PS3 Details From Sony Game Day

Gamespot has up the record of a liveblog from yesterday's Sony Game day event. They dish a medium-sized helping of dirt, with information like controller price ($50), first-party title price ($60), what is actually in the box, launch window titles, and a bit on what the online experience will offer. From the article: "2:04 p.m.: Hirai says the final boxed product is rolling off the assembly lines as we speak. Then he shows the retail packaging. He says they will have 22 launch-window titles, including games like FEAR, Call of Duty 3, Full Auto 2, Genji: Days of the Blade, NBA Live 07, NBA 2K7, NHL 2K7, Rainbow Six Vegas, Tony Hawk's Project 8, Untold Legends, and Riiidge Racer 7. (Yes, he said 'Riiidge.')" Meanwhile, 1up has some details on the PS3's pre-order status in Japan ... if you're curious. As well you might be, because importing a PS3 is illegal, doncha know.

Comments

Excuse me while my eyes bug out

[AKAImBatman]

Riiidge Racer 7. (Yes, he said 'Riiidge.')

It's good to know they're not taking themselves too seriously. That's something, at least. :)

What "launch window titles" really means

[falcon5768]

That they are not actually comming WITH the launch but possibly weeks later, within the 2 month holiday season.

I seriously think Sony is going out of it's way to fuck this up, its too comical at this point for them not to be trying at screwing up the launch.

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[badasscat]

I seriously think Sony is going out of it's way to fuck this up, its too comical at this point for them not to be trying at screwing up the launch.

(rolls eyes)

What you're basing this on is the rants of fanboys - whether they be random people posting in forums and comments, or those posing as "journalists" and writing actual articles. There's really no distinction apart from some possibly better grammar.

The proof is in the pudding. The PS3 is out there. It's playable - it was playable at TGS, and it's sitting right now in Sony's building in Ginza in Tokyo. Anyone can walk in and play Minna no Golf and Gran Turismo in full HD on one of Sony's new 1080p Bravia displays. No need to listen to the inane ramblings of those who have never experienced the system anymore.

When you play the system, all your doubts melt away. I remember thinking "wait a minute, what are the supposed problems with this system again?"

The price is an absolute thing, true - even after giving the system a try, that doesn't change. But what does change is your perception of it. The PS3 is, at the moment, a luxury item, and it feels it - when you see it hooked up to a 60" Bravia LCD playing both games and Blu-Ray movies at 1080p, you start to get it. It is not even intended to be a mass market system yet.

And I think that's fine for now, given that there will only even be 400,000 units at launch. Remember the iPod in 2001? A lot of people said it was ridiculous to charge $400 for such a device. But it worked, and the price has gradually come down and the iPod itself made more of a commodity. That will happen with the PS3 too.

But to play a PS3 is to lust after a PS3. You will want one. Whether you can afford it yet or not is another matter, but I don't think that's really relevant to Sony's strategy, and I don't see anything about this launch that they've "fucked up".

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[ShadowsHawk]

"But to play a PS3 is to lust after a PS3." Three points. 1. My PC has been doing 'HD' for years. 2. My desire simply does not justify the cost. 3. Seven of the nine games listed are ports or sequels. I certainly can afford the PS3, but I simply don't believe that I would get $600 of fun out of the machine.

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[oc255]

Your PC is below the PS3. Please realize this. Full HD is 1920x1080p. You cannot (even with magic books) play Oblivion on a PC at full quality with all the fancy blinky stuff at this resolution. The PS3 will, for a time, trump everything that the PC has whether you assembled the pre-fab parts or not.

As far as the 360, it's more bad design. And before you flame me, ask "do I want to fast-forward MP3s on a $400 console?". The 360 can't do that and there's no goddamn good reason. It's MS. It's disconnect and it's not the center of my living room if it can only skip MP3's, no rewind, no fast-forward. Some things are nice, as usual, but they miss the polish or sell the polish in MCE edition.

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[Baldrash]

I felt exactly the same way when the PSP came out. Then I bought it, and the drought of good games has relegated it to dust collector status. Both the PSP and PS3 are impressive technically, but without worthwhile games (which we haven't seen much of, except White Knight) it's just going to leave most gamers cold.

