Top 3 Forgotten PlayStation Launch Gems

ign.com:

In honor of IGN’s ‘90s Week celebration, this month’s installment in my regular column about forgotten games is going to go just a little broader. Instead of looking at a single game that may have faded from public discourse, I foolishly promised my fellow editors that I’d look at the entire launch lineup of the PlayStation and highlight all the obscure gems we once loved to play.

Hey, I was there – at launch – and picked up my PlayStation at our local Toys R Us using one of those printed-out tickets you had to take to the “Keeper of Valuable Goods” behind the glass window. (I think his name was Geoffrey. Maybe.) IGN didn’t yet exist – our first website launched in 1996 – and as a university student with limited means, I picked out a batch of games that looked most promising to me and that my budget could bear. I can’t tell you what exactly motivated me to choose the games I did, but Air Combat, Battle Arena Toshinden, Kileak: The DNA Imperative (“The Blood”, for my European friends), and Ridge Racer all came home with me. I didn’t buy a new 3D console to play NBA Jam or Raiden arcade ports, but the promise of bringing 3D arcade graphics home with Ridge Racer was reason enough for me to shell out $299 and take a chance on the PlayStation at launch.

With IGN Playlist , you can copy and remix the above PlayStation Launch Games list and rearrange it to create your custom, sharable ranking.

So, no. There isn’t more than a single forgotten gem in the PlayStation’s launch lineup in my book. So to make this more interesting, I have to cheat a little and look at the “launch window”. The quotes are here as a reminder that console manufacturers used to use that term to pretend they had much better console launch lineups than