New York Times: PS3 isn't that great.

[Adrian Laguna]

My guess is that a real newspaper like the New York Times is about as neutral as you can get in a console review.

A Weekend Full of Quality Time With PlayStation 3
By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: November 20, 2006

Howard Stringer, you have a problem. Your company’s new video game system just isn’t that great.

Ever since Mr. Stringer took the helm last year at Sony, the struggling if still formidable electronics giant, the world has been hearing about how the coming PlayStation 3 would save the company, or at least revitalize it. Even after Microsoft took the lead in the video-game wars a year ago with its innovative and powerful Xbox 360, Sony blithely insisted that the PS3 would leapfrog all competition to deliver an unsurpassed level of fun.

Put bluntly, Sony has failed to deliver on that promise.

Measured in megaflops, gigabytes and other technical benchmarks, the PlayStation 3 is certainly the world’s most powerful game console. It falls far short, however, of providing the world’s most engaging overall entertainment experience. There is a big difference, and Sony seems to have confused one for the other.

The PS3, which was introduced in North America on Friday with a hefty $599 price tag for the top version, certainly delivers gorgeous graphics. But they are not discernibly prettier than the Xbox 360’s. More important, the whole PlayStation 3 system is surprisingly clunky to use and simply does not provide many basic functions that users have come to expect, especially online.

I have spent more than 30 hours using the PlayStation 3 over the last week or so and may have played more different games on the system — 13 — than probably anyone outside of Sony itself. Sony did not activate the PS3’s online service until just before the Friday debut. Over the weekend a clear sense of disappointment with the PlayStation 3 emerged from many gamers.

“What’s weird is that the PS3 was originally supposed to come out in the spring, and here it came out in the fall, and it still doesn’t feel finished,” Christopher Grant, managing editor of Joystiq, one of the world’s biggest video-game blogs, said on the telephone Saturday night. “It’s really not the all-star showing they should have had at launch. Sony is playing catch-up in a lot of ways now, not just in terms of sales but in terms of the basic functionality and usability of the system.”

Sadly for Sony, the best way to explain how the PlayStation 3 falls short is to explain how different it is to use than its main competition, Xbox 360. When I reviewed the 360 last year, I wrote: “Twelve minutes after opening the box, I had created my nickname, was in a game of Quake 4 and thought, ‘This can’t be this easy.’ ”

I never felt that way using the PlayStation 3. With the PS3, 12 minutes after opening the box I realized that Sony inexplicably does not include cables to connect the machine to a high-definition television. Keep in mind that one of Sony’s main selling points has been that the PS3 plays Blu-Ray high-definition movie discs. But high-definiton cables? Sold separately. The Xbox 360, by contrast, ships with one cable that can connect to either a standard or high-definition set.

Then, before you are even using the PS3, you have to connect the “wireless” controller to the base unit with a USB cable so they can recognize each other. If you bring your PS3 controller to a friend’s house, you’ll have to plug back in again. The 360’s wireless controllers are always just that, wireless.

If there is one thing one would expect Sony to get perfect, though, it would be music. Wrong. Sure, you can plug in your digital music player and the PS3 will play the tunes. But as soon as you go into a game, the music stops. By contrast, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed most on the Xbox 360 is being able to listen to my own music while playing Pebble Beach or driving my virtual Ferrari. Doesn’t seem too complicated, but the PS3 can’t do it.

In that sense it often feels as if the PlayStation 3 can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. In the PS3’s online store (which feels like a slow Web page) you can access movie trailers and trial versions of new games, but when you actually download the 600-megabyte files, you’ll be stuck watching a progress bar crawl across the screen for 20 or 40 minutes. Astonishingly, you can’t download in the background while you go do something that’s more fun (like play a game). On the Xbox 360, not only are files downloaded seamlessly in the background, but you can also shut off the machine, turn it on later, and the download will resume automatically.

The PS3’s whole online experience feels tacked-on and unpolished. On the Xbox 360 each user has a single unified friends list, so you can track your friends and communicate with them easily, no matter what game you are in. On the PlayStation 3 most games have their own separate friends list and some have no friends function at all. There is a master list as well, but in order to communicate with anyone on it, you have to quit the game you are playing.

There are some high points. The multi-player battles in Resistance: Fall of Man are excellent. The arcade-style action in the downloadable Blast Factor is suitably frantic.

