The original PlayStation was my first console, and I've got a big soft spot for it. Here's a bunch of games for it I've tried out over the years, either ones I've known for a long time or ones I just found, all of which I think are worth sharing with you.

[#] N2O: Nitrous Oxide (Fox Interactive, 1998)

Get busy, child.

From the "how did this take me 27 years to try out" file, N2O: Nitrous Oxide is a long-forgotten arcade shooter from back when every arcade game was getting the 3D all-neon Wipeout rave treatment. This one, it's Polybius getting the boob job, if Polybius were real. Creepy-crawlies and mushrooms populate various psychedelic tunnels, and you spin around these tunnels blowing everything up. The more you blow up, the faster it goes. This is the kind of game you play at eight years old on a demo disc and it transfixes, terrifies, and perhaps nauseates you. For me, it's become my first cigarette of the day.

N2O seems overcooked at first (because it is), piling on text boxes about combos, bonuses, alt-fires, brakes and jump controls, bugs to run over, and a strange coin-leveling-up-when-shot system (and I have had a few cheap deaths due to these blocking my aim of incoming enemies). Ignore all that. It's the coins that add the push and pull to the game, exchanged for either smart bombs or points on level complete. Do you stockpile the extra firepower if needed, or do you go for max scores and the extra lives every 50,000 points? Either way, leveled up coins give you more, so focus on shooting them, not the enemies. Plentiful bonus levels also provide opportunities for extra coinage.

On the audiovisual front, N2O is stellar. It runs at a solid 60FPS nearly all the time, tunnels undulate and flash and wobble like liquid, and unobtrusive sound effects lightly pepper the effectively game-exclusive, usable as an audio CD DJ mix by 90s big beat duo The Crystal Method (American Gran Turismo 2 fans, listen out for a certain "Now is the Time"). I mean, it looks great. All this glitz does mean there's occasional readability issues with what's going on, and man oh man, does this game need a rapid fire function bad. Whatever faults it has, though, it's whippits in video game form, Galaxy Gas on your PlayStation—just that it gives you ADHD instead of brain damage. I say it's worth it.

[#] Namco Museum Vol. 1 (Namco, 1995)

There was an actual museum at one point!

Namco Museum was where the arcade compilation train really rolled out of the station. It made sense! Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug—huge hits that previous home consoles could only imitate, and with a new generation of home players who didn't remember them in their heyday, Namco saw fit to roll up several onto one disc and provide a "museum" component, a free-roam 3D environment to link the games together. It worked nicely, and so, Namco made four billion more.

This first volume consists of Pac-Man, Rally-X, Pole Position, Bosconian, Galaga, and Toy Pop. Bosconian and Toy Pop are the obscure ones, the former an eight-way overhead shooter with some gnarly voice synthesis and the latter a cutesy maze game featuring killer wind-up toys. Toy Pop is the only real dud here, and the museum is overall nicely detailed and fairly clean looking for such an early PS1 title, with plenty of crunchy scans of memorabilia and posters to peek at.

These games actually aren't emulated, they're recreated, and the astute will notice some differences, though they're so minor (we're talking muffled sounds and ghost speed differences) that they don't detract from the quality of the recreations. My only real gripe is the fact that you can't save your high scores unless you "register" with the front desk of the museum first. It's an annoying oversight, but mostly, Namco Museum Vol. 1 is a PS1 must-have.

[#] Namco Museum Vol. 2 (Namco, 1996)

Two winners in a sea of mere curiosities.

In retrospect, it's weird that Namco decided to release two must-have Museum installments and then three ones filled with oddballs. They couldn't space the classics out a little more evenly? One suspects these were mainly built for the Japanese market, whose classics are different than ours, but no matter—for the more hardcore arcade enthusiast, Vol. 2 isn't bad. This time, you're getting Mappy, Dragon Buster, Super Pac-Man, Xevious, Gaplus, and Grobda. The museum wraparound and menus are identical to the first installments, down to the annoyance of having to "register" with the front desk before it'll save your scores.

