I just published an article espousing my unending love for a PS Plus Classic reintroduced earlier this year — mudslinging off-road racer Rally Cross. Admittedly, I was a bit behind the trending curve, as Sony’s physics-happy rally game hit the PlayStation Classics library all the way back in January. To the astonishment of who I imagine to be literally everyone, I’ve actually caught up on news this week, so we’re talking current PS1 additions!
On that note, we’re getting yet another banger (as the youths would call it) of a title in 1997’s G-Police, available for PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers starting today. This is alongside the likes of two other PS1 re-releases: Snowboarding racing romp 2Xtreme, as well as yet another Worms title, Worms Pinball. I swear, Team17 puts these grumpy invertebrate games everywhere, while other third party games like Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, Turbo Prop Racing and Guardian’s Crusade languish in what I’m assuming to be licensing hell. Life, it is not fair.
Developed and published by Liverpool-based and now functionally defunct studio Psygnosis, the new Classics release looks to now be published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, probably because the empty Psygnosis brand still technically floats under the umbrella of SIE. For most intents and purposes, though, the brand exists in name only.
Psygnosis was acquired by Sony Electronic Publishing in the early ‘90s and went on to develop some of the most stylish and iconic PlayStation titles, like launch game Wipeout, Colony Wars and the aforementioned G-Police.
So what is G-Police and why should you play it? To sum it up: A dark, dystopian, cyberpunk flight simulator that draws heavy inspiration from films like Blade Runner and The Fifth Element. A game, of course, that was throttled by the technical limitations of Sony’s 32-bit machine, made evident by notoriously poor draw distances, which I seem to remember fondly for some reason. I feel the same way about the PS1’s texture wobble. Stockholm syndrome, I’m sure.
The visuals themselves still show the obvious talent of a late-’90s Psygnosis, but man, draw distance fog was basically a painful right of passage for early PlayStation and N64 gamers. Gex: Enter the Gecko immediately comes to mind, along with a dozen other in-good-company PS1 releases. Ah, to be back in the bit wars. The Zoomers don’t know how good they have it.
Eurogamer did a nice retrospective on the PS1 original back in 2017, citing the general brooding ambience as a solid reason to replay, but lamenting the copious escort missions. I rented G-Police back in the day and have only fuzzy memories of the experience, other than struggling with the controls and having fun despite the lacking draw distance, so I’m looking forward to giving the Classics upload a proper playthrough. As you can tell from the thumbnail for this article, I did end up owning a physical copy at some point (two whole discs!) but never went back to it. The time is now.
Some good news is that G-Police now supports trophies, so that should make trudging through some of the more tedious missions more palatable. The same goes for 2Xtreme, although I’m not sure if I can bring myself to return to the scene of that particular PS1 crime.
I can only hope this means we’ll eventually see the sequel, G-Police: Weapons of Justice, in addition to the Colony Wars trilogy, all come to the PS Plus Classics library at some point.
