Blog FeedSony drop ball instead of bomb. Fanboys cry.
A rather lackluster press conference came to a shocking end, as first, Sony unveiled that the Dual Shock 3 has some of the functionality of the Wii controller (though not all) claiming this to be a major innovation, despite acknowledging that developers have only been aware of it for two weeks. It’s one thing to borrow an idea from a competitor, espescially when it’s a good idea, but to call it innovative and attempt to dodge the issue of where the inspiration came from, is more than a stupid move.
Then came the price point. $499 for a PS3 with a 20 gig hard drive. $599 for a PS3 with a 60 gig hard drive.
Talk about double ouch.
It wasn’t long until those ouches became even bigger ouches. The Dual Shock 3 has apparently sacrificied rumble functionality for the new motion sensing capability, though it seems much more likely that the feature has been dropped as a result of the on going court battle between Immersion, whose patents on controllers Sony have infringed.
Then, for a company that insulted it’s competitor for going with two different SKUs, the story of the $499 PS3 gets even more interesting, and even more tragic. While making the hard drive standard is something to be heralded, here’s what isn’t going to be standard.
Memory cards. HDMI. Built in wireless.
The last isn’t a big deal really, espescially given that Microsoft charge $100 for the priveledge of an official wireless adapter, but the others?
I’m not saying that the $499 PS3 doesn’t come with a memory card. No, that’d be standard. It doesn’t support them.
And no HDMI? That means 1080i output is as good as it’s going to get. Full resolution blu ray or games? Forget it… and blu ray films that studios don’t want showing in HD over analogue cables? Welcome to DVD resolution.
If anyone believed that 1080p at 60fps was going to be standard for games, I think it’s time to stop dreaming.
By Sony’s own words, the $499 model isn’t ‘true HD’, the PS3 has copied a ‘gimmick’ controller and ’stupidly’ comes in two SKUs.
The PS3 just saw to it that it won’t penetrate the market as quickly as the PS2 did. It’s going to take a handful of price drops before it’s appealing to the mainstream customer, and it’s going to be two hundred dollars more than it’s closest competitor and over twice the price of the Wii.
Sony still have a great chance at holding onto the market, but anyone who thought it was a no brainer needs to think again.
You only need to look at the desperation of the Sony fanboys, either slapped out of denial about it’s power (most of the games shown looked like high definition PS2 games, or higher quality 360 games) and it’s price point, or babbling like crazy people saying things like ‘you never know, maybe Sony were working on this controller before Nintendo’ with a straight face.
This year’s E3 was just handed to Nintendo on a plate, and it won’t take much for Microsoft to at least equal Sony’s rather slow and unimpressive show.
Sony put on a good show last year, albeit it filled with smoke and mirrors, that overshadowed Microsoft’s 360 launch. Microsoft were showing stuff running on dev kits, that paled in comparison to the pre rendered footage Sony showed, and this year, by using software running on dev kits, Sony’s hyperbole caught up with them.
In a stunningly bad move, the first game they demonstrated in real time was Gran Turismo HD, a version of Gran Turismo 4 running at 60 fps in 1080p, still using the same textures and models that the PS2 version used. The designer kept talking about how high the resolution of it was, and stated that it was running at ‘twelve times’ the resolution of GT4.
You’d think he’d remember that GT4 ran in 1080i. It wasn’t full resolution 1080i by any means, but it certainly wasn’t one twelth of the resolution of this.
Streamed over the internet you wouldn’t have known it was a next generation game, something sadly true of most of the games shown off. Again, Sony fans that had mocked the 360’s games as just being high definition versions of last years games, need to realise that the PS3 isn’t going to be any different for the time being. Genji 2 looked like a PS2 game. All the games using amazing physics, AI, and game changing effects, such as motorstorm, were conspicuous in their absence.
We saw no next gen gameplay, just prettied up graphics.
Even more amazingly, in Japan, Sony are not setting a price for the high end PS3. This would make sense if they weren’t setting a price for the low end PS3, but they are. Stores will be allowed to sell the proper PS3 for whatever they want, presumably in an effort to combat Ebayers and to combat shortages. It’s an intersting move, but not one you can do in halves.
