* The hardware absolutely rocks. The tech demos they showed off were incredibly impressive, and it's very clear that Cell (programmed correctly) will be the most powerful platform out there.* There's already signs of DRM and locking down the platform. There was a slide on "hardware security built-in" (they probably meant the way the Cell protects data when shuttling it off to another processor, but it's easy to get the double-meaning).* As it stands right now, this thing is going to blow the doors off of Xbox 360. This is coming from an Xbox fan (I've got 30 titles lined up in the den). I'm a gamer, but I also love the best hardware. Barring what Nintendo introduces (and they could very well surprise us, despite the "graphics don't matter" marketing they've been doing), this is clearly going to be the most powerful console around.

It may have more FLOPS, but I'm not sure that's going to necessarily translate into much better games. Both systems are PowerPC derivative chips running at 3.2 GHz with PC-like video chipsets and are coming out within six months of each other. I suspect the game quality (graphics, etc) will be very close between the two.

You don't play specs, you play games. And I'm not sure why you think the PS3 GPU is so much better than the 360's. Care to enumerate?

At the debut of the PS2, Sony claimed it was 10 times as powerful as the Dreamcast, but it took quote a while before any PS2 games looked/played any better than the Dreamcast games. Now they're saying the PS3 is twice as powerful as the 360 -- in marketing speak, I'd call that a wash.:)

Space Sim:X-Box:360 - The original cut of StarWars with maybe six X-Wings and six Tie Fighters shown at any one time.PS3 - Return Of The Jedi with waves of them coming in.

Shooter:X-Box:360 - A platoon of enemy troops charging your squad.PS3 - Two enemy platoons trying to flank your allied squad while you try and find a way to out flank them.

If I'm playing a WWII game, I want occasional set piece massive battles not constant squad action because the system can't handle making that number of troops look good. If I'm playing a world war two flight sim, I want to defend a thousand bomber formation not be one of two planes guarding a six plane flight of B-17s. If I'm playing a racing game, I want all the other cars of a big race, with constant jockeying for position, not an arbitrary six needed to keep the framerate decent.

I could go on. The point is, we play games, not specs. But double the amount of processing power means developers have the ability to put double the amount of content on screen at any one time (assuming they don't simply increase detail on existing numbers). Double the amount of adversaries etc. makes for much better, more realistic games.

So, directly, I don't care that much about the tech specs. I care about the games. But the tech specs give the developers far more freedom to make the games I want to play.

As for proof of that power differential: I could argue about how [only when well coded] massively parallel simple processors can blow the crap out of only a couple of very powerful, highly generic processors. You build a processor that can do hundreds of different complex multimedia tasks - great - but half that silicon isn't getting used for any given specific instruction whereas it's all getting used in massively parallel simpler units and, because they're simpler, they can be optimized to cycle faster.

Regardless of theory though, there's a far simpler solution - take a look at the demos. The X-Box:360 demos look good. Great even. They're definitely an incremental improvement over the current generation. The PS3 demos, however, look like something a movie studio rendered. It's like the difference between companies doing better and better stop motion animation and what Weta did with huge numbers of troops in Lord Of The Rings. That is why I'm tending to believe the PS3 claims. They may just be tech demos, not real games. But what tech demos they are.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Sega and now I work for a major third party publisher, so my words may seem biased.

Will we ever learn?

Travel back in time to 1999 when the Dreamcast was about to launch and Sony showed a realtime demo of a character from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, looking great, with no aliasing problems and looking just like the pre-rendered movie. Then they showed a realtime version of one of the prerendered scenes from Final Fantasy VIII. All PS2 games will look like this, they said. This blows away Shenmue and Virtua Fighter 3tb and Soul Calibur on the DC. Why buy a Dreamcast?

What did we get for PS2 launch? Fantavision.

Soul Calibur DC looked so much better than Tekken on PS2 (made by the same company, mind you) and DOA looked amazing. The colors were more saturated and the images were fully anti-aliased on the DC, but most of the gaming public purchased the PS2.

Now they are pulling the wool over your eyes again.

When I hear comments like "it's not about the specs, it's about the games", I honestly question whether that is true. The DC had so many great games with new ideas (Skies of Arcadia, Samba De Amigo, Soul Calibur, Power Stone, ChuChu Rocket!, NFL2k, Jet Set Radio, Typing of the Dead, Seaman, etc.) and yet it died a horrible and early death.

