Get Info: #playstation

Review: The Italian Job (2001)

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 14:00:00 +0000

You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

The Italian Job is based on the 1969 cult classic movie of the same name, and released very late into the life of PlayStation in fact over a year into the life of PlayStation 2. It reviewed well and charted at number one for a good amount of time, even winning a “Best PlayStation Game of 2002” award from the Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it let alone played it.

It was one of those games I picked up along the way, long after release, probably at a car boot sale or charity shop or bargain bin. I distinctly remember booting it up for the first time and feeling the vibe of the movie instantly despite only having seen it once when I was a teen. It retains all the comedy, action, and British irreverance. The thought of racing cars around busy city streets with reckless abandon is as intoxicating now as it was then.

So, with that in mind we should look at The Italian Job through that sort of period lens. PlayStation was on its way out and the wobbly polygons were par for the course, no worries. It released after the hugely successful Driver (1999) and its slightly less successful sequel Driver 2 (2000) and is obviously inspired by those games. It features pretty much the same game modes, and the same gameplay. One could be forgiven for thinking The Italian Job was Driver: 1969, which is no bad thing. Graphically it’s very strong, gameplay wise it ticks all the boxes, and most imporantly it drives very well. You control a range of vehicles throughout the game and they all handle differently in terms of speed and control which makes the game all the more rewarding.

The main game follows the plot of the movie quite faithfully and turns the heist planning and preparation into missions mostly around London, then on to Turin and finally to the Alps for the finale. If you don’t know the movie, it’s the story of a heist where $4 million in gold bullion is stolen from Turin on the day of a football match and the robbers escape through grodlock traffic in Austin Mini cars coloured red, white, and blue. Rule Brittania, eh!? The music at the end of every mission never fails to raise a smile, and the sound effects in Turin really put you in the moment.

What I love most about the game is that even though it is sticking to the plot of the movie, it never feels linear. You’re free to take whatever route you want. Naturally, there are more optimal routes for certain things, and familarity of the cities comes over the course of the missions. You might want to drive on the wrong side of the road, or take a slightly longer route to avoid police cars or roadblocks. The developers did something wonderful when they stiched together all the disparate stunts and scenes from the movie into something far more grand than it has any right to be: a seven minute escape route across Turin—through city streets, across rooftops, shopping arcades, on top of the roof of the Palavela, around the test track at the FIAT factory, down church steps, through a Palazzo, across a river, into sewers, and foiling the police to potential freedom. It’s difficult to recall a finer set piece. By the time you get to this mission the game is quite demanding in terms of difficulty, but never feels unfair. Of course these days it useful to play with save states to avoid any frustration. Load times are probably the only real issue with the game, but you can use emulator fast forward to speed those up. No better time to play the game!

Today we’re spoiled by open world games. We’ve seen it all before from the likes of Grand Theft Auto and many more. It’s comforting to think that the lowly PlayStation was powerful enough in the right hands to pull of streaming of “whole” cities and allow a game like this to exist in 2001. It is undoubtedly one of best arcade driving games on PS1.

It’s worth noting there was a later movie also called The Italian Job from 2003 which received a video game on GameCube and PS2 that same year. It’s similar in scope, though perhaps less daring in scale, and also very highly recommended and well worth playing. See posts from 2022 and 2021.

Five interesting facts about the design of the original PlayStation

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some things you probably didn’t realise about the design of the original Sony PlayStation:

it was inspired by Apple’s Macintosh Plus
the colour is grey with a hint of violet to counteract plastic ageing/yellowing
Sony acquired the PlayStation name from Yamaha
it led to the VAIO range of PCs

Bonus fact:

VAIO was originally an acronym for Video Audio Input Output

Photo reference

Taken from Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center (1999, Paul Kunkel)

Samurai Mech

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been digging up old Macintosh games, and this search has resulted in the website for the classic Japanese game Samurai Mech coming back online after over a decade! Thanks Ritsuko! See: patreon.com/posts/48174477

Samurai Mech サムライ・メック is a Japanese sci-fi RPGs set in a future-medieval-space Japan. You assume the role of the eponymous Samurai Mech over the course of 40h of exploration/battle/puzzle gameplay.

You can practice your swordsmanship at the dojo, and upgrade your Samurai Mech suit with parts obtained through winning battles. The first game has a whole city to explore whilst you solve a mystery involving a group of ninjas.

