seawasp | Well THAT'S disappointing...

Well THAT'S disappointing...

The responses to my prior post on videogame consoles has revealed that Sony, apparently, has decided to shoot itself in the foot again; having created the PS3 with backwards compatibility, they've now removed all or much of that capability.

This means that I will almost certainly NOT be getting a PS3, or at least not in the near future, unless I happen across one of the first-generation systems with full hardware compatibility.

And alas the Wii appears to be hard to get indeed.

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... of too many decent RPGs for it, and that being my primary gaming interest I didn't give it too much consideration.

The Wii has some additional features which are unique and attractive.

It's true, there aren't a huge number of decent RPGs on the 360; but if Sony continues to bungle the PS3 the RPGs have to go somewhere -- right? Right? -- so I think it's worth keeping an eye on the 360 RPG offerings in the future.

Speaking of XBox/XBox 360 RPGs, though, KOTOR rocked. It's one of my favorite RPGs of all time. I know there's a PC version of it, I don't know if it ever came out for any other consoles... but if you haven't played it, it's well worth begging or borrowing someone's old XBox just for that. The sequel wasn't as good, unfortunately, but it was still eminently playable.

If you liked KotOR you may like Mass Effect.
There's also Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata out now.
That's actually one more decent RPG on the '360 than on PS3 (if Mass effect counts :).
PSP and DS are where the RPGs are right now, mostly.

I just got Mass Effect and played it for an hour or so last night... and there, sadly, it will have to stay until at least next week, because I have papers to write over this weekend and other stuff filling the evenings until then. But so far it looks very promising. I really like the conversation system -- you don't pick from a menu of responses, so much as choose a direction in which to steer the conversation.

Eternal Sonata looks like it has potential. Enchanted Arms was a quite serviceable game. I haven't seen Blue Dragon.

Unfortunately for me, I'm also kind of a graphics whore; so I prefer playing a good RPG on a full-fledged console where I can see all the pretty lights and cut-scenes on a big screen, rather than on a hand-held system like the PSP or DS.

What are the good, or even semi-decent, RPGs on the PS3 now anyway? I haven't checked recently.

There aren't any.
There is one PS3 semi-exclusive RPG available: Untold Legends, and that's an "update" to a PSP port. And the PSP version stinks. The PS3 version is worse. Everything else is either cross-platform (Elder Scrolls IV and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance) or Xbox 360 ports (Eternal Sonata and Enchanted Arms).
And that's it. No, really, that's the entire PS3 RPG library (in English) right now.

As of a week ago, Atlus USA (the guys who specialize in bringing over niche titles from Japan like the Persona series) is officially a third party Xbox 360 publisher. That's good news for RPG fans although their first two '360 titles are going to be strategy RPGs (Operation Darkness and Spectral Force 3) rather than "true" RPGs.

Probably I'm misremembering, but I seem to remember hearing that the PSP was sort of a shrunk original Playstation with integrated display and controls? If so, could a PS original or PS2 play PSP games?

No. Different media. PSP uses an updated version of MiniDisc called UMD and there are no readers for really anything but PSP right now. Yay, Sony and its proprietary formats.

PSP lies somewhere between the original PlayStation and the PS2. You can't play PSP games on either PS1 or PS2 but you can run original PS games on PSP. To do so requires either (re)purchasing them from Sony's (limited) on-line store and download to a big Memory Stick (again, yay with the proprietary formats) or installing a custom firmware that uses Sony's POPS PlayStation emulator to play games from images ripped from your own discs and copied (you guessed it) to a big Memory Stick. The one big problem is that POPS does not understand multi-disc games so games like Lunar that do not save before swapping discs leave you stuck.

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Well THAT'S disappointing...

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