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Sony Displays New PSP, Polished Games At E3
Sony had a lot to prove coming into this event, and kicked off on a high note. The PlayStation 2 is still selling units, and the PSP's numbers are apparently up as well. They followed that with the news of a new version of the PlayStation Portable. It's slimmer, lighter, has a longer battery life, and the ability to connect directly to your television to display video and games. There was a good deal of discussion about upcoming PSP titles, some of which are connected to a PSP bundle. Pushing out the PS3, they show several PlayStation Store titles, included the fascinating-looking Echochrome . Moving onto the Home service they discussed cellphone and website tie-ins to the Home service, as well as the ability to launch games from directly within the Home environment. Referencing the price cut, they reveal sales have already gone up. NCSoft, Epic, and Ubisoft are all referenced as heavy backers of the PlayStation, with a tantalizing statement suggesting that user-created mods for Unreal Tournament will be coming to the console via the Playstation Network. A lengthy Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer and a statement that the game is only for the PS3 (still to be determined), due early in 2008, cap off the third-party section. First-party titles show all of the highlights of Sony's portfolio with the LittleBigPlanet trailer emphasizing creation rather than play, and their Heavenly Sword highlight showcasing the game's story for the first time. A new sandbox title with a morality component was announced, InFamous, as was a new chapter in the Gran Turismo series. The press conference wrapped with a gripping trailer for Killzone 2, completely running in real-time.
I hope it's running in real real-time and not just real time like the previous trailer at last year's E3. Because as real as time was at the time, the demo wasn't very real, just based on what they believed would be real.. at the time.
I think it gives them some credibility when they talk about their ten year product cycle for the PS3. If the PS2 is still receiving new games and versions of games that aren't showing up on the previous generation consoles of their competitors they can point to this and how they stand behind their product. The fact that the PS2 is outselling all other consoles short of the Wii and still has content being developed for it is amazing considering that we're over a year into the next generation.
I think you're just muck racking and naysaying, trying to proclaim the death of Sony when you don't have anything of real substance. If you want to suggest that Sony is failing at least offer something more than a shot at the success and continued viability of the PS2 as a platform.
Have you ever actually watched a movie on your PSP?
I've watched hundred of hours of movies and TV shows on my PSP.
Air travel + PSP + movies (on a memory stick) = Heaven.
No need for a laptop in your carryon means you can "sail" through security. The instant on/off is wonderful as well. You can use it while actually standing in line. One 4Gig stick will hold an entire season of a television show plus a movie or two.
You get good battery life (a little under three hours) because it's not hitting the UMD, but for longer flights you can get: a USB battery box and a USB charging cable. It will suck down batteries (but this setup allows the brightest screen mode) but work like a charm. I went through 16 AA's on a 24 hour flight once.
Oh yeah, I also rest it on the treadmill in front of me while running. I've lost 10 pounds when I never had the patience before. No physical media = no skipping.
I just kick myself for waiting a year to get one. It is by far the best video player available and Sony has marketed it INCREDIBLY poorly.
Never played a UMD though. Those are a waste of money IMO.
The first and more important fact is that the hardware is powerful enough on both the 360 and the PS3 that you can get more payback for good artistic direction and heavy technical investment than ever before. The 360 and the PS3 will both respond very nicely to extravagantly expensive development budgets, and the skill of the developers and artists working on the average game will probably make much more difference in the quality of the results than any differences between the hardware will.
That said, and while the 360's graphics chip is probably superior to the PS3's, the PS3 was designed to have the Cell and RSX working together in a very close fashion. Killzone 2 is being developed with a deferred renderer, in which the Cell can overlay lighting calculations on top of the rendered polygons, rather than having all of that be always done with the RSX. Lair is using the Cell to do dynamic winnowing down of the in-game geometry to present only the essential data to RSX, while continuing to animate everything with high fidelity. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is using Cell to do very ambitious dynamic animation blending on the main characters.
Between Cell and RSX, you can do awful lot on PS3, but you have to develop the games for it, and the kind of distributed programming required to harness 8 distributed processing cores (1 PPU, 6 SPU, 1 RSX) takes a lot of time and money to do, and straightforward ports from 360-style DirectX games won't necessarily show what the PS3 can really do to best advantage.
The PS3 has another advantage with the Blu-Ray disc, as it has over 5 times more on-disc storage than the 360 has (though at the cost of a reduced maximum transfer speed). That can help allow for more extravagant level budgets, especially in titles that support streaming audio and graphics loading.
The bottom line is, we've not begun to see the best of what either the 360 or the PS3 will be capable of. The good news is that Sony is making a big enough push that they might get enough purchasers of their console that the budgets will have a chance to continue to be there to make these amazing games.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX