Backwards compatibility, my ass

Backwards compatibility, for me anyway, has never been a strong selling point on a console. I don't get rid of my old systems, so if I ever felt the urge to boot up the original cartridge of TMNT: the Arcade game, I could; assuming I wanted to go to the trouble of hooking up my NES and cleaning both it and the game first. The point is, it's there, should I want to.

Like I said, I never really gave backwards compatibility a second thought until this weekend. Justin came over, and wanted to play some Bushido Blade 2 (which is, arguably, the best fighting game ever. I mean, ninjas and swords and one hit kills? Badass, man) for the PS1. Hey, whaddya know, my PS2 is backwards compatible, so I don't have to pull my PS1 out and hook it up.

So we were playing, trading off against the CPU, and unlocked some secret characters. At the end of the story mission, it asked if we wanted to save. Of course. The PS2 looked for the memory card, and then popped up with, "Memory card was removed." No, it wasn't. It had been there the whole time. I thought maybe it didn't like the PS2 memory card, so I dug out one of my old PS1 cards and tried again. "Memory card was removed." Bullshit, mother fucker. So I didn't save, and went to the memory card manager, thinking there might not be enough space on the card. Nope, that wasn't the problem, either.

So, even though Sony hyped the shit out of the PS2 being backwards compatible (the first console to do so, if I remember correctly, although I believe Nintendo might have beat them to the punch in the overall market with their handheld Game Boy something or other), it's really not. Why should I bother playing a PS1 game on my PS2 if I can't save my fucking progress?

Here's what really pisses me off, though: there are PS1 emulators for the PC that are capable of saving my progress just fine. Emulators, that, might I add, a group of folks coded in their spare time, for no money. Why did Sony bother paying their employees to emulate their PS1 poorly when they could have payed people that would have done the job right?