From least upwards, Dragon Buster is an branching path dungeon sidescroller that looks kinda hideous (what is the main guy's sprite doing?) and is way too easy, to the point where I made it through three worlds on my first-ever game. Something's off there! Gaplus is one of the many updated Galagas, and I like some of what it does, like the tractor beam that lets you get not just double ships, but quadruple ships. At the same time, enemy movement into the phalanx is too erratic, and waves restart when you die, so I didn't make much progress. Grobda is a tank battler where waves take approximately five seconds. Everybody puts out some insane firepower, but you die in the blink of an eye, so games (and attention spans) really don't last long.

Super Pac-Man locks off portions of the maze initially, either openable with keys or with super pellets that let Pac-Man just break the doors—that's what PCP does to you, kids! At least until the keys start going to random doors, it's fun. That leaves two real winners of the pack, Mappy, where a police mouse navigates a maze of trampoline and cats to retrieve stolen goods, and Xevious, a breezy-yet-tense overhead scrolling shooter where you bomb ground targets while dogfighting in the air. These games have that Namco charm and addictiveness the others tend to lack—again, fascinating for the arcade enthusiasts and very little for anyone else.

[#] NFL Blitz (Midway, 1997)

Uncalled for, but a LOT of fun to watch.

Despite being raised in a Madden household, my affection for the games begins and ends with the early 2000s entries. I think it was accidental I liked any of them, as they're a bit slow and technical for my taste (but so is the real game). Thankfully, EA didn't yet have exclusivity over the league, so there was no shortage of much speedier, more gratuitous competition—chief among them NBA Jam's sister series NFL Blitz. And y'know what, playing it now? I think I missed out!

NFL Blitz was originally an arcade game, and it shows in the quick matches, simple control scheme (you pick receivers with the D-pad), reduced player count, no run plays (quarterbacks can still run the ball), and automated kickoffs and punts. The hits are nasty, and you have the ability to toss around and leg drop fallen players on the other team after the play is over. The NFL was not happy about all the violence back in the day, but really, isn't that why people watch real football?

This port looks about standard for 3D PS1 football games, but it's super slick to play. The Season mode is about my only real gripe—you get a few games in, and the game RNGs cheap fumbles and interceptions into existence constantly, cheating you out of easy wins. But then that ridiculous TV commentator pipes up ("that was uncalled for, but a lot of fun to watch!") and I have a giggle and all is well. Seriously, Blitz entertains and satisfies like few other PlayStation football games do.

[#] Pac-Man World (Namco, 1999)

Ah shit, here comes Pac-Man.

I already beat the next two Pac-Man World games. Had to go for the hat trick, right? Mostly, I remember this one frustrating me as a kid—and then frustrating me as an adult, to the point where I actually streamed it back in 2019 only to give up on the Anubis Rex boss and play Minecraft instead. Sure enough, it all came flooding back to me—this game was built by assholes. It might look bright and colorful (and it certainly is lush), but it's got the heart of an NES platformer, so take your time, learn where's safe to stand for the bosses, be precise (I relied on the D-pad in my playthrough), and expect unavoidable damage.

Pac-Man has to (and I do mean has to, as the game rudely reminds you should to get to the final boss without them) rescue six of his friends from the clutches of Toc-Man, scattering them across six lands from ruins to space to weirdass, spinning funhouse levels. These levels are nicely varied, not all that long, let you save often, and provide ample opportunities for bonus lives, thankfully. Mazes are naturally built into the levels and provided as optional extras for finding Galaxians in levels, but the ghost AI and occupational hazards of some of the later mazes make them a headache, especially when you're trying to conserve lives for the actual quest portion.

And of that quest portion! If you're used to the free camera of the PS2 Pac-Man World games, here, you're given a fixed 2D platformer-like camera—though Pac-Man still moves in 3D. This means, yes, you can fall right off the edge of stages quite easily where your depth perception fails you. I'm not even getting into the variety of flame jet hazards, wonky spinning platforms, clunky bosses, and traps that basically expect you to tank damage. I don't like save states, but I wound up relying on them as levels got more..."creative" over time. At the end of the day, Pac-Man World is a quick, cute adventure with some neat ideas that nonetheless finds your suffering very, very funny.

[#] Quake II (Activision, 1999)

Great port, average source material.