The PS3 isn’t a disaster by any means, but frankly, it isn’t the console it was hyped to be, and it’s less than the console I expected it to be. Motion sensing functionality may not be as refined or advanced as the Wii is goinig to have and it’s a nice feature to put into the hands of the talented developers likely to be sticking with Sony, but the way it was unveiled left a sour taste in the mouth like nothing else.
If the PS3 is still going strong a year after launch, that’s probably about when I’ll be looking at buying one. If it’s reasonably priced much before then, then you can bet things aren’t going too well for it.
9th May | Reply
To be honest, ever since Nintendo announced the Revolution and indicated how it was going to differentiate itself from the rest of the market I have kinda nailed my flag to their banner. Prior to this I was voting for Sony because the PS3 sounded like a better thought out machine with higher specifications than the 360 which kinda sounded like a rush job to me. It should also be noted that I’m against Microsoft since their products only tend to play nicely with each other (more or less) and I expected Sony were more likely to be Apple-friendly, so the 360 was never really one for me.
Given the above I’m definitely no longer interested in the PS3. The lack of features isn’t that much of a concern but the price is. At this point in my life I don’t have the disposable income that I used to (put another way, I didn’t mind slapping these sorts of things on the credit card) and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend $499+ on a console. The ability to play high definition movies would have been one way to at least partially justify the cost but if that’s not going to be possible then frankly there’s no point in buying one. Since I am unlikely to be buying an HD television for some years I think I’ll just wait to see how the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray battle pans out and then buy a dedicated player rather than getting a PS3 now. If this is the only feature that is going to differentiate it from the competition then I’m going to side with Nintendo at a cheaper price in the hope that the games will be quirky and fun; I am not paying for a re-dressed PS2.
Seriously, you can take Solid Snake and place him in an uncomfortable place where the sun doesn’t shine that much.
9th May | Reply
I’ve never liked the idea of two SKUs, and I’ve never really had much interest in the Playstation, ever since the original. So, as you can imagine, I am pretty apathetic to everything Sony chooses to do with their new console. Out of the 3 next-gen platforms, it’s the only one I have already ruled out. The Xbox360 and Wii are both still pretty appealing to me.
9th May | Reply
That’s it, I’m going with Nintendo this time.
9th May | Reply
I think it’s worth remembering that people thought that Nintendo was the consensus winner of E3 2001 and 2002. I watched this press confrence and left more than a little bit unimpressed. The Big thing that really stuck in my head was how ridiculous the price was. The one game that really stuck out as particuarily cool to me was Resistance: Fall of man as Insomniac is one of the better developers for the PS2 and there switch from playable cartoon to gritty sci-fi FPS looks pretty cool. Especially after hearing about some of the weapons in it.
The biggest winner of the last two weeks of hype cycle has been PC gaming; and i’m really hoping for a big show for the beige boxes. I mean if you’re going to charge 400-600 dollars for a console that needs to be played on a 500 dollar tv, I’ll just stick to playing games on the PC, thank you very much. Nintendo or MS may have something amazing up there sleeve tommorrow but WOW:BC & 1.11, Dragon Age, NWN 2 C&C 3, UT 2k7, Sin, HL2:Ep1 etc. Sounds hot to me.
10th May | Reply
Resistance didn’t impress me, because it pretty much just looked like Call of Duty levels, with Strogg and Head Crabs. Given that stuff like Stranglehold is already showing off some nicely destructable environments, and given how well Black did it on the PS2, environments not reacting to anything just doesn’t really impress me. I know the PS3 is capable of much more, but all the impressive games that do stuff last generation couldn’t, were missing from the show. Where was Motorstorm with it’s splattering mud? Where was the Indiana Jones game with it’s physically aware and reactive AI? Where was Full Auto 2 with all it’s destructive buildings? The PS3 HAS games doing more than PS2 with better graphics, but thats all they chose to show off.
The most impressive thing I saw graphically was the Naughty Dog title. But then I think Naughty Dog could probably pull of normal mapping on a DS.
Oh and a small update. They’ve dropped the second HDMI port on the higher end model. At least that actually makes sense. Dual HDMI was never going to fly.