But the list of the PS3’s disappointments remains, from its undersupported voice chat to its maddening cellphone-like text messaging system. (In frustration I ended up plugging in a USB keyboard.) Overall, Sony seems to have put a lot of effort into cramming as much silicon horsepower under the hood as possible but to have forgotten that all the transistors in the world can’t make someone smile.

And so it is a bit of a shock to realize that on the video game front Microsoft and Sony are moving in exactly the opposite directions one might expect given their roots. Microsoft, the prototypical PC company, has made the Xbox 360 into a powerful but intuitive, welcoming, people-friendly system. Sony’s PlayStation 3, on the other hand, often feels like a brawny but somewhat recalcitrant specialized computer. (Sony is even telling users to wait for future software patches to fix some of the PS3’s deficiencies.) The thing is, if people want to use a computer, they’ll use a computer.

Through the decades of the Walkman and the Trinitron television, Sony was renowned as the global master of easy-to-use, seamlessly powerful consumer electronics. But recently Sony seems to have lost its way, first in digital music players, in which it ceded the ergonomic high ground to Apple’s iPod, and now in home-game consoles. For now Sony’s technologists seem to have won out over the people who study fun.

As a practical matter, given the limited quantities Sony has been able to manufacture, the PlayStation 3 will surely remain sold out throughout the holiday season. If you can’t find one, don’t fret. Sony still has a lot of work to do. As Mr. Grant of Joystiq put it: “Maybe in six months it’ll be finished. Maybe by next fall I’ll be able to do all the cool stuff. I’m still kind of waiting.”

The sentence I highlighted pretty much summarizes the entire article, Sony lost sight of what's fun.

[Jack Bauer]

In other breaking news, sex is fun.

[Vendetta]

I think the end of the next paragraph sums it up a little better.

"Maybe in 6 months it will be finished".

Everything about the PS3, the limited supply, the poor feature integration, and the quality of many of the launch titles speaks of a system that simply was not ready for release.

(Though, an issue raised by the reviewer, background downloading, was added to the 360 via one of the regular dashboard updates. It exists now, it didn't before.)

[Xisiqomelir]

So, second place for Sony this round?

[Adrian Laguna]

Likely, though who knows, maybe the Wii pulls ahead of the PS3. First place is most likely the Xbox 360. Still too early to call for sure.

[Vendetta]

If that.

Microsoft have a good headstart, with the best part of seven million consoles already in homes, and the Premium version of the unit selling at a $70 unit profit (meaning that if they feel the pinch, they can go for a $50 price drop and still remain in the black per unit), and Nintendo are looking strong, with four times the PS3's volume and still selling out, and still managing to build enough units to get a reasonable approximation of a simultaneous global launch.

Not only that, but the difficulty in developing for the PS3, and the poor development tools are going to mean that development on major crossplatform titles will be focused on the Xbox 360 versions. (See: Call of Duty 3, Tony Hawk Project 8, both missing online components on the PS3)

Sony will have to fight hard for second, and even then it will cost them a crippling amount, enough for the boardroom to begin to take a real interest in whether the computing division is worth maintaining at it's current cost level, especially after the utterly dire year the company as a whole has had (See: Exploding laptop battery fiasco).

[Xisiqomelir]

First place is most likely the Xbox 360.

Newsweek's N'gai Croal says that M$ has pushed barely 4.8M units, and that's with USAmerica counting for 3M. That's not even as "good" as O. Huegbox. I'm thinking 360 in dead last by say, summer 2008.

Loot: Dispatches From the Console Wars, Part I

Now that Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are both on the market, publishers, developers, analysts and gamers are trying to figure out one thing: which of these two powerhouses is going to come out on top? (We'll address the Wii separately.) Microsoft has an early lead thanks to its yearlong head start. But is that enough to be the winner when all is said and done? Maybe not.

Though Microsoft has already come down from its original claim that it would sell 10 million XBox 360 units before Sony shipped a single PS3 (the company now says it's confident it will sell 10 million units by the end of the year),--the fact remains that Microsoft has only sold through to consumers a little over 3 million units in North America, 1.4 million units in Europe/PAL, and 400,000 units in Japan and other regions. In its first 11 months on the market in North America, as Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel observed in a recent report, the 360 has only moved more than 300,000 units once--during its launch month of November 2005. By contrast, the standard-setting PS2 dropped below 300,000 units only once during its first 17 months on the market.