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[revlayle]

This may be redundant... but the iPod did not require third party software to use. You could put MP3s that you had on it it and go and use it anywhere. PS3 will require software/games to sell it (i know it can browse the web and play music and videos, not the main selling point i think - even then, this may apply to Blu-Ray movies to a degree, also), and if it takes too long to adopt, the software developers will pull out because they aren't making profits from developing for the system.

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[oc255]

If you have a Geforce 7950 Quad SLi setup you could easily play any game at 1920x1080 @60fps and probably could have 16xAF and 16xAA going at the same time...

Ok, good point. Let's go shopping!

- 7950GT from Newegg (times 4) = $1200
- We need a LCD monitor that can do 1920. Let's go with a Dell 24" = $1,199
- Quad pci-e motherboard = $200
- I'll assume we have a nice CPU and assume that we have nice memory that plays nice on the new chipset

Ok, we're at $2599 at the best. But then we have a PC that we can do other things with, like Folding @ Home. Oh wait, that only runs on ATI cards. Ok, well to avoid flaming anymore ... I guess it comes down to a few things:

- PCs are general purpose machines that don't compete with new consoles.
- Economies of scale, standard parts make consoles amazing bang-per-buck devices.
- PCs have advantages over consoles in many respects but not in "just play" features.
- People say their PCs do 1920. Maybe they have a really nice, old CRT? Maybe they have a 24" LCD?

The PS3's GPU is probably similar to a Geforce 7800GTX
Please source this. I say that the PS3's architecture is completely different from a PC in no comparable format except real-world tests that aren't even available yet. At the very minimum, people who have seen the PS3 in person running at 1080p have said it's "amazing and fluid". I haven't seen it yet.

How do you design a game that can run on a Pentium 4 2GHz with a Radeon 9800 and still take advantage of a the high end system I described?
You detect for card features, card model, opengl/dx version and whatever else you can:
if (glGetString(GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION) == "shiny happy version") {
  enableBlinkyBlinky();
}

or what-not. But I think what you were trying to hit on is the question of supporting change. Which is the advantage of consoles. Me, personally, I do other stuff than games so I try to put my money into my PC. However, very rarely have I seen this so-called upgradability. I put in a new video card and then fork-lift the whole thing:

- Changing CPU vendors for the best-of-breed CPU means a new PC-stack (mb,memory)
- Going from PCI to PCI-E means a new PC-stack (mb,memory,maybe cpu)
- Going from integrated intel 945 to something that runs Vista's Aero might mean any of the above.

As usual, there are trade-offs. But simply saying "upgradability of PC" doesn't always work out in practice. The way it's worked for me and my friends:

- New PC
- One new videocard upgrade that fits in XYZ slot
- Completely new PC because majority of old parts need to be replaced completely.

And to further illustrate the real point is, PCs are more iterative.
- New Console
- New PC
- One new videocard upgrade that fits in XYZ slot
- Completely new PC because majority of old parts need to be replaced completely.
- New Console ... If you were to keep up with the technology. Ah whatever, time will tell. Enthusiasts don't run anything. Dreamcast was a better system and the PS2 won (much to the anger of many). The Wii might be a better system, who knows what will happen. Certainly, the "Emotion Engine" was overhyped. But in reality, it delivered more than the PC did (for a while).

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[Ender Ryan]

1600 * 1200 pixels == 1,920,000 pixels

1920 * 1080 pixels == 2,073,600 pixels

Almost the same number of pixels.

Why would it be scaled? How many games produce graphics in a target resolution and then scale? The only considerable difference here is the aspect ratio. That's it.

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[Osty]

Yes, a common argument. I dunno, I bought a TV in 2001 that does 1080p for $2k. It's lasted me for 5 years, it's not the best. However, even Oblivion looks good at 1024x768. It's sometimes not the quantity of pixels that matters but the quality that matters. My same TV plays the PS2 and Gamecube at 1080p but the 360 looks better. Same TV.

What TV is this that was doing 1080p years before the first 1080p sets hit the market (2003) that actually accepts a 1080p signal, and has HDMI+HDCP connections years before HDMI 1.1 was even released (2004)? Perhaps you meant 1080i?

Also, PS2 and Gamecube don't do 1080p, so your TV is either switching to a 480p mode (for a CRT) or scaling them to the native resolution (LCD, DLP, LCoS, Plasma) at the risk of introducing lag.

