Playstation 3… or 2.5 :?

Lately it would seem that the Playstation 3 might not live up to its hype or even anywhere near it. Not only that, but it would seem that for a number of these reasons, it pains me to say this; I would rather own an Xbox 360 right now. Granted that the Playstation 3 has more titles that I want in the future, however none of those titles are going to make the launch window.So what exactly about the Playstation 3 is so broken and messed up? Well let’s start first with the pricing. In the past Sony told us that the Playstation 3 would have one exclusive package that would run an estimated $500 USD. For it to be $500 USD and $600 USD doesn’t really bother me. What does bother me is that they have two packages to begin with. Now we are going to have kids that are bargaining which one to get, this forces developers to create games in a way that limits them, much like developers of the Xbox 360 who can’t take advantage of the Hard Drive because all users do not have one.

Next, the Cell Processor, the supposed holy grail of such appears to be severely in trouble. While some of you may or may not have caught the local memory and processing on the console, it wasn’t pretty to say the least. The local memory of the cell processor has a 16 MB load speed. That means that the processor is almost entirely pointless from the perspective of the load frame. This of course means all the reading will be done from the main memory, aka the RAM and the Hard Drive. This leads us to conclude that the cell isn’t all that it was cracked up to be. However it does have a fairly decent write speed but that’s not really what we want from our local memory in a gaming machine. Basically what I am trying to say is that the Cell isn’t really as great a CPU that Sony led us all to believe in fact it’s more troublesome than it is great, especially when it comes to programming games for it.

Originally at E3 2005 the PS3 had a few extra features, most notable was the on board router that would allow you to more easily link up consoles and offer great broadband speed, though my personal knowledge of this device has since depleted. The reason for that is because that feature was removed from the PS3 thus downgrading it. For the most of us we hoped that nothing else would become of our PS3 in a negative way, however now it seems more downgrades could be on the way.

In an Interview with Kotaku, the “Phantom Insider” who broke various stories regarding the PS3 had some more speculation to serve to the already doubtful PS3 fans. It would seem with a November release lingering ever closer that Sony would at least have a game or two under it’s belt, however it would seem that not only are the games not ready, but the system itself isn’t ready. In response to much of the developer’s problems with the PS3 Dev Kits I have no doubt that the Phantom Insiders suggest that the Dev kits are still not working isn’t that farfetched. This Sony inside man also says that the 3.2 GHZ speeds we were promised may in fact only be 2.8 GHZ. The Sony insider claimed that the consoles running at E3 2006 were in fact 2.8 GHZ, so at least we can expect what we saw in the conference to be near the final product. But these downgrades just further that Sony might not just be as great as they have been saying. I for one don’t feel that Next-Gen gaming starts with them anymore, I feel it starts with Nintendo.

Update! - I forgot to touch on another area of the Playstation 3 development. That is of course the PC ports. Games like Final Fantasy XI, Half-Life, Crysis, and others are all PC games. Developers have talked about the difficulty in programming the Playstation 3 hardware. So much so that in order for a game to be ported to the PS3, it has to be almost completely rebuilt from the ground up. However the Xbox 360 which almost mimics a PC can get a port in a matter of months with fairly little effort on the developers. Thus the PC Ports will be sluggish on the PS3, while the Xbox 360 will be getting the games almost at the same time as the PC.

Sources : The Inquirer, Kotaku