Pros: Even way back when, Insomniac games were awesome.
Cons: No cons to Spyro, he is as fun today as he was then.
The bottom line: Spyro is one Playstation One game that holds up to the test of time.
PS3 is awesome. While playing Ratchet and Clank Future, my son and I thought about how far video games had come. EA games may be one of the biggest studios, but to us, Insomnniac was always one of our favorites. Way back, before their fantastic Ratchet and Clank series, Insomniac brought us an awesome purple dragon named Spyro. It was one of the most memorable games on Playstation One.

While online at the Playstation Store we came across a cool feature. You can download old Playstation Games to your PS3 console! We saw our old pal Spyro for $5.99 and couldn't resist. Spyro was our first introduction to Insomnia that produced some of the finest looking games on Playstation 1 2 and 3. D(on't ever get the Spyro games not made by Insomnia, they weren't the same. )

Let Me Refresh Your Memory!

Spryo was a baby dragon who has to save the world of dragons from Gnasty Gnork. (The G is silent). You see, Gnasty froze all the dragons and turned all the dragons treasure into baddies!. Spyro can't quite fly (expect in select worlds on each level), but he can glide like nobodies business! He could also flame his enemies or just butt into them with his horns. The little purple guy with red wings and golden horns still rocks today.

The game is what we gamers call a Platformer. Spyro was not very linear however, in each level you could travel to a handful of worlds in whatever order you chose, and each world was very three dimensional. You had to find and time jumps and glides just right to get to all the areas in each level.

Your goal was to smack into all the bad guys and turn them back into gems, and open up treasure chests to get more gems. You also had to free all the dragons that are frozen like ice sculptures. Despite being a PS1 game, the characters would talk, even if there wasn't a lot of dialogue, you got enough to guide you through the game. Each rescued dragon would give young Spyro some much needed advice. A running tally will show you at a button tap how many gems you had in a world, and how many you needed to collect, as well as dragons freed and dragons remaining. For a perfect score you also had to catch pesky egg thieves, one of the more challenging tasks of the game.

Along with Spyro was a trusty firefly who helped Spyro out as long as you kept him fed with butterflies.

The worlds Spyro travels through are as colorful as he is. Each level had one flying world in which you had to fly through rings, and collect treasures. Most of the worlds in each level had its own theme and monsters. You had to figure out how to get to each section of the various worlds to collect every last gem. Desert worlds, fairy tale like worlds, island worlds and ice worlds are all there for Spyro to explore and restore, until the final showdown with Gnasty Gnork. You would need to collect so many gems from each level for the friendly balloon man to take you to the next level.


How is Spyro Holding Up These Days?

You know what? Spyro still looks good even on the big screen in the days of Hi Def. The simple but brilliant color scheme makes it work, so Spyro still looks very good as a game! He looked and sounded great. The simple sound scheme for the game brought back instant memories for my son and I, we had spent hours playing the Spyro games. I don't even know where my old PS1 games are anymore, so this was worth downloading. Plus on the PS3, I don't need a memory card!

Now with PS3, you can download the game to your harddrive, and you can also use your USB cable and port this onto your PSP harddrive and play on the go. New things come along all the time, but some will stand the test of time.

Spyro the Dragon is one game that has stood the test of time, and it was as fun to replay today as it was when it came out on Playstation and represented the cutting edge of graphics.

Summary

Take a trip back into time, before numbers came after Playstation models, before X-Box came out, before High Definition was even thought of. Go back and play a game of Spyro the Dragon. Even in today's high def world, Spyro gets a solid five stars.