State of the Station: Tower of Babble

Number three: PS3.

I've gotten e-mails from old contacts that can barely suppress the fanboyism surrounding this machine. There are going to be some very annoyed wives and girlfriends out there on the weekend before Thanksgiving and Blast Factor may not be enough to soothe their souls. I've got to tip my hat to SCEA; they've really done a fine job of un-, ahem, screwing themselves after their debacle in May during E3. In spite of my off-the-record jokes that the only people happy about the PS3's price were eBay executives, it seems that every single retail chain that takes pre-orders has pre-"sold out." Whether it's all going to the secondary market of online auctions or into the homes of gamers, it's as predictable as a sunset that Sony will declare this fourth quarter to be a huge success.

Unless, of course, the PS3s have the same manufacturing defects that PlayStation 2s have had. As I've discovered from some of our UK readership on the message boards, not every gamer from every country in the world successfully managed to sue the crap out of Sony to get them to fix PS2s with Disc Read Errors. All of us litigation-happy Americans got lucky, it seems. Let's hope that the same doesn't happen with a machine that's twice as much as its predecessor. I'm concerned about it as a whole in this new wave of consoles; Dead Rising zombified a crapload of 360 among a lot of the non-editorial guys in the OC headquarters of GameSpy. It's an issue that worries me, even if no one's really talking about it.

Also, for a console that supposedly represents the HD generation, or whatever corporatespeak has been regurgitated over the last year and a half, why, as Li pointed out ten days ago as Kaz Hirai posed with a retail box, does the damn system come with composite cables? While SCEA Executive VP Jack Tretton gloated that the PS3 runs on internal power, unlike their competitors' heavy bricks, he failed to point out that the competition has an HD-friendly cable that can also work on a standard definition TV. We "R E" for something new. Can we play beyond the same RCAs that we've seen since 1995? Granted, the option for HDMI is a wonderful one, but unless someone has component cables for their PS2, it's another hidden cost to the hardware.


On a more optimistic, but still inquisitive note, has Sony announced any portability of game files from system to system? If so, the news has been awfully, awfully mum. It seems to be something that no one has mentioned, but on a system with a hard drive built in, I find myself wondering if I can take a PS3 save and slap the data on a PS2 memory card and take it to a friend's. I'm doubtful that I can (that's like those wishful e-mails from 10 year olds asking if they can play PS3 games on their PS2), but I'd like to figure out what they've got up their sleeves.

In theory, everyone knows that the 8 MB memory card has never really felt like it was big enough, and indeed, games ate up memory at a much faster and more ravenous rate than on the first PlayStation. However, after backing up the card to the PS3's virtual memory card, one wonders if those free 8 megs could be used to take my Resistance progress over to a friend's. It's something that has come up as I've realized that my PS2 memory cards will fade in importance just like my PS1 memory cards did some four or five years ago.

Also, I'm still a little nervous about PlayStation Online on this new system, but I'm willing to wait and see. Granted, it looks and sounds like Xbox Live with some iTunes Music Store inspiration mixed in, but I'm more worried about how online gaming will fare. Sony's laissez-faire system toward multiplayer really hurt the PS2. When it comes to online console gaming, the adage that you get what you pay for has rung true for a long time. Let's hope that it's not the case this time around.

Well, after taking a glance at everything, it's safe to say that PS3 owners in search of games might find themselves taking advantage of the new system's full backwards compatibility to play some of the PS2's Holiday fare. Also, some of the cross-functionality between PSP and PS3 is quite cool, if you've got both. However, it remains to be seen how the system will end up. Look for this column to heat up a lot more until the end of the year. Fingers and toes crossed, I'll have a test unit in my office by the time my next column is ready. Most likely, after that, I'll be chronicling whatever ungodly line I stood in to get some extras for the office. Yes, dear readers, no matter what kind of access and privilege that everyone thinks that we have, we're still a bunch of gamers in line for a system, just like you. Or some crazy guy you know.