Re:What "launch window titles" really means

[HappySqurriel]

I don't think the intention of the previous post was that you could produce a PC that outperforms the PS3 for the same cost as the PS3, but more that there is an annoying habit of fanboys who think that the PS3 is magic and can outperform anything. Now, being that the PS3 doesn't come with an HDTV, and CRT monitors that support 1920x1280 are readily availabe and inexpensive I don't see your point of including a high end, large LCD monitor in the PC price; $250 could easily buy a 17 inch monitor that supports these resolutions.

Please source this. I say that the PS3's architecture is completely different from a PC in no comparable format except real-world tests that aren't even available yet. At the very minimum, people who have seen the PS3 in person running at 1080p have said it's "amazing and fluid". I haven't seen it yet.

IIRC the PS3's GPU has a similar architecture to most readily available graphics cards produced by Nvidia; as a guess, I would say that it was probably a PC GPU that was under development 18-24 months ago that had most of the Legacy support removed from it to keep development costs down. The fact is that the PS3's GPU at best would be similar to the best single GPU graphics card that Nvidia offers, because if Nvidia could produce a better GPU today they would put it on a circuit board and sell it for $500 and advertize how much better their card was then what ATI was producing; if they could produce a sigle GPU which outperformed their SLi setup they would put it on a card and sell it for $700 and advertize that a single card outperformed ATI's crossfire solutions.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you think you'll recieve dramatically better performance from the PS3 than you would from a PC with a decent CPU and good Graphics card I would expect to be disapointed. Consoles (typically) produce great performance for the price, but they're still bound to the same laws of physics that a PC is (and usually consoles have very strict cost/heat/space requirements that a PC doesn't have).

Maybe...

[Bananatree3]

Maybe in a while when the price goes down from 500+ will I take a look at it.

Re:How is it possible?

[MeanderingMind]

Because contrary to popular belief, Zonk isn't biased against the PS3?

This isn't the first and it won't be the last time Zonk posts news about the PS3 without bashing it. It's been stated before and I'll stated again that Zonk can only post what news on the PS3 there is, not what news there isn't. If 90% of that news is bad, which it was for a very long time, he's just the messenger. Shooting him doesn't change what other people report.

Attacking Zonk is as popular around here as predicting the "inevitable" death of Sony. Both are silly pursuits.

Re:How is it possible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he have to?

Look at the games that were listed "FEAR, Call of Duty 3, Full Auto 2, Genji: Days of the Blade, NBA Live 07, NBA 2K7, NHL 2K7, Rainbow Six Vegas, Tony Hawk's Project 8, Untold Legends, and Riiidge Racer 7" Which game there is exclusive and of high enough quality to encourage you to buy a $500/$600 PS3?

No Imports Allowed

[poormanjoe]

They will disturbe our entire ecosystem, or realase to much CO2.
 
  God Bless America, and free trade that we are allowed.

Title

[Fozzyuw]

Is it just me, the fact that I'm not much of a Sony fan (I only bought a used PS2 a month ago, but I do enjoy the games I'm playing), but I'm not exactly interested in the titles they're offering up? Untold Legends? I had the first one on the PSP and it was traded in

Of course, I've been pretty negative about the PS3 with it's high price and undesired hardware (HD output and blue-ray, though I like the Blue-Ray more than HD-DVD), but being a person who dislikes sports titles on video games (Techmo SuperBowl is the only game I ever truely enjoyed), I AM actually intersted in the Wii sports package... which, by the way, comes with the system. I dunno, maybe I'm not into the NCAA, FIFA, NFL, NHL titles. The sports games I enjoyed (with the exception above) where always 'generic' leages, like "Basebase All-Stars" for the NES or that old NES hocky game, "Blades of Steel" I think it was called? Oh, "Double Dribble" was fun, but I don't recall if it used real 'teams' or not.

Anyway, I'm not impressed with this line-up so far.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Importing is illegal?

[Maul]

So let me get this straight.

1. Go to Japan.
2. Buy a bunch of PS3s legally.
3. Offer to sell these PS3s I purchased legally on my web page to international customers.
4. Resell the PS3s to people outside of Japan.

I fail to see how this is illegal, per say. I'm a bit confused.

Re:Importing is illegal?

[Thansal]

You and me both.