Here is Samurai Mech running on my 1992 Macintosh Classic, using System 7.1.0 with Japanese Language Kit installed.

In the sequel Samurai Mech II: Heaven サムライ・メックII・天 you are a bounty hunter in an archipelago colony at the edge of the universe. The setting includes an ancient castle, an amusement park, an adult ballroom, and a giant corporation. An all new scenario, more freedom, improved mech system, improved combat, and a choice of colour or mono graphics!

Staff

Samurai Mech

Yukito Morikawa (森川幸人)
Shūji Nomaguchi (野間口修二)

Star Odyssey
Jumping Flash series
Astronōka

Akihiko Miura (三浦明彦)

Otocky
Bombliss
Pokémon series

Minoru Mukaiya (向谷実)

Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2/3
Samurai Warriors 2

Samurai Mech II adds the following notable Staff:

Hitomi Amakawa (天川ひとみ)
Shigenori Miyamoto (宮本茂則)

Jumping Flash series
Astronōka

1992: Samurai Mech (HuLINKS)
1994: Samurai Mech II: Heaven (HuLINKS)
1994: Geograph Seal (EXACT)
1995: Jumping Flash! (EXACT)
1996: Jumping Flash! 2 (EXACT, MuuMuu Co Ltd)
1997: Ghost in the Shell (EXACT, Production I.G.)
1999: Pocket MuuMuu (Sugar & Rockets)
1999: Robbit Mon Dieu (Sugar & Rockets)

Replacing bitmap graphics in a PlayStation game

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A version of this article was originally posted on my Patreon

I found an old Hanafuda Koi-Koi game that I can no longer easily play due to… sigh… what they call progress? It’s called Koikoi Komachi and was released around 2005 for Mac OS X (initially for PPC, and later Intel).

I really like the cards images that it has, and was able to extract them using File Juicer which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife for easily extracting files that might be embedded in an app, archive or disk image.

But just looking at the cards is not enough. I really needed to play a video game with them, you know? So I thought it would be cool to transplant them into the PlayStation game Youkai Hana Asobi.

Here’s what I did

Split the new card image into individual cards
Resize/shrink the individual cards to the dimensions used in the PS1 game
Extract the images I want to edit from the PS1 game
Edit the extracted images to add the new cards and make any other changes
Replace the images in the PS1 game with the new ones

Image Manipulation

To do the image splitting and resizing I used Retrobatch which makes this kind of stuff really easy. I created a workflow to crop out the individual cards and do the resizing all in one batch. Very cool!

Image Editing

PlayStation images are palette-based so you need to use an image editor that respects the embedded indexed colour palette. There may be other capable editors, but Adobe Photoshop is very good at this sort of thing so that’s what I used. Any old version will do, you definitely do not need the latest version.

I pasted each of my small card images into the two images used by the game, replacing the spectre/monster cards that are default. I also took time to change the options screen to modify the thumbnail that signifies which card design you’re using, and I also added a “NEW” label to the title screen.

I stopped short of changing the “help” card images because that would have been a lot more work and I do not personally look at those whilst playing.

ROM Hacking

There are many ways to get images out of a PS1 game, but I settled on Tim2View because it offers an all-in-one solution for extraction and insertion. It is as easy as:

Export PNG… (F4)
(do your image editing elsewhere)
Import PNG… (F5)

Warning: Tim2View writes to your PS1 bin file at each operation—without prompting—so always keep a backup just in case something goes wrong!

Gotcha: be sure to respect whatever colour is marked as transparent when making your image edits. In my case this was the colour black (0,0,0) so I had to make sure to use an almost-black colour in my new graphics to avoid unwanted transparent pixels. You can quickly check the state of your image by toggling the background transparency type at the bottom of the window. If it’s wrong just tweak and re-import.

That was fun!

I then used MultiPatch to create an IPS patch file from the changes, so I could make this mod easy for other gamers to enjoy.

The finished patch is available at: www.romhacking.net/hacks/4593/

Screenshot

Review: Bishi Bashi Special

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 19:17:00 +0000

Attention! Ready? Go!

Bishi Bashi Special is a set of games originally found on a pair of Konami arcade machines, the PlayStation version of which allowed up to 8 players using two multi-taps and featured 85 completely mental minigames. This was all years before Wario Ware, Inc., Wii Party or any other mini-game compilations came along.

