PS1 Games On PS4/PS5 Have One Massive Disadvantage

Oh dear. So, PlayStation Plus just keeps going from bad to worse, huh? The original service was constantly being criticised by subscribers who thought that it didn't offer enough to justify the cost, so when an overhaul was announced earlier this year, only with a massive new price to actually access anything new, it went down as well as you’d expect.

Since then, the lineup of classic games on offer for Premium tier subscribers has been revealed (which is also pretty underwhelming), and there’s also been reports of subscribers having to foot extra fees to upgrade their subscription to the new tiers if they previously bought their regular membership at a discount. Now, just to make matters worse, it seems that the PS1 games available are actually inferior versions of the originals, for no reason. 

Even though Sony's current classic game lineup is questionable, there's some amazing original PlayStation games that definitely deserve to be included eventually - take a look at our top 10 PS1 titles below.

As reported by Game Rant, subscribers in Asia (who just got access to the overhauled service yesterday) have noticed that a number of the PS1 games are European PAL ports, rather than the original NTSC versions. The full list of titles affected is: Ape Escape, Hot Shots Golf, Wild Arms, Jumping Flash, I.Q. Intelligent Qube, Worms World Party, and Worms Armageddon.

If you’re sat here wondering what the problem is, fear not. Basically, back in the day, many game devs had optimised their games for NTSC regions, and when PAL ports were made later on, they often suffered problems with their graphics and game speed. PAL versions are regularly avoided by classic game geeks today, since they tend to suffer noticeable screen tearing on 60 Hz screens, as well as frame rate issues.

Getting back to the matter at hand then, it’s frankly baffling that Sony would choose to use these versions when the others are right there. It’s very early days for the service though, so things could change yet. It launches on 13 June in America, and 23 June in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.