bleem casts greed

bleemcast hasn't been under the spotlight since E3 of last year, and you could be forgiven for wondering why the company is bothering to release it at all, now. Originally if you recall, it was supposed to arrive on store shelves just after E3, but in actual fact the chances are punters won't be able to pick it up until after this one. And what's more, they may not want to. The best thing about bleemcast was the way it could improve PlayStation games, by fiddling with graphics, sounds and load time mechanics. However, come May 1st, when the bleem products will allegedly hit store shelves in America, PSX fans-come-Dreamcast owners may want to re-evaluate just how important the new toy is to them, and whether they really want to shell out on a per-game basis... That's right. Not content with splitting those PSX games compatible with bleemcast into separate emupacks, the company is now set to release little bleemcast discs at $5.95 a pop. Each bleemcast disc will be capable of emulating one game only. So in other words, bleemcast: Gran Turismo 2 (the initial release), bleemcast: this, bleemcast: that and bleemcast: the other. If you own more than 10 games it will cost you more to emulate them using bleemcast than you will likely get for your second hand PlayStation. The problem for bleem now is that they have effectively shot themselves in the foot. As we said at the time, people could well expect to sell their PlayStations in favour of a copy of bleemcast if it enabled them to play all the same titles with added improvements. But even using the emupacks scheme, where games were packaged together at about 100 'emulatable' per disc, the cost would be nearly $60, arguably the cost of a second hand PlayStation. In spite of this, we argued that bleemcast would make up for the loss of the PSX with its improved visuals, sounds and load times. For big console fans though, bleemcast is now a total waste, because firstly they will have game collections that stretch as long as an arm and will require far more bleemcast discs than are in production (many games will probably never be emulated anyway), and at $5.95 per game it's practically more economical to buy a PlayStation 2 and use that for faster load times and improved visuals. The extras the PS2 can provide are very real, whereas bleemcast's claims are unproven. The funniest thing about all this though, is that ironically the system bleemcast emulates is still in production, whereas the one it emulates for is not. It looks like Sony won't have to do much to precipitate the downfall of bleem - their own greed has all but done that for them. Related Feature - The bleem! team

Source - IGN