A Weekend Full of Quality time with the Playstation 3

[Frodo 13]

By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: November 20, 2006

Howard Stringer, you have a problem. Your company’s new video game system just isn’t that great.

Ever since Mr. Stringer took the helm last year at Sony, the struggling if still formidable electronics giant, the world has been hearing about how the coming PlayStation 3 would save the company, or at least revitalize it. Even after Microsoft took the lead in the video-game wars a year ago with its innovative and powerful Xbox 360, Sony blithely insisted that the PS3 would leapfrog all competition to deliver an unsurpassed level of fun.

Put bluntly, Sony has failed to deliver on that promise.

Measured in megaflops, gigabytes and other technical benchmarks, the PlayStation 3 is certainly the world’s most powerful game console. It falls far short, however, of providing the world’s most engaging overall entertainment experience. There is a big difference, and Sony seems to have confused one for the other.

The PS3, which was introduced in North America on Friday with a hefty $599 price tag for the top version, certainly delivers gorgeous graphics. But they are not discernibly prettier than the Xbox 360’s. More important, the whole PlayStation 3 system is surprisingly clunky to use and simply does not provide many basic functions that users have come to expect, especially online.

I have spent more than 30 hours using the PlayStation 3 over the last week or so and may have played more different games on the system — 13 — than probably anyone outside of Sony itself. Sony did not activate the PS3’s online service until just before the Friday debut. Over the weekend a clear sense of disappointment with the PlayStation 3 emerged from many gamers.

“What’s weird is that the PS3 was originally supposed to come out in the spring, and here it came out in the fall, and it still doesn’t feel finished,” Christopher Grant, managing editor of Joystiq, one of the world’s biggest video-game blogs, said on the telephone Saturday night. “It’s really not the all-star showing they should have had at launch. Sony is playing catch-up in a lot of ways now, not just in terms of sales but in terms of the basic functionality and usability of the system.”

Sadly for Sony, the best way to explain how the PlayStation 3 falls short is to explain how different it is to use than its main competition, Xbox 360. When I reviewed the 360 last year, I wrote: “Twelve minutes after opening the box, I had created my nickname, was in a game of Quake 4 and thought, ‘This can’t be this easy.’ ”

I never felt that way using the PlayStation 3. With the PS3, 12 minutes after opening the box I realized that Sony inexplicably does not include cables to connect the machine to a high-definition television. Keep in mind that one of Sony’s main selling points has been that the PS3 plays Blu-Ray high-definition movie discs. But high-definiton cables? Sold separately. The Xbox 360, by contrast, ships with one cable that can connect to either a standard or high-definition set.

Then, before you are even using the PS3, you have to connect the “wireless” controller to the base unit with a USB cable so they can recognize each other. If you bring your PS3 controller to a friend’s house, you’ll have to plug back in again. The 360’s wireless controllers are always just that, wireless.

If there is one thing one would expect Sony to get perfect, though, it would be music. Wrong. Sure, you can plug in your digital music player and the PS3 will play the tunes. But as soon as you go into a game, the music stops. By contrast, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed most on the Xbox 360 is being able to listen to my own music while playing Pebble Beach or driving my virtual Ferrari. Doesn’t seem too complicated, but the PS3 can’t do it.

In that sense it often feels as if the PlayStation 3 can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. In the PS3’s online store (which feels like a slow Web page) you can access movie trailers and trial versions of new games, but when you actually download the 600-megabyte files, you’ll be stuck watching a progress bar crawl across the screen for 20 or 40 minutes. Astonishingly, you can’t download in the background while you go do something that’s more fun (like play a game). On the Xbox 360, not only are files downloaded seamlessly in the background, but you can also shut off the machine, turn it on later, and the download will resume automatically.

The PS3’s whole online experience feels tacked-on and unpolished. On the Xbox 360 each user has a single unified friends list, so you can track your friends and communicate with them easily, no matter what game you are in. On the PlayStation 3 most games have their own separate friends list and some have no friends function at all. There is a master list as well, but in order to communicate with anyone on it, you have to quit the game you are playing.