I was in the mood for a PS1 FPS, and among the pack, Quake II stood out for lineage alone. That said, I was pretty underwhelmed by the PC version of Quake II, a decently built and yet unremarkable, overly-long blastathon through too many grimy metal corridors and the occasional human torture chamber. Fun enough while it was on, but really kinda boring next to the first one. One thing that attracted me to the PS1 port is that it's half the length, featuring an abridged version of the campaign with five out of the ten areas from the PC version. Turns out, for a game with so little variety, shorter is better!

The default controls suffer from the game being released pre-Halo. While the analog sticks are supported, it's not "one moves, one looks"—both move and look, just on different axes. This would make the game unplayable if not for the wonderful fact that the PlayStation Mouse is supported. In mouse mode, the sticks aren't supported, but the D-pad moves, left shoulders switch weapons, and the Mouse aims, shooting with the left button and jumping with the right. It feels completely natural even with the one-handed DualShock grip you'll need to use. (The stiff D-pad does mean movement still isn't as fluid as the PC version, however, and even on Easy, the game likes to spring enemies on you, so definitely crank the difficulty down.)

As for the port itself, it's damn impressive. The framerate stays very respectable about 95% of the time with few concessions on graphics from the software-rendered PC original, even adding lens flares on lights, and minimal texture warping. There are routine chamberlocks for loading chunks of the very split up original levels, but these are so quick, I really didn't mind. Things aren't perfect, mind you. You can only save at designated loading zones (where the PC version lets you save whenever you want), and it can be weirdly buggy, with stage buttons and menu options not registering and the like. (That could be DuckStation acting up though.) On the whole, Quake II's PS1 port is as great as Quake II itself is average.

[#] Rage Racer (Namco, 1997)

Max speed on the mediterranean.

Here's two things you should know about me: I like racing games and I suck at racing games. The first Ridge Racer is a PlayStation racing classic (how could it not be? It was the pack-in title for the whole system), but it's never been my favorite thanks to the bonkers, slip-and-slide car handling. Rage Racer, on the other hand, the third in the series, may just be my favorite racer on the entire system—I might even like it more than Gran Turismo 2.

Rage doesn't support the analog sticks, but it controls great, with tight turning and a really satisfying weight to the cars. There's still power sliding, but it feels more like a punishment and you'd best avoid it unless you're trying to stall out. You earn credits after each race you can use to very coarsely tune up your car, get a new paint job, or even put your name on the hood of your car, making this one of the first racing games to feature a garage and tune-up system.

While you only get one course, it is eye candy—waterfalls, gigantic cliffs, bridges and tunnels (your speedometer even glows when you're inside, nice touch), and a beautiful Mediterranean shoreline. These are genuinely some of the most appealing 3D graphics I've ever seen the PlayStation put out. A curious midpoint between the bumper cars of Ridge Racer and the sleep-inducing extreme detail of later racing games, Rage actually avoids the pitfalls of both to great success.

[#] Robotron X (Midway, 1996)

Electrifying—on the right setup.

I've had a morbid attachment to this game since I was a wee lad. In fact, it was one of the original game reviews I wrote for this section when I started doing them on cammy.somnol. To be clear, on console, Robotron X is still a mess. The framerate is horrific (hovering around 10FPS at worst), which makes it difficult to tell what the fuck is going on when dragged-out waves of respawning robots fill the screen, and the lack of DualShock support means you're holding down that shitass PS1 controller D-pad for minutes at a time. Not great!

All that said, we happen to live in The Future (not the Robotron one—yet), and emulators might just be able to fix most of these issues. I normally like my emulation console-accurate, but I've already gassed RetroAchievements up for making me like PS1 Space Invaders, so let's keep going. A little birdie tipped me off once that overclocking DuckStation gets this game's framerate up, way up. Paired with being able to map the face buttons to the thumbsticks, plus memorizing a power-up code or two, that should fix most of the issues, shouldn't it?

