PlayStation Plus Premium has had its share of critics. Sony’s 2022 response to Game Pass landed hollow on its launch, with most of the complaints centered around the library (or lack thereof). Unfortunately, the black eye that the sparse library gave fans made it hard for them to see the things that Sony didrightwith the service, one of which is the PS5’s emulation of classic PS1 titles.
For the uninitiated, emulating an old game can give you some great perks. On PC, the best emulators let you run a game at half- or double-speed (which you may want for tough platformers or grindy RPGs), or let you use filters to add a sense of nostalgia or authenticity; there’s nothing quite like the scanlines of an old CRT to bring back the glory days of a tube tv that weighed more than your car.
One of the perks of emulation that’s made it over to the emulator on PS5 is the ‘save state.’ . If you’ve never used a save state before, it’s a godsend for older games (especially when you’refighting an infuriating boss on the NES). Think of it as pausing a game and then continuing to play the same game from that exact point in your play session. It gives you the ability to save a game literally anywhere, even in the middle of a combo or a kill streak. What’s cool though, is that the save state is completely separate to your in-game save file. It’s not the same as loading your game and continuing; it’s more like saving a version of a Microsoft Word document.
Save states help tremendously with the grind that comes with PlayStation Trophies. Creating a save state halfway through a difficult boss inSyphon Filterthen instantly loading that state upon your death is far more convenient than starting over entirely. You’ll need to develop the habit of evaluating your game-state and quickly deciding if you’re at a point you’d feel comfortable returning to, and then creating the save. It’s a skill that most console gamers have never had the opportunity to develop until now. The fun part is that playing the game in this way can often turn it into more of an interesting tool than an immersion-breaking hack. Save-states should be carefully used on your first time through a game though.Super Metroiddoesn’t play quite the same when you don’t have to back-track to save points, for example.
RELATED:10 Best PS1 RPGs, Ranked
Save-states also make punishing old-school RPG’s more digestible. The ability to save your game anywhere, rather than at the save points that old PS1 RPG’s rationed out to you, makes the experience far less daunting. Creating a save state right before a huge boss in Legend of Dragoon after spending 30 minutes navigating a dungeon with no save point in sight is far easier on the nerves (and for more time-constrained players).
Sure, you could argue that save states diminish the tension and challenge that the developers clearly intended . There is a place for grueling checkpoint-based design, as anyDark Soulsfan will tell you, but it’s important to remember that many older games simply are more awkward to play than the games of today, and have outdated ideas about saving. Eliminating the inconveniences modernizes older games, and if that extra accessibility means more people get to play them, I’m all for it.
The real star of PS5 emulation though, is the Rewind feature. As you can imagine, it lets you rewind the game like an old VHS tape to an exact point within the last few minutes. Not only is it great for basically any game or genre, it’s wonderfully quick too; a snappy press of the Options button on your DualSense will bring you to the emulation controls, where Rewind is your first option. The navigation is snappy, rewinding your game is instant, and the UI will show you screenshots of the save state so you can select the exact spot you want to go back to.
Using the Rewind feature inHot Shots Golftook me from playing the game for a nostalgic five minutes, to a full hour of obsessive strokes. Every time I made a bad shot, I would just rewind the game back to the moment I took the shot. The PlayStation (thankfully) lets you do this an infinite number of times. I was making Birdie after Birdie because I kept rewinding the game until I perfected my shot. Did that break the experience and eliminate all challenge and consequence? Yes it did. Did I keep playing because I love cheating? Damn straight I did!
There are certainly ways that emulation on PS5 could be improved. I’d like to see some filters, for instance, so we have the option to enjoy the games in a visual format more akin to that in which they were released. There are still lots of other little features that PC emulation provides that the PS5 doesn’t, but I can’t be mad at Sony for the effort they’ve put into it so far. It’s a great start. We as PlayStation fans should spend more time talking about the little wins that each PS1 game adds to thegrowing PS Plus library.
