Japanese PlayStation Store now has 600 "classics" - where are ours?

As of February 9th,600 classic games of yesteryear have now been ported to the Japanese PlayStation Store.Yet only about one-fourth that number has managed to make its way over to North America. So what gives?

In the US,Sony has released 150 retro gamesvia the PS3's digital download system, the vast majority of which are"PS One Classics," with 10 Neo Geo games making their way to the console as well. Granted, 150 games is nothing to sneeze at,but looking at PS One Classics alone, Japan has hundreds more. It's been a regular staple for their PlayStation Store updates pretty much from day one. In the States, updates are much less frequent with little emphasis on releasing non-PlayStation titles, and in the first year of the PS3 there was a drought of several months where no new PS One ports were added at all.

Just a quick scan of the Japanese list reveals several top-notch games (which all have English versions ready for porting) that we still don't have access to - Legend of Dragoon, Parasite Eve 1 and 2, Bushido Blade and uh, Philosoma are all ripe for the plucking. Anything else onthis listyou'd like to see make it to the US/EU store? For what it's worth, the super-awesome Xenogears just arrived on PSN yesterday, so there's that.

There are thousands of games in the PS One library alone, never mind stuff from the TG-16 and Neo Geo. By comparison our 150 downloadable games seems rather paltry. Won't someone at Sony make a couple of phone calls and get these things out the door? Otherwise we'll have tokeep tricking our PS3into thinking it's Japanese.

[Source:Siliconera]

Feb 23, 2011

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