It could be argued that the Playstation Network is a nice refreshing wave in the history of the Playstation brand and series of console, as well as a counterpart to fellow digital delivery services Virtual Console, Wii Ware and Xbox Live Arcade, maybe just to move with the times.

Without mentioning the current-generational games available on it, there's something to say about its retrogaming offer, an aspect that is going to be the main subject of this review: the PS One Classics, meant to remove the need of the Nostalgia Filter. No Nostalgia Filter at all? Not So Fast Bucko. Now, these Classics have two pros: the first, a cheap price, as here in Europe a PS One game costs as much as a NES game on VC (so to speak, for a technological comparison), in true Sony tradition (expensive hardware and cheap software, the opposite of Nintendo); the second is that you can take them with you anywhere if you access this service with a PSP (other than PSP games themselves, this was the main reason I got the console itself - "Playstation [1] Portable", literally).

This is where things go downhill. Selection of Classics in Japan? Jaw-dropping. The list of U.S. Classics? Not so much. Think that's bad? Let's see the European situation... it's worse. And by that, I don't mean "we have a few less Classics". I mean it is WORSE.

It's a wallbangerfest: so far, I've started following the updates since January 2009 (when I got my PSP), and almost no-one of the very important Classics showed up. To add insult to injury, SCEE's vagueness about all of this has slowly become, basically, the polite version of Flipping The Bird. Despite exceptions, there are many gaps in our store, in an horrible inversion of Pal Bonus.

Lately, it seems SCEE has acknowledged the situation, and as of a post of the European Blog written one month ago (November 2010), things may change as "technical and legal problems aside, some of the most wanted Classics are on their way to the store".

As a conclusion, despite as of now results have yet to come, the point is that we can sum SCEE's attitude about the Classics with one single trope: Brilliant But Lazy  ^*

^{Not quite. See comments.}

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