The games featured such things as body builders on pogo sticks jumping for a piece of meat (“Meat Catcher”), a dance-off to get the biggest afro (“Perm Mania”), a bride throwing wedding cake down the aisle (“Hyper Pie”), juggling cavemen eating different colored balls (“Uncle Bean”), and others with names like “Uncle Launcher”, “Robo Docking” and “Touch Tone Mania”. The games used control schemes that will be familiar to many a game player - for example button bashing like Track and Field, pattern repetition like Simon, and rhythm action button pressing in time with the music. Digitiser, a video game fanzine written by Paul Rose provided by Channel 4 as part of their Teletext service had this to say about Bishi Bashi Special “utterly, utterly dreadful–but… probably one of the best games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.” That sums things up better than I ever could.

I used to play Bishi Bashi Special whilst I was lived in my first house share - the perfect place for it really. Having that many people all laughing manically at what was happening on screen was a fantastic experience. Interestingly, the few people I’ve spoken to about the game all have such fond memories but nobody could actually remember too many details so the video linked to below brought them all flooding back. In fact, I’d forgotten that a multi-player game could be so much fun until the exact same atmosphere appeared when I was recently at a friend’s house playing Wii Party, which takes what was done so well in Bishi Bashi Special and dresses it up in that special way only Nintendo seem to be able to do.

So if you’re not consumed by Wii Party and it’s horse racing mode, or sick to death of Wario Ware, Inc., and you’re hungry for more social multi-player gaming, then it might be time to revisit Bishi Bashi Special. It can currently be picked up for £3.49 on the PlayStation Store. That works out at less than 5p a game, making it quite possibly the bargain of the century.

Review: Speed Freaks

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:37:00 +0000

Nintendo seem reluctant to release more than one Mario Kart per console, so fans of the game will often seek out a new challenge by playing one of its many clones. It’s often a futile exercise as it makes painfully clear how far ahead of the competition Nintendo are.

That said, there have been a handful of games that manage to capture enough of the ever-elusive Nintendo magic to deliver an enjoyable and challenging racing game: Rare’s Diddy King Racing was the first contender of note, followed closely by Crash Team Racing. In fact, it was the later that caused Speed Freaks to fly under the radar of most PlayStation gamers - it was delayed by Sony Computer Entertainment to make way for Crash Team Racing at retail. I suppose it’s one thing to try to take sales away from Mario Kart on a competing platform but another to cannibalise sales of your own games on your own platform. The game was given a later release in North America under the name of Speed Punks.

The game has some really nice handling, with some subtle additions to the staple kart racer mechanics including an interesting turbo system. It has a nice enough range of power-ups and weapons that offer something new compared to Mario Kart at the expense of being quite as balanced. There are shortcuts on every track, as you might expect, which are essential when trying to beat some of the more difficult levels or challenges the game has to offer. As well as the usual tournament and time trial modes the game also offers split screen multi-player and a range of bonus characters and modes that are unlocked by playing through the game. Whilst the difficulty level is a little high you have three retry attempts that can be used to restart particular races and recover from any catastrophic errors. Compared to Vanishing Point - another of my favourite racers - this really is a most welcome feature.

A distinctly British sense of humour pervades the whole game, especially obvious in the naming of two bonus characters - Cosworth and Beamer. If Mario had grown up in Essex he’d fit perfectly into this game, and that’s a compliment. The graphics look really great and have a fantastic cartoon feel to them, character design is interesting and unusual, and track design has more going on than the standard scenarios you seem to get in kart racers like this. As with other games of this vintage, the computer AI is prone to stretching the laws physics somewhat, most noticeable in severe rubber-banding and predictable routing. However, despite these minor issues, it remains a fun and rewarding game and one well worth seeking out.

Review: Tomba!

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:02:00 +0000

Evil pigs, giant eggs, farting flowers, butterflies, mushrooms, a hungry monkey, a lost dwarf child, a thousand year-old wise man and a pink-haired feral boy. Yes, Tomba! may not be your average game but it’s certainly an overlooked gem.

Sony’s PlayStation brought gaming kicking and screaming into the third dimension. Before the introduction of such a powerful console we’d only seen small glimpses of 3D gaming. The SNES had Mode 7 which allowed for the pseudo-3D effects seen in games such as Pilotwings and Super Mario Kart whilst the Super FX chip allowed slightly more convincing 3D worlds like those in Star Fox and Stunt Race FX. But the PlayStation took things to another dimension - allowing fully textured 3D worlds. But where did that leave traditional 2D concepts?