Aparently they won a suit against Lik-Sang, however mabey there is something going on there, like any one that orders from Sony wholesale signs an agreement to not sell out of their region.....

Either way, it is crazy.

Forget the Games.. It runs Linux!!!

[Zarniwoop_Editor]

Forget what games it comes with.
With it running linux I think it may be a nifty way to get a cheap cell platform to play with.
The price may be a bit high for a game console but it's a dirt cheap, screaming fast Cell based platform to have some fun with.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/ yellow-dog-linux-designed-for-playstation-3-208902 .php

PS3 - An opportunity for Sony OS???

[aJester]

I just had this thought... more along the lines of random musings.
I apologize if someone had already discussed this :)

PS-3 would actually be a good vehicle for Sony to introduce its own OS .. a la-Apple. coz they will rightaway have a HUGE marketshare.
And they can sell higher priced hardware (Vaios etc) using the same OS, which means that games written for PS3 that does NOT use PS3 specific hardware feature would work on the Sony PCs.

If Sony had bought, BeOS, which I hear has low latency and was made from the ground up for Multi-media, they may have had an OS which is mostly done. They just need to tune it for their PS3.

Disclaimer: I do not know too much about BeOS. So you can replace that with your fav OS, like Amiga, Plan9 or whatever. I mentioned BeOS coz I seem to remember reading that it was called a Media OS.

Any thoughts......

Jester

Re:PS3 - An opportunity for Sony OS???

[Cheapy]

SonyOS: Crackers won't trojan you, we already have.

Re:PS3 - An opportunity for Sony OS???

[DrXym]

The PS3 can run Linux so it already has its own OS. It's not clear if Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is the official Linux for the PS3, but it's still a pretty awesome to see it at all. The FAQ even says you can download it for free (though paying for it gets you updates). Interestingly YDL has a Cell SDK and cluster management software. So you really could build a Beowulf cluster of these.

Details are pretty light so far. I'd like to know if YDL runs alongside the PS3 cross bar media interface, resides in it, or what.

Re:How is it possible?

[Manmademan]

Resistance: Fall of Man is absent from your list but is widely considered to be the system seller at launch.

Online + Talladega Nights

[thatguywhoiam]

The most surprising details to me were how finished the much-questioned Playstation Store and online service are. I was fully expecting this to be the flimsiest part of the PS3 offering but it actually seems quite solid. (And I love, love love that Cross Media Bar interface. The X360 dashboard is nice until you have a zillion items that you must grab out of a pull-down menu; then its pure hell.)

Also I think throwing a bluray copy of Talladega Nights into the box - a month ahead of the film's actual release - is quite clever. Let people see what bluray is, if they are lucky enough to have a TV that can play HD. This was a popular promo for the PSP.

Anyone have more details of PSP-to-PS3 functionality? I've read numerous 'possibilities', the remote feature, and the stuff about downloading PS1 games to PSP via PS3, but what about streaming movies etc?

Slightly OT: Yellow Dog Linux for PS3?

[thatguywhoiam]

I submitted this, but Zonk didn't post it. I would think it would be a big deal; perhaps I'm missing some detail.

He's the Ars Technica article: Yellow Dog Linux for PS3 Announced

If we get YDL for PS3, does this not mean we can write homebrew software for it? It just seems to change the equation a bit. A $600 game console is expensive, but a $600 multicore Linux PC that can do HD, Bluray and a bunch of other interesting tricks is a lot more interesting...

Re:Slightly OT: Yellow Dog Linux for PS3?

[gstoddart]

I submitted this, but Zonk didn't post it. I would think it would be a big deal; perhaps I'm missing some detail.

He's the Ars Technica article: Yellow Dog Linux for PS3 Announced

Don't know when you posted it to Zonk, but this was posted on Monday.

For once, maybe the editors prevented a duplicate.

Cheers

Re:Damn it.

[Clever7Devil]

I thought you guys didn't mind...

Re:How is it possible?

[IpalindromeI]

How is it a dig? Sony did sue Lik-Sang over importing, even though it was perfectly legal.

How is it irrelevant? This article concerns the PS3 launch, which will be happening a few months later in Europe than elsewhere, and people might have been considering importing it. Now they might not be able to because of Sony's actions. Seems relevant to those who might've wanted to import, no?