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Smaller Networked Sony "PStwo" Officially Announced

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-play-with dept.

Asriel86 writes "Tokyo Game Show has just kicked off, and with quite a bang. Sony just officially announced the PStwociting a stateside release date of November 1st, 2004. The system will be 25% smaller than the current model, will feature a sleeker design, and a built-in Ethernet port (no adapter required). Sony also says that there will be 120 new Playstation 2 games with online compatibility by the end of the year. That equates to thirty games per month or about one game per day for the rest of 2004."

8 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. new games by BoldAC · · Score: 5, Funny

    One hundred-twenty new online games before January? That equates to 30 games per month, or over one game per day until the end of 2004.

    Woop! I am totally calling in sick -- for the rest of the year.

    AC

  2. Hmm by Bigthecat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Sony also says that there will be 120 new Playstation 2 games with online compatibility by the end of the year." Developers are getting to the point on the PS2 where they've got to decide between creating a game that might be for a redundant system, or creating a game that might be ready for the new system's release. The change in status of the PS2 to the PStwo is symbolic, as it was for the PSone. It means that it's getting close to the end of it's lifecycle, which can only be downhill for developers.

  3. 75% by paradesign · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thats 75% smaller, not 25%. Its top loading as well. Check Gizmodo.com or engadget.com for better coverage.

    --
    I want 2D games back.
  4. The catch... by deminisma · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No hard drive bay, which means no Final Fantasy XI.

    Sort of similar to how they dumped the parallel port on later models of the original PlayStation, I suppose. It's interesting how support never really matierialised for the hard drive; but then again I can't think of an console expansion that has ever really flown in the marketplace.

    Squenix can't be thrilled though.

    1. Re:The catch... by Bigthecat · · Score: 5, Insightful
      "It's interesting how support never really matierialised for the hard drive; but then again I can't think of an console expansion that has ever really flown in the marketplace."

      Indeed. From the MegaCD, to the 32x, large updates to older gaming systems have ultimately been a failure.

      When it comes down to it, the one thing that console lovers always have over people who compare them to computers is the lack of requirement for the developer to account for every hardware configuration under the sun. Adding simple components and accessories is fine; an extra controller here, an add-on for a specific game (Such as the dance pad for DDR or various light guns for shotting games), but when you come out with extra components whose sole use is to enable the play of a few new games, this detracts from both the user and the developer. No longer can you run down to the videoshop and rent a game because it has PS2 written on it, the playerbase is split into who owns one and who doesn't, and then the gamebase is split into which games require the addon and which don't.

      That's not why people buy consoles. The current console doesn't have enough memory to play properly, such as with the memory expansion for the N64? There's a great new format to play games on, such as with the MegaCD? That's great, these are some pretty grounds for creating a new console. People buy new accessories for new features, such as the ability of large online multiplayer with the recent online additions to all consoles. Buying new parts for a console that does nothing new on it's own other than enable the gamer to play games they feel they're already entitled to since they purchased the system to begin with is boring, and ultimately feels like a ripoff.

  5. Dude... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The PS3 will be like another year at least, maybe another two years. We won't even see first *signs* of the PS3 until March of next year. There has been zero indication whatsoever, even in the deepest depths of the rumor mill, that any developers even have the option of developing for the PS3 available to them yet.

    Meanwhile unlike, say, XBox developers (and it does look possible the XBox2 may even be out before the PS3), PS2 developers have the comfort that their games will be compatible with the PS3 once it's released. For some time after the PS2 was released before the best-selling PS2 games were all PS1 games-- that's encouraging for developers of PS2 games.

  6. CONTEXT PEOPLE! by Fr05t · · Score: 5, Informative

    To the 50 - "blah blah blah how will they make 120 new games in 3 months, blah blah blah".

    Here is a copy of the offical press release: http://www.gamegossip.com/pressrelease.php?id=9959

    And if you don't want to RTFA:

    "During the year-end peak-selling season about 80 online game titles are expected to be available in Japan, with 120 titles and 65 titles respectively in North America and Europe. With the launch of the new network-ready(*2) PlayStation 2, the company expects to continually expand the world of online gaming in this generation."

    I almost prefer people just copying other peoples work when submitting a story to reading something out of context and passing it along to the masses.

  7. Re:Development Kit by tempmpi · · Score: 5, Informative

    A better development kit isn't going to fix that. PS2 developers can code in C++ and a higher level graphic sdk, but that isn't going to get them anywhere near good performance.
    The problem is the very ambitious architecture of the PS2. The GS (graphic synthesizer) got just 4mb of very fast ram. While that enabled Sony to have extremely high theoretical fill rate by embeding the RAM into the GS and connecting it with a 2560-Bit bus, it is also not nearly enough to store all the textures and the framebuffer. That results in the PS2 having to spend a lot of time transfering textures between GS and regular RAM. Because changing out the texture takes a lot of time, you need to order your triangles in a way that minimizes the texture changes, which is a lot of trouble and hurts performance for sure. The PS2 EE (the main CPU) also got just 16kb cache, which is clearly not enough. Memory access to stuff not in the cache is extremely expensive and the Rambus RAM with its high-bandwidth but also high-latency access profile isn't going to help. Because of that a PS2 coder needs to spend a lot of time on optimizing algorithms for ordered local data access and rewriting stuff in assembler to be able to fit the whole routine into the cache.

    A interessting document from Sony about PS2 performance is here: (PDF only sorry)
    http://www.scee.sony.co.uk/sceesite/files/presenta tions/PSP/HowFarHaveWeGot.pdf
    While marketing said 66 million polys/second, even after all these years the fastest real world Sony seems to know about is 125k polys @ 60 Hz, which translates into 7.5 million polys/second while the average recent game seems to do just 3 million polys/s
    Better SDKs aren't able to help here. The problem are hardware limitations. And while the hard-to-optimize-for design will sure enable programmers to squeeze out quite a bit of additional performance, but it will never be able to reach the real-world performance of XBox and Gamecube.
    And Sony even has better DevKits now, but as you can see their feature isn't C++ or something similiar to DirectX but instead tools to analyse how the cpus is stalled by cache misses etc.
    Imho the PS2 is similiar in design to the first Pentium 4, ambitious, marketing-driven design with very high theoretical peak performance but low real world performance.
    BTW: Gamecubes marketing is exactly the opposite, Nintendo claimed 7-12 million polys/second while one of their launch games 'Rogue Leader' was pushing 15 million polys/second in some scenes.

    --
    Jan