If you’ve been keeping track at home, you may have noticed that I haven’t added to the PlayStation First-Party Project lately. That’s because it’s dead. I didn’t end it out of malice or anything, but rather just that fact that I simply wasn’t feeling it.
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When Spider-Man was revealed for the PS4, I was somewhat confused. A first-party developed licensed superhero game? We hadn’t really seen that since the Sega Genesis days! It sorta made sense considering Sony had the Spider-Man film rights, but superheroes are so ubiquitous, with Spider-Man arguably being the most popular of them all, that it seemed baffling to limit the game to a single console. And then the developer. I love Insomniac, but Sucker Punch, the first party developer who had spent the last decade making open world superhero games, was right there!
And yet, despite all of the conventional wisdom being defied, Spider-Man was released and it reviewed and sold extremely well, creating a new key Sony first-party franchise.
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I love EverQuest. For years, Norrath was my favorite fantasy game world, so I was ecstatic to play an action-looter (my favorite genre of RPG) in that setting. What made it even better is that Champions of Norrath was from Snowblind Studios, who had released the sublime Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on PS2 in 2001. Needless to say, for me, Champions of Norrath did not disappoint.
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In early 1997 I traded in my Nintendo 64 for a PlayStation, due to disappointment in the N64 launch window games (and their prices) and in anticipation of Final Fantasy VII. In the lead up to FF VII I discovered a handful of games that would become among my all-time favorites, like Suikoden, Twisted Metal 2, Resident Evil, Ridge Racer Revolution, and the original Persona. But the game that was most aligned with my FF VII hype was Wild Arms.
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Initially I wasn’t going to include EverQuest as part of this project. It was never released on a PlayStation console and Sony no longer holds the rights. But I kept thinking about how important this game was not just to Sony’s gaming division, but to the industry and to me, and I decided to include it.
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I completely skipped ModNation Racers at launch. The game seemed like a perfect storm of things I’m not really into: kart racers, customization, and post-Mii art direction. I remained ignorant of it until I started working on my PS3 Games Still Playable Online list. In my research I learned about ModNation Racers Revival, which inspired me to pick up a cheap used copy of the game. Digging into it now I’m learning that my initial instincts were correct, but there’s also quite a bit of ambition here, and a surprisingly active community.
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Pinball is cool, but Flipnic dares to ask the question: “what if it was even cooler?” The result is a surreal and stylish take on the game that’s unlike any pinball game I’ve ever played.
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At the end of 2025 I decided that I was going to start playing and revisiting PlayStation first-party games with the intention of eventually giving my top 100 ranking. After playing the game (ideally to completion if feasible), I’ve been writing short blog posts with a bit about the game and my thoughts. These posts are all captured here (in alphabetical order).
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War of the Monsters is like a cross between Power Stone, Virtual On, and classic science fiction. If you have an affinity for any of these, you’ll probably enjoy War of the Monsters. If you’re a fan of all three like me, you’ll probably love the game.
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I will never be able to get over the fact that Camelot released Hot Shots Golf on PS1 the same year they released the first Shining Force III scenario for the Saturn in Japan. These days Camelot just seems to be a Mario sports factory, but there was a time in the 90s when they were one of the most interesting developers in Japan.
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