10th May | Reply
A-they wanted to show games that were playable so they had to pick stuff that were close to done.
B-Resistance fall of man didn’t impress me enough till i started hearing about the weapons in it. This Blog talks about some of the crazy weapons on it and some other stuff based on the games journos could play after the confrence I hope i managed that tag correctly
10th May | Reply
Motorstorm was running realtime on dev kits at GDC. LucasArts have Indiana Jones running real time though that might not yet be on PS3 dev kits. I’m not sure about the others, but Motorstorm was the main one that surprised me by no showing.
10th May | Reply
Oh nuts this makes me sad.
img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/RazzUK/image6me4rb3zp.jpg
10th May | Reply
Though the Wii sounds awesome, I think the same thing that has held the big N from being the number 1 system will do it again. Nintendo plays by their own rules. They release a couple of great games a year, but the rest is average. Before the 360 launch, you would get at least one game a month released for the PS2 and Xbox that would cause a stir. It might not be game of the year, but they were games worth buying (if not for $50, definitely for $20). The new controller almost guarantees that a lot of smaller third party companies are not going to bet their company on a system that isn’t playing to be number 1. They will have great games (and I’ll own one), but like the Cube, I don’t think it’ll be number 1.
I think Sony might be in for a slap in the face. I think they know that Blue-Ray won’t sell on its own. So, they are going to force it into the market by making video gamers pay the Blue-Ray tax (stole this from the cheapassgamer forums, not my term). I just wonder if gamers will do it. Some will pay anything, so $600 will get some takers. But, I have loved the PS1 and PS2, but I seriously wonder if I can pay this sort of price (or anything close to it). Especially since many of the Playstation games I love are third party games. I’ll wait for the next GTA to come to Xbox 360. I’m going to miss Final Fantasy until the price becomes more reasonable, but I can’t pay that when I can play Oblivion and have $200 in my pocket.
10th May | Reply
After watching both the Nintendo and Sony conferences I am kind of mehed about E3 results this year. Nintendo did a better job in terms of presentation but once we finally got to see some Wii games played I started to wonder exactly how “great” this motion sensing technology is.
When they played Warhawk for the PS3 I thought “Ok the obvious trouble he’s having with the controller is because sony just recently jumped on the bandwagon with it.” But then I saw the Wii titles, a console specifically designed from the get-go for this kind of controller and it seemed equally troublesome. The guy playing Red Steel was having a whole lot of trouble just getting around. Movement looked very clumbsy. I am wondering if games that use this tech are really going to have to dumb down the difficulty so that people can actually progress through them.
Frustrating controls are usually the biggest turn off for me. If I know what I want to do but I just can’t make my controller do it the game’s lifespan drops. Perhaps as the tech gets some experience behind it things will smooth out but I wouldn’t be shocked if a lot of the launch titles for both consoles are a little clumbsy or “tech demo-ish”.
To be realistic though I am not counting anyone out yet. Some of the PS3 trailers to hit have shown off that it can be quite a powerful system. I am still pretty certain I will own one of each (I am already quite thrilled with my 360) and it is interesting how seperate each console is. I don’t think there has ever been a time where the consoles were so drastically different from one another. The 360 at E3 last year did not impress me, however, I own more 360 games right now than I ever have (at any given time) for most of my consoles. I actually play it more than my PC at the moment.
I have faith in Sony, and hope for Nintendo. In the end we win, no?
10th May | Reply
I am also not sure how exhausting I want my video games to be.
10th May | Reply
I was pissed off about the Dual Shock 3 announcement, to the point of not wanting to purchase any more Sony products. Then I cooled off a bit and realized that the added functionality isn’t really the same as the Nintendo Wii.
The price point will be a huge barrier to entry for me. I was thinking this morning that maybe I’ll get a PS3 when it is $300, half the MSRP of the high-end model. Then I thought to myself: “Wait a second, I didn’t buy an XBox because I thought the price was a huge barrier to entry for me.” The price, of course, being $300.
I would have to wait for more than a 50% decrease in the price of the PS3 before I can realistically consider making that purchase. I will probably get a Wii and perhaps an XBox360. Astute observers will note that this particular combo costs as much as a PS3, to that I say: Incredibly more value and variety for the dollar with two consoles over just the one.
