the 16-bitter

Those who know me and know my writings won't think this list is that much of a departure. The PS3 has been giving me chills for the longest time, and it is very unsettling to know that a console maker has completely lost sight of the gamer in the process of dominating all forms of media. I hope the gaming population is as fed up with Sony's crap as I am, so they'll finally take a hint and butt out of the industry.

8. No must-own titles
Very few consoles actually pull this one off at launch, but at this moment I don't see anyone spending $600 to throw down on Resistance. The launch-lineup was particularly weak for the PS3, and games aren't coming out fast enough to keep gamers interested. Many people purchase the PS3 in anticipation of a few titles, namely Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy MCVILLIXXCMVII or what not, but as we're going to find out, many third party developers, even ones who have been true to Sony in the last two generations, aren't going with the PS3. So far, the only title worth anything is Resistance, and I'm afraid that's not going to be enough to push consumers to empty their wallets. Perhaps one will come soon, but for now, early adopters of the PS3 are the unlucky ones.

7. Installs
One of the benefits of console gaming over PC gaming was that there was never an install necessary to play and enjoy a game. Just pop the disc in, and you're off. Not so with the PS3. Sure, you have the option in every case that's appeared so far, but when the alternative is a poor loading speed I bet many gamers will choose to take up a bit of their hard drive to play a more efficient Ridge Racer. The problem is, even if you are able to sell a kidney to afford the "budget" model of the PS3 with the 20 gig hard drive, the installs are around 5 gigs themselves. So you can only play four games without horrible loading times before you either have to do an install or buck up and wait for the game to load. The 360, on the other hand, needs no reason to have installs, as its DVD drive is faster than the PS3's Blu-Ray drive by almost double, and the 360 has more ram to store whatever data is coming in. So, while 360 users can fill their hard drive with music, movies, and retro game downloads, PS3 owners will find that they're managing hard drive space a little tighter.

6. Backward-compatibility problems
As racketboy just illustrated, the PS3 is having some graphical problems when playing PS2 and PSX games. Apparently the PS3 upscales the graphics, but somehow in the process the PS3 brings out the worst in it's older sister. Jaggies, which have been a 'problem' with Sony's hardware in the past, are brought out in full swing. In fact, they look horrible. It's amazing that Bleem! and Bleemcast! were able to make PlayStation games look better, where Sony themselves overlook this major feature of thier new system.
Apart from graphical issues, apparently the PS3 is selective in its backward-compatibility-ness. Feel free to correct me with more current news I might've glazed over, but last time I checked, 200 or so games from the PS2 catalogue have been overlooked, and won't play on the PS3. While this is completely better than the Xbox 360's monthly backward-compatibility updates, it still isn't how Sony pushes it.

5.The Sixaxis controller
Perhaps playing catch-up to Nintendo in the realm of controllers caused Sony to overlook what makes traditional controllers good: They have weight, to ensure that you can hold onto them; and they don't hurt you. The Sixaxis controller is too light, enough to make it feel cheap. Cheap to the point that spending $50 USD for a new one seems insane. And the weight also affects how well you're able to hold onto it. While playing the demo unit at my local Best Buy, it slipped out of my hands... Twice. And I wasn't getting down with NBA '07 so much that I would knowingly toss it around in a bout of fury. The triggers are what hurt. For some reason, Sony figured that they better hop onto the trigger wagon with this console, but they executed it horribly. Instead of the triggers nicely disappearing into the controller for pinch-free gaming, the triggers are just flaps. There even is a visibly underside to the triggers, which has been absent since the first trigger (the Saturn 3D controller) probably to protect from pinching. Other than that, I found my fingers slipping off of the triggers, as they're flat and not rounded off, and when the trigger's fully pressed it's at an angle at which it's nearly impossible to keep it pressed. And no rumble? Please. Believe it or not the controller can and does make or break a console.

