Well, a re-owner of the PS1 as my father threw mine out, and this is my second PS2, but the other one is American.)
So I thought it was time for a family photo!
Sort of. I wasn't going to unplug the PS3, PS4, and PS5 just for a photo opportunity. Yet.
It shouldn't bother me, but I don't like how they dropped the button colours from the PS5. If anyone fancies getting me the 30th anniversary controller, don't be shy!
As I may have mentioned before, Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favourite computer games ever. When the team behind that announced a follow-up, The Last Guardian, in which the giant-thing-on-which-you-can-climb is a friend rather than a foe -- although the Colossi aren't enemies as such, but that's a bit of a spoiler -- I knew I had to have it.
I waited, and then it was announced it would not be coming out on PlayStation 2, but rather the upcoming PlayStation 3.
I bought a PS3 for the sole purpose of playing TLG. I waited.
It was delayed so long that the PS3 release was cancelled and it would instead be released on PS4. In the mean time I had found other games to play, so purchasing a PS3 wasn't a total waste.
I was lucky enough to win a PS4 in a competition, and so I waited.
The game was released! I got it! I... got busy and distracted and didn't play it.
I got a PS5. Just last week a gap appeared in my life and I, at long last, booted up The Last Guardian.
I didn't like it much.
Oh dear.
It's not bad. It's fine. It looks amazing, most of the time, the music is beautiful, and the central gameplay idea is very clever; your big furry buddy Trico does feel like a real creature and the way you interact with it in order to progress through the game is for the most part well-implemented. I also have to give the designers considerable credit for basing a game around collaboration rather than combat; it reminds me of the sort of quasi-puzzle games you'd get in the Amiga days, and in fact I'm sure there was a game of that era which had a similar pet-and-puzzles premise, but I am old and fuzzy now and I don't remember.
But.
The controls are borderline terrible. There's an attempt to go minimalist and simple, and the controls are context sensitive to an extent, but recognition of the context is a bit wonky, so you may be trying to walk along a platform but instead find yourself bouncing off a wall. The camera automatically rotates to point at Trico, which is a lovely touch except if you're trying to line up a precise jump. Basic movement seems to go from a single tentative step to a flat out sprint, with nothing in between, which again is not much good when you're hopping about hundreds of metres from the ground. Trico doesn't always do what you want it to do, which is fine because it's part of the central concept of working with a wild beast, but you'd expect your actual playing piece to respond to the buttons you're pushing, given that precise movement is such a big part of the gameplay.
The game also has a habit of taking control away to show off the more dramatic jumps, which I suppose on the plus side means you're not wrestling with the controls. In fairness these cut scenes are impressive, but would probably have been more fun if I'd been allowed to be involved.
I finished the game but I didn't complete it -- there are secrets to unlock -- and long before the end I knew I would probably never play it again. It would make a wonderful animated film but as a game it's a huge disappointment. I wonder if I just waited too long. Maybe it could never live up to my expectations.
Arbitrary score: PS3 out of PS5
Here you go, you can watch the beautiful production and my less beautiful struggles with the wonky gameplay:
I have mainly been using it to play the PS4 games that won't fit on the tiny hard drive inside my PS4, and to benefit from the "PS4 Pro Enhanced" features that I obviously cannot detect with my ageing brain and eyes.
It's a fine machine. It's huge, about the size and weight of a small family hatchback, but at least it's nowhere near as noisy or power hungry as its predecessor. I have two complaints:
1. The build quality feels wonky. For such a bulky thing it feels flimsy, even cheap, and I'm not fond of the shiny black strip down the middle that does nothing but attract fingerprints and smudges.
2. The user interface is bonkers. Gone is the lovely simplicity of the XMB, or even the PS4's chubby menu, and instead we have an insane double menu system that seems to combine both, but in the most non-intuitive way possible. Utter madness that feels like it was designed at 4:30pm on a Friday and released before anyone noticed.
All that grumbling aside, the happiness in the image above is genuine.
I had been a Sega man up until the release of the so-called 32-bit -- did any of us know what that meant? -- consoles but then everything changed. Sega followed up the Mega Drive -- we don't talk about the 32X -- with the Saturn and that looked good, but where was the old enemy? Where was Nintendo? It turned out Nintendo was a year or so behind everyone else but into the void -- twenty years ago today -- stepped a new challenger.
Sony was an unknown quantity. My father always bought Sony electronics because he had a strong and strange conviction that one could always trust the quality of Sony gear -- where that came from I don't know, nor do I know why he pronounced it "Sonny" -- but I had no reason to believe that the company would be any good at games. Even so I wasted a lot of time and thought weighing up the relative merits of the PlayStation and Saturn, before coming to a decision based on some dubious criteria.
The first was that I was -- and still am -- an Amiga fan and a lot of the better Amiga developers seemed to move over to the PlayStation; indeed, the mighty Psygnosis got absorbed into the Sony hive collective a couple of years before the console launched. This is not a bad reason to favour a games platform, but the other is somewhat more embarrassing; I thought the black discs looked cool.
When a wealthy relative gave me a silly amount of money for a birthday gift I took it straight down to HMV on Western Road in Brighton and bought a console, some controllers, a multitap, an Atari arcade collection containing the original Gauntlet, and the brilliant Tekken 2. Maybe I should have put the money aside and saved it for something sensible, but I'm glad I didn't; the PlayStation was a great little console and one that brought me and my friends hours of joy, and a few years later begat one of my favourite games machines ever.