Yes! A 500% overclock gets you a solid 60FPS in damn near any chaotic situation, meaning navigating near-death Robotron encounters and picking up humans becomes more than possible—it becomes mesmerizing, habit-forming, fun! Seriously, I've been itchy for this one all week, cleaning out 25 levels at a time like a creepy bald chimney sweep. Even the eerie, skeletal visuals have grown on me. None of this makes Robotron X a better game (Robotron 64 is still the way to go on hardware), but it does make it a better experience, revealing its true form as a psycho zoneout game with a thrilling, throbbing electronic soundtrack.

[#] Space Invaders (Activision, 1999)

The songs you grow to like never stick at first.

Didn't your mother ever teach you not to judge a book by its cover? Mine didn't, and that probably explains something. Still, this game drew me in in a weird way, so let me give you the Wikipedia rundown of PS1 Space Invaders so I can make my point. It's a 3D remake of the original, ten waves to a planet, each with bosses and aliens with funny attacks and power-ups, and you can unlock the original emulated Space Invaders. It was a little slow and easy at first, and I had a pretty middling review written up for it and scheduled for weeks—and then I went to try out its RetroAchievements set.

RetroAchievements is a site that gives you achievement sets, points, and trophies for various emulated retro games. If that sounds dumb to you, hold on. RA has given me reason to dive into games I'd written off as stupid, simplistic, frustrating even, to learn how to beat them or to get the high scores, and I walk away with a new appreciation for them every time. I thought the original Space Invaders was just obnoxiously difficult and required ungodly reflexes until I learned of the "wall of death" setup that turns the pace outright leisurely, making the "4,000 points without dying" achievement a game of clean execution instead. Suddenly way more fun, cool as shit now.

Just so you don't think I wrote this solely to glaze RA, let me talk some about the remake. Shooting four aliens of a color in a row will give you a powerup based on their own attack. The horizontal sweep weapons and the laser are easily the best in the game, and there is actually a lot of satisfaction to taking out a whole row or column with one shot. You get into the groove of clearing waves, visually, it's solid and clean, you can save at any time, and if you're looking for a challenge, you do get it on the higher difficulties. Like the arcade original, Space Invaders is definitely a little underwhelming at first blush, but dig into the details and you might just find some appreciation for it.

[#] Tempest X3 (Interplay, 1996)

Melt-O-Vision supreme.

Rediscovering how fun Tempest was in The Atari Collection last week got me motivated to dig out this little PS1 obscurity I've had since I was a lad. If you're unfamiliar with Tempest (what are you, normal?), you're a claw on the end of a 3D web with monsters of various types crawling through it up at you, and you have to get rid of them before they touch you or fry you out of existence. Atari Jaguar fans will of course know of Tempest 2000, Jeff Minter's 90s breakbeat rave-soundtracked psychedelic recreation of such (it was one of the few good games the Jaguar actually got). Tempest X3 is the PlayStation equivalent, and it's also damn good. Sounds good, looks good, plays good. Mostly.

Caby sometimes likes to tease me by saying the games I play look like fake video games, but Tempest X3 really does. The blasting is constant, the screen gets filled with explosions and rainbow textures, squidgy electronic noises and sample-filled rave music fill your ears, and disembodied voices recharge your Superzapper smart bomb and commend you on how much destruction you cause. 2000 and X3 wrinkle the formula up further by introducing weapon and jump powerups, an AI droid to blast along with you, and the ability to warp levels through even trippier minigames in smoky voids and vector tunnels. This game does a stellar job of recreating those sharp arcade vectors, and while the lack of spinner controls may bother some, I never had an issue playing this with a D-pad on either the PS1 or Jaguar.

Tempest X3 is actually slightly fuller featured than 2000, featuring an unlockable 2000 mode inside of it, some gameplay tweaks, and nearly 30 additional levels. (According to Jeff himself, these were mostly so High Voltage Software would owe him fewer royalties.) The unlockable modes are quite cool—the extra webs less so. By level 50, this game gets kinda hard, but past 100, it's death all around as the blink-and-you're-dead pulsars and UFOs get dropped on your head constantly. Quite irritating. If ever a game justified save state scumming, it's this one. If you're not devoted to beating it and seeing the single-screen tongue-in-cheek win message, though (what are you, normal?), Tempest X3 is merely an excellent time.

(2000 mode is unlocked by way of getting the top score and putting a special message into the comment field. I mean, it is literally called "X3".)