Whoopee Camp had some ideas. They took the platform game and stretched it into something that sits somewhere between 2D and 3D - sort of 2.5D. Action takes place on a 2D plane and the characters are 2D sprites, but the level is rendered in 3D. This gives everything the benefit of depth and perspective but keeps gameplay recognisable, simple and straightforward. As well as the platforming aspect, gameplay also borrowed elements from adventure games such as Coktel Vision’s Gobliiins or LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island where you have to collect and use items in specific ways in order to progress. It even borrows some RPG elements in that there are multiple, overlapping events or tasks to be completed - only a fraction of which are essential for progression of the story – for which you’re rewarded with adventure points. I guess the most accurate description of Tomba! would be a platform adventure game, but that would be to simple a definition.

You can see from the graphics that the game has a unique visual style - full of bold, neon colours more reminiscent of the late-80s rather than the late-90s. You might think the cartoon aesthetic would cover up game meant for kids, but beneath the bright veneer you’ll find a very challenging game that will take you far longer to complete than many more modern ones. Tomba! has a great sense of humour and a somewhat bizarre story but it nevertheless oozes charm and character.

The game received a sequel that moved things on even further - the characters as well as the levels were fully 3D - whilst keeping the core gameplay largely the same. Tomba! creator Tokuro Fujiwara - best known for creating Ghosts ‘n Goblins and producing the Mega Man series - now works at Platinum Games whose recent Vanquish garnered rave reviews. Perhaps they’ll revisit one of gaming’s most misunderstood icons for a third time? A new adventure of the pink-haired little oik would be perfectly suited to modern download services such as DSiWare, WiiWare, XBLA or PSN. Here’s hoping.

Review: Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:00:00 +0000

In a sea of badly realised licenced games French company Infogrames made a daring move to buck the trend, creating this cartoon stealth ‘em up set in the Looney Tunes world. The result is a fabulous game as imaginative as the source material it’s based on.

You play a Ralph Wolf – a Looney Tunes character the double of Wile E. Coyote from their Road Runner series of cartoons. The story goes that you’re starring in a game show hosted by Daffy Duck in which you have to steal sheep from under the nose of Sam Sheepdog. Using ACME products such as rockets, dynamite and giant elastic bands ordered from mailboxes conveniently placed around each level - as well as a variety of items that make up the scenery - you have to figure out how to get to a sheep without being seen. After that, it’s usually - but not always - an easier task to get it to the level exit. It’s a brilliantly inventive mix of stealth, puzzle, platform and adventure genres that really brings a breath of fresh air.

The pace of the game encourages a thoughtful and sedate approach. With it’s electro-jazz music you’re left largely to your own devices as you survey the lay of the land, sneak around, collect items and figure out how to approach the problem of sheep stealing with the tools you have at hand.

The game is slickly presented with short tutorials to introduce every new gameplay mechanic and has all the hallmarks of a Looney Tunes cartoon: a cast of well known characters all of whom have their proper voices, a luscious cell-shaded 3D realisation of the cartoon world, and the famously comical over-the-top deaths.

Even today - almost 10 years after it was released – it’s rare to get a game this simple, fun and challenging. In fact, there are few games on the original PlayStation that holds up so well after so many years. Plus, it’s as cheap as chips on eBay and you can even get a graphically improved version that will run on Windows that might be more convenient to obtain and play these days.

Replay value is limited once you’ve figured out the puzzles, but I still enjoy revisiting levels from time to time.

I’d love to see a follow-up to this game, or alternatively another game that treads the same ground as I’m hungry for more.

Get Info: #playstation

Review: The Italian Job (2001)

Links

Five interesting facts about the design of the original PlayStation

Photo reference

Samurai Mech

Staff

Replacing bitmap graphics in a PlayStation game

Here’s what I did

Image Manipulation

Image Editing

ROM Hacking

That was fun!

Screenshot

Review: Bishi Bashi Special

Links

Review: Speed Freaks

Links

Review: Tomba!

Links

Review: Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf

Links

Get Info: #playstation

Review: The Italian Job (2001)

Links

Five interesting facts about the design of the original PlayStation

Photo reference

Samurai Mech

Staff

Timeline of related games

Replacing bitmap graphics in a PlayStation game

Here’s what I did

Image Manipulation

Image Editing

ROM Hacking

That was fun!

Screenshot

Review: Bishi Bashi Special

Links

Review: Speed Freaks

Links

Review: Tomba!

Links

Review: Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf

Links