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PS3's New Back-Compat Limit Outlined
We spoke last week about the EU version of the PS3 having a more limited backwards compatibility offering than its US and Japanese cousins. Now, via Gamespot, Sony's Phil Harrison has clarified what kind of support the machine will be offering. His comments in an interview on the 'semi-official' ThreeSpeech blog state that emulation of the PS2 won't be a huge barrier to backwards compatibility. "Our thinking involves being able to bring the latest hardware specification of the PS3 to Europe, although that does mean an initial slight reduction in the number of PS2 components. But it's important to put that into context: there will still be thousands of PlayStation and PlayStation 2 titles playable on the PS3 at launch ... The situation is changing every day, but on March 23, we expect the list to include over 1,000 PS2 titles." Harrison goes on to say that they'd likely be concentrating on 'big' titles, and that they generally don't consider back-compat very important in the grand scheme of things; in their view people buy the PS3 for new games, not old ones. If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, there's an opinion piece over at Next-Gen that completely agrees with Harrison's statement. Colin Campbell penned a missive entitled 'Why Sony is Right', and lays out what backwards compatibility looks great on the side of a box, but just isn't that big a deal.
I never had a PS2, and since none of the launch titles appealed to me I've been using my PS3 almost exclusively for PS2 games. I'm actually quite happy playing "old" games like DQ8 and FF XII that I've never had a chance to play before.
The PS2 compatibility was a huge selling point for me.
Having backwards compatability is a nice bullet point, but I don't think it's a major factor anymore. The only irony here is that when the 360 was first launched, Sony was making fun of the 360 for not providing full backwards compatability as it was based on software emulation and the PS3 had an edge with hardware emulation support, yet Sony is now following the 360's lead.
Don't want to sound like a fanboy, but, I thought Nintendo announced their BC first and then Sony and MS followed suite. Certainly in terms of implementation, the Wii has done BC considerably better than the other two.
Now perhaps the Wii is really just a GCN 1.5 still...
IMO the PS2 has the best games library ever (and yes, I go way back so I'm including NES, SNES, Genesis, etc). Until (if) the PS3 games library is so superior to the PS2 library that you'll never want to play one of those great old PS2 games, backwards compatibility is hugely important. It sucks that I have to keep an XBox 360 /and/ an XBox so I can play games like Panzer Dragoon Orta. It'll suck just as hard to have to have a PS2 and a PS3.
Furthermore, since the PS3 game library is so sad on its own, without the added weight of 'Well I can play my PS2 games on it, so what the hell' goes out the door. It is a great selling point this early in the system's life, even if 5 years down the road nobody will care.
[conspiracy theory on] Maybe leaking this is a desperate attempt to get first gen PS3s off the shelves so they don't embarrass Tretton any more. Suddenly they're much more desirable. [/conspiracy]