There are some high points. The multi-player battles in Resistance: Fall of Man are excellent. The arcade-style action in the downloadable Blast Factor is suitably frantic.

But the list of the PS3’s disappointments remains, from its undersupported voice chat to its maddening cellphone-like text messaging system. (In frustration I ended up plugging in a USB keyboard.) Overall, Sony seems to have put a lot of effort into cramming as much silicon horsepower under the hood as possible but to have forgotten that all the transistors in the world can’t make someone smile.

And so it is a bit of a shock to realize that on the video game front Microsoft and Sony are moving in exactly the opposite directions one might expect given their roots. Microsoft, the prototypical PC company, has made the Xbox 360 into a powerful but intuitive, welcoming, people-friendly system. Sony’s PlayStation 3, on the other hand, often feels like a brawny but somewhat recalcitrant specialized computer. (Sony is even telling users to wait for future software patches to fix some of the PS3’s deficiencies.) The thing is, if people want to use a computer, they’ll use a computer.

Through the decades of the Walkman and the Trinitron television, Sony was renowned as the global master of easy-to-use, seamlessly powerful consumer electronics. But recently Sony seems to have lost its way, first in digital music players, in which it ceded the ergonomic high ground to Apple’s iPod, and now in home-game consoles. For now Sony’s technologists seem to have won out over the people who study fun.

As a practical matter, given the limited quantities Sony has been able to manufacture, the PlayStation 3 will surely remain sold out throughout the holiday season. If you can’t find one, don’t fret. Sony still has a lot of work to do. As Mr. Grant of Joystiq put it: “Maybe in six months it’ll be finished. Maybe by next fall I’ll be able to do all the cool stuff. I’m still kind of waiting.”

Source: NY TIMES

[MadBryan]

wow, bummer.

[Peench]

Some valid points, but to be fair, downloading in the background was a recent dashboard release on the 360 and wasn't working out of the box on the 360 either.

Hopefully Sony will learn from these issues and work towards resolving them with software updates. If so, that will be great!

[Fragmintz]

Mazel Tov Uncle MS!


I do hope that Sony fixes its experience for users but I am happy to see that credible new sources are realizing that the release of the PS3 was not some slam dunk that was going to knock the other two competitors out of the water. This is good for everyone, b/c now Sony realizes they need to step it up to compete.

[SpOoNmAn]

Cant play music while a game is going?!?!?!

Wth?!

Wow I learned a lot about the system from reading that.

And regarding Downloads, the 360 offered Resume from day 1, and unless I read incorrectly, the ps3 does not. That to me is more important than multiple downloads and downloading in the bg while doing other things.

[Crippler]

I think it's totally valid to compare what the 360 experience is now to what the PS3 experience is now. Sony had an entire yr to match it. But didn't.
Time Magazine gets in on the fun to: http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...560635,00.html

[SpOoNmAn]

Originally Posted by Crippler

I think it's totally valid to compare what the 360 experience is now to what the PS3 experience is now. Sony had an entire yr to match it. But didn't.
Time Magazine gets in on the fun to: http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...560635,00.html

Never thought of it that way, I must agree. What a shocker!

As far as any online stuff goes, theyve had well over 4 years to try and copy the features.

[Peench]

Good point Crippler. Hadn't thought of it that way.

[KEEZY]

I'm sure updates will make things better.

How were the updates for the PSP? That is probably the only thing we can really go by, if we are to estimate how it will come along.

[SpOoNmAn]

whats a PSP? that black thing thats dead in the water?

Its selling as well globally as the 360 does in japan.

I apologize, this was uncalled for. I shall go in the corner now.

*I dont know about updates it got or the time schedule for them

[SpOoNmAn]

Arstechnica, a very well respected site within the electronics community speaks up. Its not all bad and things will turn around, but every core message of every review is that the 10 month delay wasnt nearly long enough.

Conclusion for those that dont want to click and read thru 6 pages..

