Arstechnica Reviews the PS3

[DJ12]

There's LOADS more poring stuff to do! Paint a wall, sit in front of it and look at it until it's dry.

Or playing Final Fanstasy 12....


... Ok i dropped the ball....

Strangely enough, I never tried to paint my walls with my 360

I imagine that to be far more fun than "playing" with the dashboard.

 

[blakjedi]

Patsu I find your arguments interesting.

1- The MS money machine line - MS has a lot of money. Basically due to good management of analyst expectations, stock usage, and "innovative" ways of leveraging technology to support their "system" of integrated software services. Hasn't Sony been profitable for the two generations? What was the break even point for Sony in the last two generations (which means how many consoles = equaled the break even point) and how many consoles did they sell beyond that? You cant tell me that 100 million plus consoles has not equaled BILLIONs of dollars of profits for years. If that money has been used to support other lagging parts of the company then so be it, but no one believes that Sony should not have enough money to compete with MS in this space. Thats Sony's fault and Sony's problem.

2- Monopoly schmonopoly - MS is a virtual monopoly because they make things easy and attractive for those of us that arent geeks. People didnt choose MS windows because they had to originally; they chose them because they wanted to. Their OS worked and had attracted more developer interest on the right hardware at the right price than Apple, Unix, Amiga, and Atari did. Apple is a virtual monopoly in the MP3 space, YouTube in the user video distribution space, and Sony has had all the power of a monopoly in the console space.

Sony is a consumer electronics GIANT. You can go soup to nuts with only Sony gear in your household... you cant do that with MS. MS makes no TVs, no DVD players, amps, receivers... All of that competence and industrial entrechment and capacity, you worry about some software guys that cant get WebTV off the ground and have staggered in both the console and small CE phone and PDA business?

Sony destroyed Sega and has roundly whipped Nintendo into an also ran console maker such that they really receive most of their income from handhelds.. and overwhelmed MS into 4 Billion dollars of losses... Sony makes and breaks developers and invents new chips (Cell, Emotion Engine) and sponsored the creation of CD (dominant optical sound format), DVDs (dominant AV format), Bluray, HDMI and S/PDIF among others... which everyone basically uses for all their audio visual entertainment needs...

I mean really... Sony has the upper hand in all the elements of this arena and should be dominating it from UI, to hardware, to ergonomics, to aesthetics, to component quality, sourcing, manufacturing and distribution... to software. Sony also had a seven year head start (1994-2001) with almost ten years of absolute domination (1996-2006) in the videogame software development space... Why are there "mistakes" and why is there even any room for mistakes from them now?

3- MS's Xbox division was up against Sony as a whole last generation and lost BIG. This time MS decided not to make the same mistake twice. Sony put even more effort as a COMPANY into PS3 than any other product before and you want MS to just sit there and let a couple of the old Xbox gaming geeks, IE guys and marketers build a system? Anyone who doesnt believe that MS' approach this time isnt the ONLY way for ANY company to attack the console market as it is currently dominated by Sony, has a very friendly relationship with a local crack dealer.

 

[Geo]

/me struggles to find the relevance of the above to Ars review of PS3, but reluctantly decides not to break Blakjedi's heart by deleting that much text. /me also thinks that warning haven been given, follow ups shall receive no mercy.

 

[blakjedi]

/me struggles to find the relevance of the above to Ars review of PS3, but reluctantly decides not to break Blakjedi's heart by deleting that much text. /me also thinks that warning haven been given, follow ups shall receive no mercy.

Geo - Allow me to just say... that the sum of my above post is "Sony has every advantage in the console arena from hardware to software to distribution. Regardless of what MS did, Ars technica should have had nothing negative to write about this (the PS3's) launch."

Thanks for the sympathy regarding my post.

 

[-tkf-]

Anyone who doesnt believe that MS' approach this time isnt the ONLY way for ANY company to attack the console market as it is currently dominated by Sony, has a very friendly relationship with a local crack dealer.

MS as a crack dealers makes some 3 billions pr quarter(?) Just introduced the Vista pricing which will milk even MORE money from the crack addicts.

Sony has competition all across the board from everyone they don´t "own" any single market and the reason they won the first 2 "wars" is just as much because Nintendo chose to loose and Sega just made a plain mistake (2D!).

For me the XBOX is a classic Microsoft product, v1.0 is ok and nice and cost billions, v 2.0 is better and costs billions v 3.0 is getting there and will maybe make them money. v 4.0 is making money and the competition is all but dead. v 5.0 is bloated but has zero competition and innovation has died.

When i was getting my "nerd" education, we used Word Perfect and Turbo Pascal. They were the defacto standard. Windows NT was just about to be released at a very cheap price point compared to Novell. As with every Microsoft product the price stayed low until the competition was gone.