As far as games go, I’ve only watched trailers of the Wii games. To be perfectly honestly, I was smiling the entire time, I cannot wait to try out these games and the new controller. I’ve heard about what games were previewed by Sony and to be perfectly honest, I’m not all that interested. I’m going to have to go with Vermouth and say that, at least as far as high-end/graphics-intensive games are concerned, I’m much more interested in the PC.
To Holliday I say: I share your trepidation about the Wii. I’m a huge fan of Nintendo and I totally buy into their philosophy about what gaming should be. I find myself with less time to game and the Nintendo DS has proven many times over that it is a very fun and capable system to enjoy in the short bursts of time I commonly have available as well as for longer sessions that are harder to come by. This bodes well for the Wii.
On the other hand, I saw the same problems with movement on Red Steel that you did and I’m concerned. I know they are trying to implement a delay in turning to avoid motion-sickness, but it seems a bit groggy to me. Matt Cassamassina from IGN got some hands-on time with Metroid Prime: Corruption and has some concerns about the controls as well.
Metroid I’m not too worried about, as it isn’t a planned launch title. There is plenty of time to get that one right. However, Red Steel is going to be the public’s first shot at a genre that seems tailor-made for Nintendo’s new controller, if it isn’t nailed just right, it may wind up turning a lot of people off. If the game sucks, so be it, I just hope it doesn’t suck because it is nigh unplayable.
Anyway, as far as my gaming dollar is concerned, the large purchases are going towards an upgraded computer. The “minor” purchases will most likely be centered around a Wii, if the rumored prices of $250 or $200 are to be believed or the insane-o rumor of $0 + the purchase of four games, turn out to be true as well as with DS software.
Great article, as per usual around this parts.
12th May | Reply
I’m still waiting for any of the current generation products to truly seduce me. I’ve been thinking of getting a 360 but for all the wrong reasons: Hooking it up to my PC monitor and replaying the original xbox games.
14th May | Reply
I really am not sure what I am going to do with the next generation consoles. Thorughout Sony’s videogame life I have been a pretty much consistent supporter of their consoles. I only owned a PS1 in that generation, and my PS2 gets more playtime (and I own more games for it) than my Gamecube.
Before E3 the temptation was not to get any consoles at all this time round. My gaming time had dropped off, and I didnt know whether I really wanted to invest in games again. However, now I am not sure how things are going to pan out for me. Once again E3 has managed to tempt me into buying consoles, but mainly buying a Wii.
Nintendo, like it did with the Gamecube, has sucked me in with its games. The controller excites me yes, but I still fear that I will look like a berk playing it, and as Holliday says, it may be too much exertion. Looking at the games on offer though, I don’t know if I can turn it down. Super Mario Galaxies looks excellent, and possibly a return to the brilliance of Mario 64. Metroid Prime 3 will be as great as always, and Super Smash Brothers: Brawl looks like another success.
Also, even though I say that I am still not completly sold on the controller, E3 did a lot to allay many of my previous fears. The reception to the way it works has generally been positive (with a few minor hiccups that are to be expected as the games are not finished). Even with Twilight Princess, a game I thought I would definitly get on the Gamecube, I fear that I will be missing out on something if I do not play it on the Wii.
I’ll have to wait and see how I feel when it comes out.
15th May | Reply
A small update. Resistance had a second trailer on the floor at E3 which I caught by accident, which showed more of a horror slant. Dark subway tunnels and a third kind of alien that was tall and spindly and rather creepy. I tracked down a demo of that level, and played that and it was a blast. I still don’t think the idea is that interesting, but at least now I’ve seen that the controls are tight, the ai decent and there are some interesting things in there. Just a bad trailer at the Sony conference.
Motorstorm was playable on the floor also, and was fun. Obviously looking nothing like the trailer from last year, it’s still a nice looking game, and the way the mud trails splatter and set is still impressive. Could do with a bit of tweaking sense of speed wise, didn’t feel fast enough, but apart from that it was shaping up nicely.
I’ll hammer out some hands on impressions with the Wii controller soon.