Upon booting up the PlayStation Classic, you're thrust into the home screen, which is reminiscent of the CD player on the original console. There's a carousel with all of the games, as well as a virtual memory card that you can access. That works as you'd expect, but you can also create a suspend point anywhere in a game by hitting the reset button. I only wish the system let me create multiple suspend points -- whenever you make a new one, you blow the last one away.

The most important part is the games, and that's a bit of a mixed bag. Some titles, like Final Fantasy VII, are recreated well. As soon as I started it up, I couldn't help but play until I defeated the first boss and struck a blow against the Shinra Corporation. Jumping Flash, which I never spent much time with before, was pretty fun and an intriguing window into early 3D platforming. And Metal Gear Solid still looks and sounds impressive, especially after slogging through the first stage of Syphon Filter (a game I loved at the time, but one that has aged very poorly).

But the emulation isn't always consistent. Ridge Racer Type 4 has significant frame-rate dips and jitteriness (or judder, in video-geek-speak) that makes playing the game a huge headache. That's a particular shame, since the original was a graphical milestone for the 32-bit era. There's no longer any sense of speed, and I had a hard time steering without analog controls. I'm surprised Namco's developers haven't complained that Sony's slipshod development turned one of the highlights of the PlayStation into an unplayable mess.