 

[patsu]

/me struggles to find the relevance of the above to Ars review of PS3, but reluctantly decides not to break Blakjedi's heart by deleting that much text. /me also thinks that warning haven been given, follow ups shall receive no mercy.

I was responding to an earlier post to correct a statement comparing Sony's team size with only the Xbox 360 team size. Didn't realize it will drag on. PC entertainment and console are converging, it's only natural that the players' relative strengths and weaknesses got involved in the discussion among us. But you're right, it's the wrong thread to do so.

As for the relevance to the Ars review, I take the position that Sony marketing has contributed to the fragmented image of PS3 w.r.t. this comment in the summary:
"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."
I also edited my previous post to add more details.

Within the context of this 1-machine review, Sony's failure to manufacture large quantities of PS3 on-time is not in their scope of evaluation. That is another long drawn topic altogether.

 

[Barbarian]

Optical discs are error prone by definition - if people want to write I/O subsystems that don't handle any errors they shouldn't develop for machines using optical discs (or any removable media for that matter).

Well, the thing is, the OS has the ability to handle these kinds of tasks better and more reliably. Or would you rather trust every developer out there to do it right?

 

[mckmas8808]

Didn't agree with somethings in the review, but every review should state in big letters how good the PS3 is in showing off Blu-ray media.

Jesus Christ Black Hawk Down looks great in these picture.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Didn't agree with somethings in the review, but every review should state in big letters how good the PS3 is in showing off Blu-ray media.

Other than the users who are getting kicked down to 480p! The irony here is heavy...

 

[patsu]

Nice pictures !

For what it's worth, Ars (and other mainstream news sites) are not gaming portals. And PS3 is an entertainment computer. There are people who bought PS3 for Blu-ray. Leaving out Blu-ray (titles and advanced features) and just talk about a machine for "gamers" is missing half the picture.

It is a pity Sony did not emphasize the "entertainment" value, or the reviewers missed the cue (I read somewhere that the package include Blu-ray coupons besides the free HD movie ?).

The down-scaling to 480p is a minor point as long as it's mentioned in the article. Might as well highlight PS3's system update.

 

[Fafalada]

Well, the thing is, the OS has the ability to handle these kinds of tasks better and more reliably. Or would you rather trust every developer out there to do it right?

I'm all for OS handling stuff, but "rebooting a game" is not handling anything.
That's like saying Win3.x had memory protection because you could reboot the PC if an application hanged.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

I'm all for OS handling stuff, but "rebooting a game" is not handling anything.

I believe he was referring to optical disc i/o functions / error handling.

 

[-tkf-]

Other than the users who are getting kicked down to 480p! The irony here is heavy...

The users with HiDef sets by name but not by nature?

 

[deathkiller]

Other than the users who are getting kicked down to 480p! The irony here is heavy...

Do you know someone with a 720p only HDTV?

 

[jimpo]

Do you know someone with a 720p only HDTV?

For example 80% of european HD sets?

 

[DuckThor Evil]

For example 80% of european HD sets?

That's not true. They accept 1080i signal and convert it to 720p.

 

[rabidrabbit]

For example 80% of european HD sets?

Huh it was 720P only.
You're so wrong in this, it's more like 99.99% of HD sets in EU are NOT 720P ONLY, but capable of accepting 1080i and/or 1080P and downconvert.

 

[Arwin]

For example 80% of european HD sets?

In the EU (at least in the Netherlands) HD TV sets aren't allowed to call themselves HD unless they meet the minimum requirements of being able to accept both 1080i and 720p signals.

 

[rabidrabbit]

And HD-TV's really weren't sold in the EU until there was a HD standard and that "HD-Ready" badge. There are many sets that are only "HD Compatible" though not HD resolution, and they only accept a HD signal to be input, but scale the picture down to their native resolution, which might be as low as 576p.
But you'd have to be really dumb to buy such a set and think you'll get a real HD display, and only deserve to be shafted (and probably would live happily thinking you're viewing in HD, until someone tells you the truth)
So, in EU, the 1080i is totally a non-issue.
Lesson to Sony. You really should have launched the console in EU first, and be spared from much of the bad press you're getting from (the few) angry 1080i only folks in the US

 

[London Geezer]

It's true. All European geeks were really angry at one point by the apparent total lack of interest in HD in this continent up until the boom 2 years ago. But in the end it seems that the huge delay (HD had been in the US and Japan for a decade already!) did something VERY good for us, having a strict (or at least, much stricter than the US) set of requirements which in the end protects consumers.

We might get things late, but lots of times we do get them "fixed" after they have launched in other territories first.