Archive for December, 2005

I’ve got a quote for you:

Next, never has a system sold well that was less powerful than what came out before it. Never. Ever. Not once. In fact, one could argue it is retarded that a company would release a system that offers less than what came about before. Well, guess what boys and girls, that’s exactly what the Revolution is. Even Nintendo says “it’s less powerful than the PS3.” Here is an exact quote:

“Instead of going for the highest possible performance, which does not contribute to software development, our idea was to create a developer-friendly next generation TV game machine that maintained above-standard capabilities.” – Nintendo

Does that sound about right? Is that what Nintendo intends to do with the Revolution? Well I tricked you. I actually changed the original quote. I changed two lines in the first paragraph. They should actually read:

Well, guess what boys and girls, that’s exactly what the GameCube is. Even Nintendo says “it’s less powerful than the PS2.”

This was originally written back in 2001 or so about the launch of the GameCube. And it looks like Nintendo isn’t learning from their mistakes. The only difference this time around is that they have a fancy shmancy controller. Will that be enough to save Nintendo?

Acts of Gord – The Book of Chronicles

Eurogamer has an interview with Phil Harrison about the PlayStation 2, PSP, and also the PS3 a tiny little bit. Actually, not much was said about the PS3 at all, except for why they’re not talking about the PS3 and some HD posturing:

Eurogamer: Why is it that you don’t want to talk about the PS3 at the moment?

Phil Harrison: I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that we always have a strategy for when we share particular new information with the world, and we’re in a period when we would rather focus on selling PSPs and PS2s – obviously this Christmas is a huge Christmas for retail. PlayStation-branded products, hardware and software, are the most important thing to retail around the world right now – that’s where they’re making their money – and it’s important that we remain focused on exploiting our current business to the absolute maximum.

Clearly next year the emphasis will start to shift, and we will start to share with you at the appropriate time a lot of the cool things about PS3. We also perhaps didn’t feel the need to be overly scared into making any announcements just because somebody else had launched beforehand – that wasn’t part of our plans and isn’t part of our plans.

Eurogamer: HD is obviously a big topic in gaming at the moment. Microsoft has made 720p the default, Nintendo is kind of ignoring it – Sony seems to be taking a middle route, would you say that’s true?

Phil Harrison: I think it really has to be redefined as to what you mean by high definition. High definition as far as the consumer is concerned means high definition movies, which means Blu-ray disc, and that is the reason that people will buy high definition display coupled with a player that is capable of playing movies and games, which is obviously PlayStation 3.

The true definition of HD is the three elements of the HD value chain – the display, the content and the hardware to play back that content, and PlayStation and Sony is the only organisation that has all three bits of the value chain together. As you well know the Xbox 360 doesn’t play high definition movies and doesn’t have true HD functionality – PlayStation 3 is the only format that has 1080-progressive, which is the true definition of HD, so it’s really premature to be talking about the HD era. The HD era really only starts when we are on the market.

Read the full interview at Eurogamer.

Eurogamer – Phil Harrison on the future of PlayStation