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Sony - PS2 Until 2010, First PSP Game Demo?
ack154 writes "Reuters has a good article from the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, explaining how Sony is planning to milk PS2 sales until 2010. They see a lot of potential still down the road. Also mentioned at the conference was that Sony has no plans to speed up PS3 development based on the next Xbox system. There was also an emulated demo of a game for the upcoming PSP handheld." Elsewhere, GameSpy has a more detailed write-up of the same GDC keynote, and 1UP.com has in-depth information on programming the PSP from another GDC lecture. Update: 03/26 14:31 GMT by S : 1UP has added a streaming movie of Death Jr., the PSP game demonstrated, to its coverage of the keynote.
6 years ago was 1998.
I was using a 200 mhz pentium, playing games on my Playstation 1, and surfing the internet on a 28.8 baud modem, and I think I had a Voodoo 2 graphics accelerator card.
6 years from now.. who knows what I will be doing. But there is no way I will be sitting around playing a PS2.
In 1998 I had a 400MHz P2 and was within a few months of stripping my Voodoo 2 cards out of my system (and had already replaced one that fried from the heat of the SLI setup). I had cable internet access, and had only been using 28.8 before that because my parents' ISP didn't support 33.6.
On the other hand, I still play PS1 games almost as much as PS2 games, though I play them on a PS2. I've probably bought more PS1 games since the PS2 was released, but I can't say for sure because I sold a lot of my PS1 games with my PS1 (most of them were pretty horrible games).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Hey, it worked for cripping the Dreamcast...
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Even if Sony doesn't push the PS3 faster, they should consider a PS2.5 box, no change to the CPU or GPU hardware, but have a build in HDD, network adapter, multitap, and/or better memory card system. Maybe update the firmware to fix some of the DVD viewing problems that also exist (esp. with multilayer DVDs). Heck, if they use a good size HDD (60g+), they could build a PVR unit easily off the PS2 base, sell this PS2.5 for $200-250, drop the PS2 to $150, and stay competive on hardware for the Xbox(2) and GC. Just give the consumer something that shows maybe a taste of what the PS3 will have and work from there.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Sold? Heck, the still get made, too, you know.
Nintendo still made profit selling the Famicom and Super Famicom in Japan until September 2003. Not much, but they didn't mass produce the console.
I didn't see anywhere where Sony said they'd sell the PS2 in the US six years from now, and Japanese gamers aren't as vain as US gamers. FDS games are still developed and sold there. Try selling an 8-bit game in the US and see how fast you get laughed out of the country.
Reading through those articles i noticed a couple of things 1) Rumor that a psp and ps2 will be able to link up 2) gfx power is about equal between ps2 and psp 3) Porting to psp is very easy 4) PS2 sales are expected to extend into 2010 (don't worry, i am getting to my point here shortly) Basically what i am getting at is that Sony is going to use the psp to drive sales of the ps2 (although i doubt it will stay in its current form..they will probably redesign it like they did with the ps1). Why do i think that? Glad you asked. With other handheld gaming systems the power discrepancy is always so huge between the home gaming machine and the handheld (look at Gameboy advanced and the gamecube) there wasn't much possibility for a game that you could play on the move and that you could sit down in front of your t.v. and waste a couple of hours. I think nintendo tried doing that with some of the pokemon games but i am not sure on that so someone please correct me if i am wrong. Anyways my point is that the PS2 and PSP look like an electronic peanut butter and jam. Why wouldn?t a game developer develop for both platforms especially since it is supposedly very easy to do and both platforms have similar capabilities. I think this is why sony is saying that the PS2 will remain viable until 2010 peace
--I swear, it was a case of isolated idiopathic hemibalissmus
I am a huge Xbox fan, and even I can see that this strategy of overlapping systems and backwards compatibility is why Sony has dominated the market. I wonder, why can't Microsoft or Nintendo* see this? *I realize Nintendo uses this strategy with great success with the Gameboy(s), why can't they adapt it to their consoles as well?
Play a DC and PS2 game side-by-side and I think you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference
Actually, DC games look way better than PS2 games, I even think the image quality looks as good as the Xbox.
The PS2 triangle rasteriser is an absolute piece of shit. It supports about two blending modes - and doesn't even support anti-aliasing, bilinear filtering or MIP mapping. A 3Dfx Voodoo 1 graphics accelerator was more technically advanced.
The DC used a hybrid tile rendering system that severly helped deal with overdraw in complex scenes. It was effectively performing visibility determination without having to render polygons that would have been overdrawn with a traditional rasteriser. Hence it needed the 8MB video memory to store a bit of data about each tile on the screen. But this did mean that it was way ahead of it's time when it came to rendering speed and quality.
The Playstation's success is due to nothing more than the triumph of marketing bullshit. They have vastly inferior products that do the absolute bare minimum.