Retro Content

While PS3 users are happy to get the occasional PS1 title repackaged in downloadable format, the 360 doesn’t merely get direct ports, but genuinely enhanced versions of classic fan favorites: Doom, Marathon, Prince of Persia, Street Fighter, and now even Rez! And all of these game have upgraded textures and graphics, improved frame rates, a variety of multiplayer options, etc.

PS3 users do get the occasional retro title with enhancements (Super Puzzle Fighter, Lemmings, or MK2), but the 360 seems to get more retro titles, a better selection of them, and much more substantial enhancements.

I’m definitely envious of this. I would love to see more of this type of quality, enhanced remakes.

Hobbyist Development

Microsoft provides attractive hobbyist oriented XNA dev kits with options for 360 distribution. I must mention two counter points to this:

1. User created content, which is coming to both systems, will be much more relevant in the console world than from-the-ground-up game development support.
2. There is already a dream hobbyist system, and it’s not a console and probably won’t ever be. I’m talking about the general purpose home PC. Independent and hobbyist developed games are flourishing on the PC and enjoying great success. The success and variety in these efforts is amazing. Check out here, here, and here.

However, despite these two counter points, I’m still genuinely envious of the power and accessibility of Microsoft’s XNA tools and I wish the PS3 had something similar.

(BTW, PS3 Linux is great, but it’s just a limited PC rather than a new tool for hobbyist developers)

Third Party Relations

The 360 seems to get many third party titles much earlier than the PS3. This includes traditionally PlayStation franchises such as Ace Combat and Katamari, which are rumored to come out for the PS3 after a 360 exclusivity period. Even titles such as GRAW 2, which the devs claim was designed from the very beginning to provide full PS3 support, still come out a solid five months earlier on the 360.

And for GTA fanatics such as myself, those upcoming exclusive episodes sound very tempting.

UPDATE: This was supposed to be a genuine and good spirited acknowledgment of the strong points of the competition that would ease tensions and restore a constructive enjoyable discussion forum. This isn’t supposed to kick off a second wave of console war arguments. There are a ton of PS3 advantages that I will not mention those for now.

Bungie community rep, Luke Smith, tries to do some damage control on the discovered Halo 3 resolution deficiency debacle:

“In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152×640 image and the scaled 1280×720, it’s practically impossible to discern the difference.”

Very true! Upscaling doesn’t improve quality at all! That’s why people are upset! ROFL! For once, I actually agree with something Microsoft says about upscaling

Upscaling doesn’t add any more texture or model detail or sharpness, it just blows up the pixels.

Then, the Microsoft rep proceeds to go off the deep end:

“In fact the reason we haven’t mentioned this before in weekly updates, is the simple fact that it would have distracted conversation away from more important aspects of the game, and given tinfoil hats some new gristle to chew on as they catalogued their toenail clippings.”

640p vs 720p? Sure, most people wouldn’t notice by themselves if they didn’t read about it. But the exact same thing can be said about the 30/60 Madden FPS issue that Microsoft trumpeted to the moon last month.

UPDATE: OK, even though this is a PS3 fan site, we try not to be obnoxious and blatantly bash the 360. In rather short hindsight, this post was a little bit too much, so to balance this out a little bit, read this newer post.

We touched on this topic in this thread, but I think this topic really deserves it’s own thread:

Why do you think that the GPU access is restricted under Linux? Please vote for one in the comments or suggest your alternate reasoning.

• Piracy
• Competition with Linux game development
• Just Not ImportantDeveloping and supporting proper Linux drivers takes time, money, and valuable resources. Maybe Sony simply has more important priorities.
• Other?

I vote for Linux game dev. Think about it: if devs could access the full hardware under Linux, they could make the exact same games for Linux that they make for PS3 and sell to the exact same install base with one difference: They can cut Sony out of the picture and not pay them anything. The PlayStation revenue stream could really dry up.

That’s more than quadrillion floating point operations per second! And that’s only from 41,145 PS3s. Great job PS3 folders! Keep it up.

Our Folding@Home team is doing great too. We are currently at 419 with only 116 members. Very impressive. We are always accepting new members to the folding team. You can even join on your PC.

Join our Folding@Home Team: 55054

Remember you can run Folding@Home on your PSP via remote play, but you need to start remote play first and then start Folding@Home. Might as well have your PS3 doing something beneficial while it’s on remote play and not in use

Also we can’t let Joystiq pass us up, they seem to be about 10 or so places behind use and they have more members than we do.

Keep those PS3s Folding

Folding@Home update: PS3 breaks Petaflop barrier on its own

Here’s a conversation Gary and I had this morning via chat. I thought it might be a good starting place for a discussion. We started by talking about Halo 3 at 640p. The conversation below starts where I defend Bungie, noting that this is their first 360 title (I think). I’ve edited it for clarity…

***

Henning said:

I assume this is [Bungie’s] first 360 title.

Shime Waza said:

Heavenly Sword isn’t a great game, it’s good but it’s graphics are astounding for a game released during it’s (the PS3) first year. You’d think Bungie would be given preferential treatment by MS though. Seeing as Halo 3 is their only big franchise. They would do everything in their power to give them as much help as possible in getting the 360’s power into Halo 3

Henning said:

Okay, I’ve found some other sources for the news…

Shime Waza says:

Back to my view that 360 is hitting it’s peak. Halo 3 is their single biggest first party franchise and the game they have touted to kill the PS3 (well so say the xbots). Apart from Mass Effect and PGR4 (which won’t sell a load of 360s), they have no exclusive games to blow people away with. They only have that marketing BS with the GTA IV downloadable content. So what can the 360 offer to would be buyers in the form of exclusive games and content? Not a lot compared to the PS3. They have had an easy year and a half to build a lead, sales wise, but the PS3 IS ALREADY CATCHING UP WITH QUALITY CONTENT, then next year THE big EXCLUSIVE games arrive on PS3 and that is when sales (along with a proper price drop) will take off. Here’s a good read related to the Halo 3 phenomenon.

