You can read a report from the Sony E3 2006 press conference at Kotaku, but let me give you a few highlights:
Lots of new games for the PS3.Can you tell Im underwhelmed? Yep. I did not see gameplay from one new game that Im excited about. Even the footage from Metal Gear Solid 4 was in-game cutscenes, not gameplay, and could have been prerendered for all I know. Yes, Sony will have an online service, which will apparently be great and do everything. But somehow, Im bored by it all.
Sony free online service will do everything that Xbox Live does, except twice as fast and much shinier. Oh, and it will cook you dinner.
You can buy new levels and items for your games. Yay.
The new PS3 games will be pretty much like PS2 games, except with better graphics
The PS3 controller will be wireless, and have tilt sensors in it, except without the position sensors of the Wii controller.
And whats with the faux-Wii controller? Gee Sony, werent you just talking about the gimmicks” that the other systems are using? This implementation is much more limited than what the Wii controller will be able to do. Since Sony and Microsoft already have tons of overlap for third-party games, that pretty much guarantees that the PS3 version will not use the tilt sensor, or will use it just for a few little gimmicky extras that no one will care about.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the price: $499 for a version with a 20GB hard drive and some features stripped out (HDMI, Wi-Fi), or $599 for a fully-featured version with a 60GB hard drive. Contrast that with the Xbox 360 price of $299 for the version without a hard drive, and $399 for the version with. Or the Wii, rumored to be between $199 and $250.
Heres the thing: Im the target market for these guys, and I love my PlayStation 2…and I didnt care about the Sony press conference. I saw nothing there that makes me excited. In fact, I see the potential for skyrocketing development costs that will result in the same old games, except shinier and high-definition. Right now, I feel like people are going to start realizing that the emperor has no clothes. I predict that people are going to pay $599 for a system, and say, I spent all that money for THIS?” While I dont think it will lead to another videogame crash, I will go on record with my prediction that this generation of PlayStation will be a very slow starter. Maybe a few years down the road, when HDTVs are more commonplace, and the price has dropped. But not this holiday season, and not the next. It hurts me to say it, but thats how I feel.