Conclusion

I think my main problem with the PS3 is that philosophically, it's a confused system. It doesn't really know what it wants to do. The 360 wants to be a social system; it wants to get you online, talking to people, playing these fun little minigames, and going for the high score and bragging rights. It wants to bring you together and make you remember what you love about gaming. And it did all that from day 1.

The Wii wants to get you off the couch, for you to be physical and to be part of this game world. Wii wants you to connect and to get your friends and family involved even if they don't like games. The Xbox 360 and Wii are systems that know what they want to do.

The PS3 doesn't have any grand ideas; Sony wanted something high-tech, so they started from scratch with the processor and GPU, but what does it get them? Very little so far. The controller is a mash-up of ideas from their old systems, the 360's triggers, and the Wii's motion-sensing capabilities, but once it has that tech it doesn't really know what to do with it. The Blu-ray adds cost, but adds very little to the gaming experience for the user. It's great as a media player, but for those of us who love games first and foremost, we have to look at it skeptically. The PS3 is a system with no core message, and that is what keeps it from being elegant. Will it do great things in the future? I hope so, the possibility and potential are certainly there. For now, it's power looking for a mission statement.

One significant issue with the PS3 is a lack of proper scaling. We know that if your HDTV can't display 720p, you will get knocked down to 480p in some games, which is a shame. The other problem shows itself in Blu-ray movies, with the system having trouble scaling things down from 1080p if your set doesn't support that resolution. In some instances, this results in a grainy image. Hopefully this can be addressed via a software update.

Sony wants to push new formats; we want to play great games and have a good time doing it. We want every bit of that experience, from the menus to the loading times, to help us get into that fantasy world and keep us there. Sadly, with all the new technology, Sony appears to have neglected the overall gaming experience.

Overall, I am impressed with the system's potential. The graphics power is there and once developers have had the time to tap into it, things should change a bit. In fact, I think we'll see great things from the second generation of games from the PS3. Combine that with a few software upgrades, better HD scaling, and a major overhaul of the online system and you can go ahead and add two points to the current score, three if Sony really delivers with the udpates. The hardware is solid, and the games are only going to get better, but the software implementation leaves a lot to be desired; the score reflects the PlayStation 3 as it exists now.
The Good:

* The hardware looks great, and runs nearly silently and very cool
* Wireless controller is light and feels great
* Great-looking Blu-ray movie playback
* Price is low for a Bluy-ray player
* A lot of multimedia options
* Solid backwards compatibility

The Bad:

* Terrible online store
* Slow, unintuitive browser
* No background downloading
* Games continue to play even if you eject the disc; you have to manually restart the UI via the controller
* Messy UI
* HD scaler doesn't work right
* Price is high for a video game console
* No rumble, controller loses sync with system sometimes; little game support for motion-sensing features
* Uninspired launch lineup

The Ugly:

* Knowing that no one is actually playing this thing, every system is waiting in a box somewhere for the eBay profit

Review

[Peench]

Nice succinct conclusions. Thanks for passing it on Spoon!

[Jon Liu]

it's really sad to see the bad press even AFTER the console has released...

I had really high hopes that they would overcome all the pre-launch negative press.

[Frodo 13]

I hope they fix the issues. I was 100% positive that was going to get one. With more negative press, this percentage lowers.

[SpOoNmAn]

Originally Posted by Jon Liu

it's really sad to see the bad press even AFTER the console has released...

I had really high hopes that they would overcome all the pre-launch negative press.

Well they have noone to blame now but themselves at this point. For Sony to get negative press on a scale like this....you know its bad. In the past people would look the other way. People are finally holding them accountable for their actions or lack thereof.

People deserve to know what they are spending 600.00 on. Thats a lot of money for whats meant to be a toy. The reviews arent biased either so...

They should have delayed until spring '07. They surely arent helping themselves with the current situation. They could have mustered up a couple million working units, and holiday or not, every single one would have sold correct?

They need to finally admit that their competition forced their hand, but they'll go to their grave before that is ever whispered.

[Wondermonkey]

The updates for the PSP were minimal at best and didn't address a majority of the issues that people were asking for. And yes, they really fell short on supporting the PSP, which is why I traded ours in for the DS Lite.