Sony News
Since visiting E3, and experiencing the Playstation2's "goods" I have nothing more to say than "God, save us all from the jagged, blurry one." Which is why I refuse to update this part of my page, but I like my article from so long ago, that I am keeping it up, so deal with it, jerky!
Okay, We can all have a heated debate about whether the PS2 really is as good as Sony claims, but one thing can't be denied; Sony really are great using PR techniques. Nicely timed to put a big black cloud over the US Dreamcast launch, Sony wheel out the case designs, more hardware specs and the official name for their new console. And as you can see below, it's an odd looking beast. It's not ugly, just different, looking kind of like what we would imagine Bang & Olufsen would have come up with if they originally designed the Atari VCS. The unit can stand either horizontally or, with the aid of a transparent blue clip, vertically.
Sony plan to release the machine in Japan on the 4th March 2000, promising to ship a whopping one million consoles in the first week. European and American gamers not willing to import will have to wait until Autumn 2000. Various industry analysts are already questioning Sony's ability to build the machine that fast, but if they say it they must be confident - they'll only look foolish if they have to downgrade their plans close to launch - you only need to look as far as Sega Europe and the Dreamcast launch to see that.
What is suprising is that Sony are saying that the PS2 will support DVD-Video. Previously it was thought that, although the machine would be capable of reading DVD discs, it would not play movies as this would threaten lucrative sales of stand-alone DVD units.
As we knew from previous announcements, the PS2 will be backwards compatible with original PSX titles and hardware. At the conference, Sony also unveiled a couple of PS2-only devices. All the buttons on the new Dual Shock 2 joypad (with the obvious exception of Start and Select) will be analogue. Sony also showed a new 8MB Memory Card. The new card looks identical to older cards, putting paid to earlier rumors that the PS2 would support Sony's MemoryStick format. The card has no VMS style capabilities, but there are strong reports sugesting that Sony will also be unveiling a PS2 PocketStation.
Sony claim that 89 publishers have officially committed to the machine, with a further 46 North American and 27 European companies signing letters of intent. Question marks still remain over the learning curve of the machine which is said to be very difficult to program well. Certainly, although many screenshots and movies look impressive, there are an equal number of tired and dull looking games in development. With the European and American releases just a year away, UK and US development teams will need to get to grips with the system quickly if they wish to develop launch titles as impressive as TrickStyle and Ready2Rumble.
Gran Turismo 2000
Tekken Tag Tournament
So, now we've seen the early videos and screenshots, know the name and have seen the box. Whether it'll all look so impressive when we've all got Dreamcasts running Shen Mue sitting under our TV is another matter, but - for the moment at least - the future of videogames is looking very exciting indeed.
