PS3: Thoroughly unimpressed

I watched a good chunk of Sony's PS3 presentation at E3 today, and it left me (to my own surprise) thoroughly unimpressed with the PS3.

Let's be clear, I do buy-in to the notion that Sony has a wicked piece of hardware on its hands. I think that Sony has been quite innovative on the hardware front -- with the powerful and exotic cell architecture, and the Blu-Ray DVD drive.

And I think that Sony went out of its way during the presentation to drive that point home. "We're a hardware company, and we have made an impressive piece of hardware".

However, in the past, the gaming industry has been ruled by one maxim at the time of new hardware release. The maxim: "It's all about the games, stupid!". And so when I say that I was unimpressed with what Sony displayed today, I'm speaking more about the games (which are what really matters, anyway).

And sure, the games looked fairly spectacular (it was a little hard to tell seeing them through the webcast). High resolution, lots of polys, tons of character animation and realistic physics. I'm sure that the fan-boys are drooling.

But here is the kicker -- none of the games (not one!) looked like they were any fun! In order to rebut the rumor mill, Sony made a point of highlighting which games are going to be playable at E3. Well, after seeing the demos, Sony can keep them -- because I'm not interested in playing game one.

One of the demos actually showed how you had to manipulate a character into running around in a 3D environment (which the presenter seemed to struggle with), knock a boss character over, and hit said character in its weak spot in order to defeat it.

Are you freakin' kidding me?!?! I have been doing that in video games, since like, forever!

Where is the innovation, Sony? All of the big new innovative features that Sony announced today (save from their hardware) were direct rip-offs of their competitors. Integration with PSP? Nintendo showed us the way with integration between the GameCube and GBA. Advanced online features like player matching and a marketplace? Such a shameless rip-off of the Xbox live, that I'm surprised that the Sony executives could deliver it with a straight face.

Now I am super-interested to see what Nintendo talks about tomorrow. I think that there is a giant opening in this next generation for games that are actually fun to play.

Because, as we all need to keep in mind, that is the point of playing games, after all. Which is lucky, because "Mario Kart: Double Dash" sure is a lot of fun, which hopefully explains why Kevin and I are still finding at least 7 hours a week to play...

-Andy.

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