4. The PS3... isn't a great system
I'm talking about specs, here. To PS3 fans, and to Sony, the PS3 is probably the best system available. What, with 6 or so processors, HD compatibility and a Blu-Ray drive, what could be missing? Well, RAM for one thing. How does Sony and its fans think that 20 thousand vertices, 800 detailed texture maps, character controls, game engines, and the operating system all to be running in 512 Megs of RAM? Well, not very well, apparently. Perhaps Marvel: Ultimate Alliance's developers overlooked some of the 'finer coding' necessary to make a decent PS3 port, but this video illustrates what a straight port to the PS3 will look like for the next few years: Shit. The framerate is something to gasp over. Other than the RAM issue, the Blu-Ray drive reads at a pittly 9.0 Mbps. This, of course, in contrast with the other 'graphics intensive' platform, the 360, whose DVD drive reads at 16.0 Mbps, a whole 2 Mbps short of being double that of the PS3's Blu-Ray drive. What does this all mean? The Blu-Ray can feed little over a half the information to the PS3 that the DVD drive can to the 360 in the same amount of time. So, the long and short of it is, sure, the PS3 can handle more processes at a time than the 360, but it is bottlenecked by the comparatively slow uptake of the Blu-Ray drive, especially when coupled with the limited amount of RAM the unit has. The PS3 is simply not as powerful as Sony would have everyone believe, and as far as performance goes, the 360 is faster, stronger, better.

3. Lack of 3rd party support
Namco announced a few weeks ago that it would take sales of over 500,000 units on a specific game for them to make any sort of profit from developing games for the PS3. If this is true, then it would take 100,000 more units sold than last generation's "Greatest Hits" to make a profit. If that isn't enough, the SDK is notoriously hard to work with, and is the most expensive to buy of the current generation. On top of that, even, is the announcement that Sony might be charging games developers to host demos of their games on the PS3's download service. And knowing Sony, it isn't going to be a paltry sum. We have news, nearly every other week, telling us that this or that game isn't going to be a PS3 exclusive, or these companies aren't going to make many Sony exclusives anymore. It's too early to really tell what effect this will have on the PS3 market, but early and perhaps late adopters might have issues finding their favorite games on the PS3.

2. Price
Even if Sony is losing almost $200 USD per console, $599 USD is too much to pay for two hopeful titles (Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIV), regardless of what power the console has. The inclusion of the Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 pushes the price of the console up astronomically, as the slower 1x Blu-Ray players retail for around $1,000 USD. And, as I have illustrated, even the Blu-Ray is slower on the uptake than a cheaper, and faster, DVD drive. So Sony definitely didn't have the gamer in mind when they chose Blu-Ray. As much as Sony and PS3 fans will vehemently deny it, Sony included the Blu-Ray drive just to further their standing in the format war. (But even that is going unsuccessfully.) Sony could have replaced the slow Blu-Ray drive with a faster DVD drive, and perhaps added more RAM, and made a faster, better console which might have been both cheaper for them and for consumers, and they might've even made money off the console a lot earlier.

1. Sony has no mind for consumers
Bold statement, I know. But I have been screwed over by Sony on more than one occasion. And I'm not the only one. I bought a CD a while back and wanted to transfer it to my iPod. Well, apparently, Sony thought that was a bad idea, and instead the CD installed spyware on my hard drive. How fantastic. I'm sure Sony had the consumer, and not themselves, in mind when they decided to infect my computer. Another day, I bought a PSP, hoping that I could play my favorite classics on the go, and still 'enjoy' what little the PSP had to offer for commercial gaming. But apparently Sony has a habit of thinking that when people make homebrew, God kills a kitten. So, due to Sony's huge ego, again, I was out money, and was left with a pretty useless piece of plastic. I'm sure in restricting development on the PSP, Sony had me, the consumer, in mind. Plus, the battery recall from hell, wherein Sony sold batteries that exploded. Sony also has a way of creating stalemates in court against those who do like consumers. The Bleem! project was halted because they couldn't afford court costs, and all they were doing was reviving the PlayStation (much better than Sony did). Lik-Sang imported PSPs to other countries, and they were sued into oblivion, even though many of the buyers were parts of Sony. Sony is a terrible corporation which aims to control every aspect of the media, and in the process, loses sight of those that are supposed to buy their crap: the consumers, the gamers, the music listeners.
I leave you with a spine-chilling quote from the former marketing manager of Lik-Sang, Pascal Claryss:
"Blame it on Sony. That's the latest dark spot in their shameful track record as gaming industry leader. The Empire finally 'won', few dominating retailers from the UK probably will rejoice the news, but everybody else in the gaming world lost something today."

Well, there's the weekly list, and I am as bitter as ever. Comment below.

Posted by Rayek on Tuesday, December 19, 2006 at 4:22 AM | Permalink