Though Microsoft remains committed to its goal, to hit the 10 million mark by December 31, the company must, in the face of all of the PS3 and Wii hype, convince gamers to purchase 5 million Xbox 360s during the next two months. And they have to accomplish this without the benefit of Halo 3, which won't ship until sometime in 2007. "Frankly, we never believed that number," says Sony Computer Entertainment America's vice president of marketing Peter Dille of Microsoft's shifting target. "But I think we were the only ones that didn't. How can they possibly get to 10 million based on their run rate when they're not even outselling the original Xbox?"

Good question. Considering that 65-70 percent of Xbox 360's global sales take place in North America, with only a dwindling contribution from Japan, it's all but certain that Microsoft's stated goal is out of reach. The most optimistic analyst, Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter, originally predicted that Microsoft would sell 400,000 units in October. The actual figure? 218,000. Nevertheless, Pachter stands by his Xbox 360 forecasts for November (750,000-1 million) and December (1.5 million-2 million), and possibly more if gamers who can't find a PS3 or a Wii decide to substitute a 360.

At the aforementioned 70 percent ratio of North American sales to overseas sales, that figure would get Microsoft fairly close to its goal. But based on past data, it seems unlikely. Elevation Partners managing director John Riccitiello, who was previously the president of Electronic Arts, quickly did the math in his head during an interview with Level Up and predicted that based on historical trends, Microsoft would only get to around 8 million units by the end of this year. "They're going to need a marketing event to hit that number," he says.

[Admiral Valdemar]

That's what I gather. They felt more like not letting MS have a year head start and Ninty getting their foot in the door, than getting the system as they promised it. If they had simply waited a few more months, they'd have more units, more games and more features completed. The launch is often the most important part of the game system. If it flops on release, it really damns the console later on with negative views unless a price drop and rave reviews later saves their bacon.

If in a year from now they are still having problems, then the PS3 simply wasn't meant to be, at least for this generation. If they can turn it around in half that time, they may just recover, so long as Sony learns from this.

[Stark]

Are there any statistics to show relative uptake? I see a lot of talking about number of units shipped and how it's low (something I've never seen at a launch before) so is the industry becoming more compeditive, or are manufacturers fucking up their channels and people buying them more slowly?

[Count Dooku]

I really want the PS3 to do well - I really do. If it does well, every gamer will benefit. If it flops, than Microsoft probably won't be as motivated to push great high-cost, and they won't be motivated to go into the next-gen as heartily as they would if the PS3 did well. If both Microsoft and Sony are both selling a lot, than both companies are going to get behind their games, and they'll invest heavily in making their games, the best games. Or, that's how I invision this working out. I could live in a dellusional state

[DaveJB]

Are there any statistics to show relative uptake? I see a lot of talking about number of units shipped and how it's low (something I've never seen at a launch before) so is the industry becoming more compeditive, or are manufacturers fucking up their channels and people buying them more slowly?

Seems like all the launch units have sold out, but there's a ton of confusion over exactly how many launch units there were. Sony are claiming that there were 500K PS3s released, while the figures being bandied about by retailers and analysts seem closer to 350K.

[Vympel]

I must admit, I'm totally oblivious and uncaring about the features available on the XBox 360 and supposed to be available on the PS3 (but, from this review, much inferior)- all that online functionality.

I mean, my brother has an XBox 360, and he has 3 games for it. Never bought another. Why? Too expensive. He's just not that into it. He's certainly never set up any online functionality on it- fuck, I don't think he even knows how.

Of course, I objected to him buying an XBox 360 in the first place, saying he would never play it. I was right.

But when the good games for it are cheap, I might get some and get some use out of it. But all that online stuff? Meh. I'll never touch it.

At least my brother has learned his lesson. He's said he's not going to get a PS3 until Gran Tourismo for it comes out.

[Ghost Rider]

At least my brother has learned his lesson. He's said he's not going to get a PS3 until Gran Tourismo for it comes out.

That may not be the wisest choice either given the thought that you have to BUY(as in real cold hard cash) the cars in GT.

Something to think about

So not only will GT need online, you'll eventually have to buy cars and such not to even get close to a real experience from the game.

[Ravencrow]

That may not be the wisest choice either given the thought that you have to BUY(as in real cold hard cash) the cars in GT.

Something to think about

So not only will GT need online, you'll eventually have to buy cars and such not to even get close to a real experience from the game.

That's kinda shitty. I was looking forward to GT for PS3. Although the article does say the game still comes with hundreds of cars and dozens of tracks, but I bet the exotic ones are the ones you need to pay for to have.

