The PlayStation 2, on the other hand, has a strong video games heritage, and it shows. It looks like a console and plays like one, albeit a supercharged one. Its black box design is practical, if a little uninspiring; its specially designed 300MHz RISC processor produces excellent results; and it plays DVD movies. There is even a strong rumour that there will be a remote control unit available for it by the time it is released in the US, Europe and Australia on October 26.
Unlike X-Box, which was there in spirit, PlayStation 2 was at E3 in reality, with a big line up of games and all of the major developers working to have titles ready either by launch date or within the first couple of months. Sony announced that there would be up to 50 titles available at launch and there are a total of 270 games in development. But more important was the announcement of the changes that have been made to the console itself for the non-Japanese market. Our version will come with a drive bay for an optional 3.5-inch hard disk drive with a rumoured capacity of up to 30Gb. There will also be an expansion unit for a network interface enabling broadband Internet access. The problems Japanese users have had with having to use their 8Mb memory card for DVD playback have been cured by bringing the playback facility on-board.
Sony says the features and functionality of the DVD players will be enhanced in the future through firmware updates, which according to the company enables PlayStation 2 to evolve into future digital consumer applications. However, Sony did not expand on what those future applications might be. What the company did emphasise was its push toward broadband Internet access, both for online gaming and e-commerce. Sony will be establishing regional Internet portals around the world in the lead up to the launch, including one in Australia, which insiders say has a budget of $11 million.
Telstra is expected to host the portal, which should open shortly to take advance orders for the console.
Unlike Microsoft, which appears ready to change the processing specs of the X-Box at the drop of a hat, Sony has maintained the basic specs of PlayStation 2 for the rest-of-the-world version. It runs on the Sony/Toshiba-developed 128-bit Emotion Engine, operating at 294.9MHz. It has 32Mb of Direct RDRAM and can produce 66 million polygons per second using a graphics synthesizer that has 4Mb of embedded DRAM and runs at 147.46MHz. The screen resolution ranges from 256 x 224 to 1280 x 1024, streets ahead of anything the second generation 32 and 64-bit consoles were capable of.
Sony proved last time that if you got the formula right a 32-bit machine could equal, if not outperform a 64-bit machine such as the Nintendo 64. It now faces a similar challenge up against the X-Box and at this stage there is little difference in performance to the naked eye.
Admittedly the X-Box is still very much a prototype, but by the time it finally goes on sale, Sony developers will be starting on their second generation of games and will be starting to work out how to get the best out of PlayStation 2, so dont expect there to be a huge difference between the two.
The initial price of PlayStation 2 will be prohibitive for many Australian buyers, particularly if you add a hard drive and the network expansion pack. While it will sell for $299 in America and about 299 in the United Kingdom, the local price was yet to be finalised at press time. But it will be either $599 or $699 for the base unit. The state of the Australian dollar will have a big bearing on the final decision and unless it improves dramatically between now and the third quarter of this year, $699 is the more likely price.
However, even at that price it is a cheap DVD player and Sony is budgeting to sell three million units in the US by March and a similar number in Europe (Sony includes Australia in the European market). The experience in Japan, where almost two million PS2s have been sold since March, is that people will buy two or three DVD movies to every game they buy. Sony is using the sales data to promote PS2 as a total home entertainment unit rather than just a games console and for that reason the company says it will continue to support PlayStation 1 as a dedicated game machine.
There was certainly no evidence of the console being phased out and there were dozens of new titles on show at E3 ranging from the blockbuster role playing game Legend of the Dragon to sequels of old favourites such as Cool Boarders 2001 and a host of kids titles including Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon and Crash Bash, an arena game featuring Crash Bandicoot and friends. There was also the usual line up of popular sports titles.
With the arrival of PS2, the price of the PS1 console is expected to fall further and games are
also expected to be cheaper.
The obvious problem with this is that third party developer are no longer likely to pour the big budgets they have in the past into some titles. An average PlayStation game costs $3 million to $4 million to develop with titles such as the later Final Fantasy episodes costing upwards of $30 million. However, the price of PS2 is not expected to drop as quickly as its predecessor and with a customer base of 73 million consoles around the world - almost 1.5 million of them in Australia - there will be a continued demand for the games. The market also has been helped by a clever move from Sony to enable PS2 to play PS1 games, and in some cases make them look better.
State of play
A surprise player
Enter X-Box
Nintendo play catches up
Dreamcast alive and kicking
The next generation