The point of the 15 Essential Games lists is a starting point for people who are either; A, looking for things to download from legitimate DLC services; or B, looking for things to download for their emulators. Of course the Sony PlayStation is one of those game consoles that sold millions of units... but, uh...
See, I knew being a Nintendo kid would come back to bite me in the ass one day. Back in school, the very existence of the Sony PlayStation was offensive to me. I held people who owned one in the lowest contempt that a nine-year-old could have, and I never even touched a PS1 game controller until 2011. If it wasn't an N64 game, I didn't want to hear about it. So... as you can imagine, this is holding up the 15 Essential PS1 Games page a bit. Not that I still hold the PlayStation in contempt, but that I don't know shit about it. All I know of PS1 games, I watched on WoL; which isn't very much. It's like I said in that one entry a while back: a longplay is not representative of a common gameplay experience—people practise their routes just as much as if they were doing a world-record speedrun until they arrive at something that wastes a minimal amount of viewer time and makes it look as though the player character is acting with a will of its own. Longplays can't tell me about clumsy controls, pacing issues, replay value, or really anything practical except for what the game looks like.
Now, sure, I could just go onto Moby Games and arrange the PS1 games list in order by aggregate score (I think the website does that by default anyway, for whatever sense that makes), but that only tells me what critics and a few respondents with Moby accounts think. Did a particular game get the shaft because a room full of Doom completionists thought the pacing was too slow? Was the game unfavourably reviewed because the critics had a beef with the publisher? Was the game only reviewed by a couple of people who really didn't have time to play it well enough to review it and bullshat their way through to the deadline? How did the game perform with children? Women? Autistic people? Casual gamers? Do you need to know the entire history of the franchise for this game to make sense? That sort of thing.
"Well, can't you just play the games yourself?" Sure, I could. I could waste 24 hours of my life downloading PS1 ISOs from Redump at random and hoping 15 games stick. The issue here is that only a very narrow scope of games appeal to me; therefore, the games I would recommend would not stray very far from my own interests. I don't care if Tekken 3 sold as many copies as there were PlayStations, I don't like arcade-style fighting games because they're boring as hell. I would probably recommend Bubsy 3D because it was an early attempt at a cartoon-realistic 3D platformer, despite the fact that kids had more fun throwing the game discs like Frisbees than actually playing the game. There are some obvious games that I know would appeal to most players; like Rayman, Gex: Enter the Gecko, and Gran Turismo; so, yeah—3 down, 12 more to go.
"What, did you play all of those other games that you recommended?" Yes. Some of them I didn't play for very long, most of them I've never completed, but I have played them all. I even owned most of those Nintendo 64 games (except Doom 64 and the Star Wars ones).
I guess, what I'm trying to say is, don't hold your breath on a PS1 page. It's under construction, but I don't expect it will be finished anytime soon.
--3 October 2023--