[Ghost Rider]

That may not be the wisest choice either given the thought that you have to BUY(as in real cold hard cash) the cars in GT.

Something to think about

So not only will GT need online, you'll eventually have to buy cars and such not to even get close to a real experience from the game.

That's kinda shitty. I was looking forward to GT for PS3. Although the article does say the game still comes with hundreds of cars and dozens of tracks, but I bet the exotic ones are the ones you need to pay for to have.

Yeah, but those are older games collection...literally.

Gamespot went into more detail

So you get the older material for free for buying GT, but the newer?

The biggest news on Gran Turismo HD is that the game will be split into two portions, known as Gran Turismo HD Premium and Gran Turismo HD Classic. The significant differences between the two "sides" of the game are extensive, not just in quantity but in terms of visual quality. First let's talk numbers. Gran Turismo HD Premium will feature 30 cars and two tracks, all of which have been modeled from the ground at a level of visual fidelity that simply hasn't been approached in the game before. As Yamauchi told us, modeling cars for the HD Premium version of the game takes roughly six months for each one, and the models themselves are composed of tens of thousands of polygons (as opposed to merely the thousands that compose those found in GT HD Classic).

As you might expect, the Classic version of GT HD will feature the "quantity" side of the equation--more than 750 cars, 51 tracks, and thousands of downloadable items. All of the assets in the game will come from data supplied from previous GT games, all upgraded for high-definition presentation. Essentially GT HD Classic will be a compilation of previous Gran Turismo games presented in HD quality.

Honestly I would've preferred the scenario of exotic are to be bought and I still get a new game.

[Vendetta]

That's kinda shitty. I was looking forward to GT for PS3. Although the article does say the game still comes with hundreds of cars and dozens of tracks, but I bet the exotic ones are the ones you need to pay for to have.

Gamespot's preview has a slightly different story on this.

Essentially, GTHD has two portions. The first, GTHD Premium is basically a demo of GT5, gives you 30 cars and two tracks, but each car is modelled in insane detail (they're apparently taking six months to model each car). The second, GTHD Classic, sounds like it's basically GT4 running in HD, and is reusing assets from previous games, rather than actually being real new content. It does, however, have 750 odd cars and 51 tracks.

There will be tons of extra downloadable stuff, but it does seem like the initial horror stories of paying for all the content on top of the engine were a bit exaggerated, it's just, well, not GT5 so much as a demo thereof.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I really want the PS3 to do well - I really do. If it does well, every gamer will benefit. If it flops, than Microsoft probably won't be as motivated to push great high-cost, and they won't be motivated to go into the next-gen as heartily as they would if the PS3 did well. If both Microsoft and Sony are both selling a lot, than both companies are going to get behind their games, and they'll invest heavily in making their games, the best games. Or, that's how I invision this working out. I could live in a dellusional state

I'm not so sure about that. If incompetence and bad decisions aren't punished by poor sales and huge losses, I'm not sure that's good for consumers even if it means more competition. And I'm not entirely certain that Sony exiting the console market and being replaced with a company that has a fresher, more vigorous take would be a bad thing, either.

[Ravencrow]

Ok, I see what this is about now.

GTHD Premium is a demo for what is coming, just like there was GT4 Prologue before GT4.

The second, GTHD Classic, sounds like it's basically GT4 running in HD, and is reusing assets from previous games, rather than actually being real new content. It does, however, have 750 odd cars and 51 tracks.

I can confirm that GTHD Classic is what you say it sounds like, because GT4 has roughly that number of cars and tracks.

I'm not rebuying the game just to play it on PS3 and HDTV.

[Hamel]

I fooled around with Walmart's PS3 demo unit and I have to say that Motorstorm and that generic NBA game look like crap. These games look much better on internet video than they do in person.

Also, Walmart, when're you fuckers going to put up a Wii demo unit?

[Hawkwings]

Yeah, competition is great and all, but if one of the competitors puts out a significantly better product than the other, relatively rational customers will go for the better product. If this means that the second company takes a hit, so be it. What would really suck is if the PS3 was never finished, stayed crappy, and still sold tons of units. That would just show the gaming worlds that people don't care about how good the console is, they just care about the name behind it.

[Vendetta]

I fooled around with Walmart's PS3 demo unit and I have to say that Motorstorm and that generic NBA game look like crap. These games look much better on internet video than they do in person.

Also, Walmart, when're you fuckers going to put up a Wii demo unit?

The generic NBA game apparently is crap. The PS2 version of it is better.