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Posted By Shaun K. about 9 months ago
Thumb Wars: Episode 6: Of Potential & the PS3
Welcome back to the show where we introduce the debate and you continue it. This week’s topic: Shaun and 8-Bit Mickey examine if the PS3 has fully lived up to its potential as a console.
Thumb Wars is a weekly show hosted/produced by Shaun Kronenfeld dedicated to starting and encouraging dialogue and debate on a wide variety of topics within the video game industry. Look for a new Thumbs Wars every Sunday. Comments, opinions, and thoughts are not only welcome, they are the entire point. Feel free to follow Shaun on Twitter @bigred_13 if you feel so inclined.
what really hurt sony was the cost of the thing and using sonys own cell prossesing unit made it at first really really hard to code for that is why games like bayonetta was go god awfull on it compaired to the 360 witch worked very much like old school coding.
but a dev really dosen’t give a shit if a console is hard to program for or lacks power if it has the units sold so lots of people can play there game. look at the PS2 it was hard to code and was the least powerfull of the consoles that gen yet it had the people on it so ofc you made games for it. the briliant thing with the PS2 was the DvD player with the moderate power that made it a sale.
it was not my brother or i that owned the PS2 in our house but our parrents that owned it, we just said “get a PS2 it is cheaper than a normal DvD player and we can play games on it” they liked the idea so we got one. now look at the PS3 with the blue-ray player it was allways way more expensiv than a just getting a blue-ray player so you could not just say get a PS3 insted of a normal player so you lost alot of people that way.
it is not untill now that programers can really take full use of that cell prossesor to make some really nice 720p games but now it is just so much worse in power than a normal pc that what is the point.
so i think alot of potential was lost with the PS3 just since they where counting on the same people who got the PS2 to just jump on the PS3 for the same reason they got the previous console witch did not work since that multimedia funktion of games and movies was not there for the price it needed to be at.
if PC gaming wasn’t the biggest part of gaming in sweden it would be the PS3. i know alot of people who has sold there 360 for a PS3 since they got sick of having to pay for online and figured they would get money back from not having to pay for xbox gold
Hey…
Shouldn’t Sony’s gimmick be… “Hey online gaming! And it’s FREE!”
Cause that’s totally true.
Also a European, or rather a Western Russian, I can say that the PS3 is by far more popular here. Or local shop has like 1 shelf for Wii, half a shelf for 360 and the rest is all PS3. And whenever a shop gets a multiplatform game, of course they advertise the PS3 one more.
Also, right now, I read that the PS3 has just struck its stride in Japan… or something.
Thanks, I forgot to mention that. Doesn’t the PS3 generally have better services there as well? Like I hear that Netflix isn’t really usable or viable there so Xbox doesn’t really offer as much as Sony?
And Japan is only a matter of them keeping the only viable HD console alive there as success in the west comes more from 360 while Ps3 is dominant there. God help Sony when Wii U comes.
The real problem with Sony consoles is that, because they are always “more of the same,” there’s not really much incentive to stay with Sony over several generations. Fundamentally, there hasn’t been ONE DETAIL changed to the Playstation controller since the mid 90′s, and this is now even the defacto controller for the Vita. Microsoft doesn’t yet feel stagnant because they gave the XBox controller a diet before launching the 360, but Nintendo?
With the exceptions of the handhelds (which were similar to preserve backwards compatibility) no two Nintendo consoles have like interfaces. Gamers have a reason to stick with Nintendo console after console, but Sony? It’s just more of the same.
About the PSP: Sony’s biggest fault was (again) to try to replicate the PS2. Had Sony made the PSP able to play PS2 games proper (without the UMD nonsesnse) AND given the PSP a decent memory card–like Nintendo and SD cards–it would’ve been a crazy good system with that library. As is, it had way too many hidden expenses, and way too small a library to justify the bother. And I speak as a current PSP owner.
I don’t see the use same gamepad design since PS1 as a problem. Actually i think it’s even good. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”. Their controller is simply perfect for most kind of console games, and scales well with older games
Except it’s not the same controller. They took out analog face buttons (they were really only used in the Metal Gear games, but if they had been left in it might have eventually had more uses).
How do you know it’s perfect? Maybe some button placement isn’t completely optimized or superior control scheme yet implemented and will change the way we play forever. I’d personally hope that some companies would start using the l/r buttons to control the camera again because that would work a lot better than the stick in quite a few games. Specifically so you aren’t taking your thumb of the face buttons.
Except the “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mentality is exactly what’s destroying Sony.
Taken as a controller from the 90′s, there’s nothing wrong with the PS1 controller; it was ergonomic relative to the N64′s gamepad, and it had enough interfaces for complex interactions. These days though? It’s vanilla and dated compared to the 360 or Wii controllers.
The Wii classic controller? yes
The 360 controller? hell no, their control has always been unnecessarily big and annoying
I can’t help but think that this is a very stupid topic. The PS3 hasn’t reached the heights of the PS2 for very obvious reasons.
One, it was far more expensive than anything else at the time. The PS2 managed to be the cheapest DVD player in the market at the time of it’s release, so it managed to pull in people who would never use it for games or would just be introduced to games (in a way, similar to the Wii).
Two, variety. The PS2 was home to a good amount of absolutely whatever you liked (unless you like Mario, but PS2 had it’s substitutes). But that was a problem for every console this generation as nearly every smaller developer went almost entirely handheld, leaving only big publishers who chase the skirts of money.
Three, as stated, no identity. Look at the game series that really helped make the PS2. Where are they now? They’re just now starting to get here! Sly and Jak should have come out ages ago, as should have Last Guardian. But Sony is only concerned with owning IP rather than the using of it. Except when they are flooding the market with it (Little-Big Planet, Killzone, Ratchet). Nintendo, you always know what you are going to get (though with new and interesting tweaks every once in a while). Microsoft, they advertise every minute of the day. Sony… it only does everything… but not anymore… or best, for the most part. Except for the developers who put that work in. In spite of Sony.
Really if any of these consoles failed in any way and should have been discussed, it was the Wii,but not because it lost money or was a bad business move. It’s failure was in those developers who didn’t support it and why.
And this is the second non-debate in this as-of-now short series. These are really more discussions than anything.
P.S. Yes, let’s only define a console’s success by American Standards, not unlike those that say the Japanese gaming industry is only making bad gibberish games.
I think that ps3 was meant to live on the success of the previous consoles. I’m saying that as a 360 owner: if I look at the ps3′s exclusives I start thinking that going with microsoft wasn’t such a great deal.
But that’s the problem: I began thinking that after analyzing the overall systems quality instead of being hypnotized from the adverts. Sony is lacking some good marketing decisions
The PS3,the model that is available now in stores is NOT the same gaming console which it was originally sold/advertised as.The removal of all PS2 backward compatibility on every model bar the original fat 60g models.Removal of LINUX compatibility due to hacking ,or whatever Sony’s excuse was.Removing 2 USB ports and other memory card slots.
And then from a purely personal POV;i don’t like the lack of playable demos on PSN,near constant times PSN times- out and disconnects and all the hacking occurances that really hightlighted Sony’s network poor security .
Things like that mount up and lead to disapointment IMO.
If it wasent for Demon’s Souls and the Yakuza series i wouldnt use the machine anymore.
I suggest you try God of War
I played most of the clones of GoW before i rented Gow 3.Just didnt grab me at all,not too say the game was crap,which it isnt..just not my thing.