Putting quarters in a machine? How Quaint!



E3 ended last week, and it’s time for me to assess where I stand on the next generation consoles.

The big news from Sony this year was the date November 17 (the PS3 gets released in the U.S.) and

$600

That’s the price of the PS3. Sony also announced a $500 configuration, but like the $300 configuration of the Xbox 360, it is crippled in some important ways and not worth buying. I have to hand it to Sony’s publicity department, they did a good job hiding that fact and most mainstream media coverage made it sound like the only difference between the two versions is the size of the hard drive.

There no way I’m going to spend $600 for a game console. Heck, I balk at the $400 price tag the Xbox 360 has right now. And in terms of graphics, they look about the same.


Here's the PlayStation 3!



And here's what you'll need to sell to afford one!

A month ago I wrote a pretty pessimistic assessment of the PS3 chances in the market, and E3 didn’t do much to change my mind. The $600 price tag is widely perceived as ridiculous. In Sony’s defense, the console is probably physically worth that. It includes a Blu-ray DVD player standard. For their part Microsoft is going to offer a HD DVD player as a peripheral and the best information suggests it will cost $200, thereby making a similarly equipped Xbox cost the same as the PS3. The problem with Sony making the drive standard is that a format war is coming up between Blu-ray and HD DVD, and if Blu-ray loses the PS3 will have $200 worth of pointless boondoggle built in. I might be less worried about that happening if Sony’s history wasn’t littered with marginalized formats, like Betamax, miniDisc, and ATRAC.

I wasn’t exactly blown away by the PS3 games Sony was showing at E3. Despite being six months from launch there was very little gameplay on display. In fact, I can only think of two games that we actually saw being played. The first was Warhawk, a redo of an old PS1 game I have a lot of affection for. The other was a fighter called Heavenly Sword. Neither made me want to run out to buy a PS3. There were also trailers for Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII, but not a single frame of in-game footage from either.


Warhawk before...



...and after.

And speaking of, remember the controversy of last E3? Sony showed a trailer to a new Killzone game for the PS3, and hardly anyone could believe it was real in-game footage. You can see a low-res copy here, but the full-res version was incredible. Sony execs swore up and down that what we were seeing was what a game would actually look like on the PS3. Watching G4TV I saw Morgan Webb flat out ask one of Sony’s people, “A year from now [Ha! - me], I’m sitting down in front of my PS3, this is what I’m playing?” “Yes,” replied the exec, and Webb quipped “Okay…” with that perfect combination of skepticism and TV host perkiness.

So if Sony had in-game footage from Killzone last year, certainly it must be ready to play this at year’s E3, right? Nope. In fact, I don’t think I saw single reference to Killzone for the PS3. I wonder what happened to it. It certainly smells like a bait-and-switch.

I have come out of this E3 week more convinced than ever that I want to buy a Wii. It’s still a stupid name, but Nintendo had a couple dozen games available to play on the show floor. Most of them looked like fun, especially Super Mario Galaxy and the new Metroid Prime. There was also a strange new game called Elebits where you shoot little creatures hiding in domestic environments. Looks odd enough to be a hit.

Posted: Thu - May 18, 2006 at      

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