Lots of good footage here. Interesting how the marketing was geared towards seventeen year-olds: I was fourteen when the PlayStation came out in 1995, and I remember the advertising appealing to me and my friends as we progressed into and through high school. I bought a PSX very early in 1997 at Funcoland with a copy of "Crash Bandicoot", by trading in the terrible N64 I had gotten for that Christmas. The 3DO was dead on the market so I wanted something new, and the N64 was really not doing it for me.

I'd flip through the reviews in the game magazines, and it was page after page after page of PSX reviews, a couple of Saturn titles, and nothing on the N64. It was obvious even by then that the Saturn and N64 were both "DOA".

I was actually skeptical of the PSX the first time I'd heard of it. I recall playing "Street Fighter Alpha" with a kid at an arcade who was really pumped for the PlayStation, and I just didn't "get it". I figured it'd be another Philips CD-i, and that the Saturn would become the dominant system. But in the end it wound up being a really iconic platform for me. The aforementioned "Crash Bandicoot", "Ape Escape", "Xenogears", "Final Fantasy VII", "Brave Fencer Musashi", "Bushido Blade", the two "Gran Turismo" titles, the three "Tekken" games, "Parappa the Rappa", "Croc", and "Street Fighter Alpha 3" are the tip of the iceberg of games I have very vivid memories of during my high school years.

I bought a Dreamcast at launch on 9/9/99 and relegated my PSX to a bookshelf. Looking back on it, the sheer number of extremely innovative and important games I played on the PSX in just two-and-a-half-years is pretty astonishing.

Back to the video then, it's interesting and sad to see how Cultural Marxism was afoot even from 1996-and-on: "Tomb Raider"-- rubbish game, by the by-- was important because of its "strong female lead", while there are lots of Tyrones in the PlayStation 2 advertisements they show. Speaking of PlayStation 2, I've now reviewed four of its launch titles. It's a platform I completely skipped back in the day, as I went from the Dreamcast to the Xbox in 2001. I like the PS2 so far-- very solid-if-unspectacular hardware. It feels like a faster Dreamcast, or maybe a "PSX with better 3D".

Of course, the PS2 really signals when gaming went down the tubes. They even discuss it at the end of the video: the big shift to "cinematic games", where "we're making a movie within the game!", and how they went from the "anything goes creativity" of the PSX, to exclusively "action adventure cinematic" games during the PS2 era. Speaking of which, scroll down to the purple "2023 Year-to-Date" table to see the state of contemporary gaming-- it's a pretty mediocre list: half of them are "cinematic" titles, there are a few very average sports games in there, and so forth. I've been having fun with "Street Fighter 6", but overall I can "take it or leave it" with the rest of the releases.

My wife just brought up PC-- "Isn't that the place to be these days?" Here is the reply I sent her, on Discord:



This also reminds me, I still owe everyone my impressions of the "LG C3" I bought maybe a week ago! I still need to fire up the PC and play with the greater-than-60Hz-stuff, expect a post about it in the near future.