Henning says:

Bioshock is big. Is Halo 3 at 60FPS ?

Shime Waza says:

It hasn’t sold 360s though.

Henning says:

Killzone 2 will only be 30FPS.

Shime Waza says:

I dunno what fps Halo 3 is.

Henning says:

Hmm. [After a web search on “Halo 3″ and “30fps”.] Looks like it’s 30FPS. That makes the 640p all the worse….

Shime Waza says:

My point is that MS and Xbots believed Halo3 would boost 360 sales and kill off the PS3 (by that I mean give the 360 an unassailable sales lead), but they haven’t got the range of games that the PS3 has. Bioshock is great but it’s on PC as well.

Henning says:

True enuf.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the official PlayStation.Blog:

>>

Hi, everyone. It’s time for the PLAYSTATION Store weekly update.

We have two great PS3 demos this week:
• Clive Barker’s Jericho
• NBA 2K8

We also have a couple more add-ons. The first is a new vehicle for MotorStorm. This vehicle, the “Castro Capitano,” is not offered in any other MotorStorm bundle, and it’s only $0.99. There’s also a new Speed Master add-on for Ninja Gaiden Sigma.

As usual, we released more game videos and movie trailers:
• NBA 08 Upside Progression System tutorial
• Eye of Judgement Overview
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock trailer
• Iron Man trailer
• We Own the Night trailer

PlayStation Store Update

Dress was mentioned at the TGS keynote, but wasn’t explained really until now. Basically there will be a virtual space for Dress where you can dress your avatar, most likely separate from the Home avatar, and you will be able to purchase those clothes as well. Or even trade them with other people. Details are below.

Dress Studio lets you create your own fashion, selecting color, material, patterns and logos. It appears that the game will let players make their own brands. Sony is even looking into letting players send their designs away to have them transformed into real life clothing.

Dress museum is a museum of clothing history. It has some interactive elements where you gather famous scenes from movies and famous characters.

Dress park is a community space that’s meant for players to communicate and exchange gifts, including clothing. Sony will hold official events and fashion shows here, giving players the chance to appear as models. Players can also organize their own shows based around their original brands. This is something that Sony hopes to actively support, Shichisawa said.

Dress should arrive in early 2008, hopefully in time for the public release of Home. I like the idea, I’ll definitely try it out. Wonder how much the clothes will cost.

TGS 2007: Tourist Trophy Director Shares Details on Dress

It’s great that PS3 will run as a full blown PC with Linux installed. But the big limitation is RAM. Most competent PCs in 2007 are purchased with 1GB for regular use and power users typically want even more. 512MB is passable for basic desktop use, but the PS3 will only run with 256MB. That’s the only thing holding it back from being a genuine desktop replacement.

Sony released the 80GB PS3 configuration which seems completely pointless, from a user perspective. How about they release a special Linux edition that people would actually want:

• More RAM This RAM would be used in Linux mode only and wouldn’t be used by games. A dedicated Linux edition should ship with at least 1GB. Ideally, this would be user upgradeable as well.
• Larger Hard Disk 60GB is fine for regular game use and most media use. However, even though the drive is very easily upgradeable, if you want separate PS3 and Linux partitions, a larger default drive is probably a good idea.
• Optical Disc Writing Ideally this would write Blu-Ray discs, but if it merely read Blu-Ray and wrote CD/DVD, that would be fine.
• Full GPU Access Currently, PS3 Linux doesn’t have full GPU access. A complete PC replacement would definitely need this. Is Sony intentionally gimping the GPU? I can kind of understand why Sony would do this. Currently, the PlayStation business makes money by getting a cut of all software sales. Sony doesn’t have control over Linux software and wouldn’t get a cut of that. Why would devs make games for the PS3 OS, if they can just make Linux games and completely avoid paying Sony anything? Hmm…
• Linux This should obviously come with Linux preinstalled or at least pre-bundled.

Why would people want this rather than just a regular PC? That’s really easy:

• Form Factor The PS3 may be big and heavy compared to other game consoles, but it’s small, light, and quiet compared to a PC. Also, while style is a subjective issue, I suspect most would prefer the PS3 looks and form factor to any PC.
• Cost Sure, you can get a cheaper PC from Walmart, but they aren’t nearly as nice.
• High-End Tech How many PCs have a high end graphics card, super high-end A/V output (HDMI+Optical), embedded Bluetooth, embedded WiFi, embedded card reader, or a quiet slot-loading Blu-Ray drive? Almost none. And the ones that come close are anywhere near the PS3’s price or size.
• Hybrid Some people want *just* a PC for office/connectivity features. Some people want *just* a games device. And other want *just* a music/movie/media device. And some people want to keep these functions on separate devices, but others don’t. There are a ton of people would be happy to get such a unit that could serve as all of the above: a high-end PC, high-end game console, and a high-end media device? Lots of people would kill for that.

So, would anyone buy such a unit? I already have a PS3, but I would buy another one if they offered this.

(FYI, this isn’t a rumor, this is just a wish list item.)

4:45 PM UPDATE: Added GPU bullet point