Are you at a loose end over the long holiday weekend? Why not sit back and enjoy our first DF Retro marathon video, combining several episodes of one of our most ambitious DF Retro projects yet into one mega-extended presentation? And it's a good one, with John Linneman and Audi Sorlie revisiting the historic launch of Sony's original PlayStation between 1994 and 1995, examining the history of the system and covering every launch game in the three main territories: Japan, North America and Europe.
Since this is Digital Foundry, there are also platform comparisons for each game that also released on competing consoles, and in my view it's always fascinating to take DF-level scrutiny to another era, where the variations between games implemented on very different architectures are very different. more pronounced than today, where most consoles are basically built around very similar PC-style components.
Some of you may have seen this “content” before, and the backers of the DF Retro tier of our Support program You may have even watched this entire two-hour, 46-minute presentation in the past. So why bring it back two years later? Well, first of all, we consider it a great way to put a new focus on work we're immensely proud of, which otherwise languishes in the backwaters of YouTube, mostly forgotten. And that's a shame, since this video is just as good as the day we made it!
DF Retro Marathon: Sony PlayStation/PSOne – All Launch Games Tested!Secondly, it is an experiment that attempts to target a different audience. we launch DF Clips channel last year, which effectively serves to break each episode of DF Direct Weekly into smaller videos that appeal to people who probably aren't all that interested in watching three men talk about gaming tech for two hours each week. DF Clips turns every discussion point and question from followers into its own video and I have been surprised and delighted to see how successful it has been and how much it has grown in just seven months.
The marathon concept is a variation on the theme, which was communicated to us by our friends and collaborators of the excellent My life in games retro channel, which they have even enjoyed greatest success combining its episodes into extended presentations that presumably appeal to people looking for longer-form videos. Like so many things to do with YouTube and its unfathomable algorithms, we simply don't know why the idea works, but we'd like to try to find out, so thanks to Coury Carlson and Marc 'Try4ce' Duddleson for sharing this idea with us.
And that got me thinking that the binge-watch concept could work for us in other ways, too. Remember that time John tried every console port of Doom ever made? Well, since then, more console conversions of Doom have emerged, so another way to 'resurface' that video is to expand it with the latest versions. And what about our review of every Sega/Mega Drive 32X game ever made? Surprisingly, there have been some brilliant homebrew developments on the ill-conceived peripheral, including a far superior Doom port and even a proof-of-concept Tomb Raider. We'll think hard about this, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the video; We even gave it a 4K upscaling to avoid YouTube's miserable 1080p bitrate. Thanks for watching!