Truth is, unless it's a first or second party exclusive title, all games will be made with two (or all three) next-gen systems in mind. Developers make multi-platform games, and they will use a development solution that pumps out builds for more than one platform.

IMO, the choice of what game system you should get (PS3, Xbox 360, Revolution) should be based on the First Party exclusive games you want to play. A good number of major third party titles will be released on multiple platforms anyway.

As for the programming thing, Sony figured out with the PS2 that they need to help the programmers along a bit. The positive is that now, all of those programmers who know how to effectively use both of the PS2's vector units will be a leg up when it comes to using all X of the PS3's vector units...

I very much doubt you will see any games support 1080p at first...and maybe not ever. Why spend the cycles rendering all that extra data that no one is going to see? I suspect that the developers would much rather use those cycles improving graphic quality or throwing more characters onto the screen at once than rendering double the data for no gain.

Almost no HDTVs support 1080p right now. And if you buy a nice HDTV today, are you going to replace it in five years? 1080p would be wasted on this generation of consoles, IMO.

1080P, so that's 1080 lines right? Right now on my desktop I'm doing 1280x1024 for all the games I play. So this would be just a hair above that, non?

I've got a 6600 GT, which is able to keep that 1280x1024 filled with data, no problem. So if the card on the PS3 is equivalent to an SLI linked pair of 6800's, it's got more than enough power to pull that off with insane levels of detail.

It seems to me that the XBox is an evolutionary step, taking the XBox, making it a better performing system, and including the obvious enhancements. The PS3 seems to be trying to set the ground work for the next level. Sony is thinking way beyond being the next generation game platform and media hub here.

While XBox can play on HD, what formats does it support? It's just a DVD player, non? The PS3 does Blu-ray, and that will allow it to play high definition movies. Of all the features on the PS3, this is the key piece of the pizzle. Now you may be thinking, nobody has high def movies, but Sony knows that too. Why have a format war over the next high def format when Sony can pre-empt that by having millions of PS3's that already do blu-ray? Expect Sony to begin releasing a lot of their films on Blu Ray when PS3 launches.

This is the first time I've seen Sony really take advantage of all their pieces. I mean Blu Ray has no obvious benefits over HDDVD, but if I've already got a PS3, it has a huge benefit. No matter what people think of the 360, the PS3 will sell millions of units, and that will give Sony it's foot hold. From there, they make money on:

1) Selling games2) Royalties on the Blue Ray format3) Selling everybody their favorite movies all over again in high definition4) Selling TV's that take advantage of all of these capabilities

Very very smart, IMHO. Microsoft has a serious problem here because they can only make up their hardware losses on game licensing. Sony has a lot of channels they can use and it actually will create markets for them that do no currently exist. Microsoft will just sell more games but otherwise be doing the same thing they have done.

"Proper" 1080p is actually 1920 by 1080, due to the 16/9 aspect ratio, so it's actually a fair bit more than your desktop; not enough to worry a whole second 6800 though, I agree.

But then the XBox's graphics processor isn't that different from ATi's next high-end chipset (i.e. it will fully support version 3 shaders). Just as with a single 6800 versus an X800, I won't be surprised if the PS3's graphics pipeline is notably faster under some engines, but actually slower with others.

Anyone that has a VGA monitor should be able to hook these things up to use 1080p.
I'm guessing that Sony will make the Component video out switchable to RGB. If not, you can get Component to RGB adapters.

At Home I watch DVD in 1080p straight from my computer on a 10' front projection screen (yes it is upconverted). Then I click a dial to watch HDTV off of my cablebox which comes out Component and goes through a component to VGA adapter.

The point is the Playstation 3 might be the appliance that truly ushers in HDTV as most everyone has VGA monitors that can be used as an entry level HDTV system, and unlike the crappy rear projection stuff you see at BestBuy and Wal-Mart these will work at 1080p not just 1080i or 720p.

* Zelda Windwaker, that took the idea of cel shading and perfected it.* Halo 2, which perfected playing online with an incredibly strong interface.* PSP, which shows you can turn a game console into a strong movieplayer and vice versa.* World of Warcraft, that brought MMORPGs to the masses and along the way redefined "art" in a video game.* Grant Theft Auto 3, the first truly mass market game.

All of these have great gameplay AND great graphics. Would WW, Wow, etc. be the same without great graphics? Not really. The core gameplay would likely still be fun, but there's a reason we don't play Space Invaders anymore.

The developers have proven time and time again that new power is a tool, and they're more than happy to get their creative juices flowing to use it (think Katamari Damarcy). Yes, there's fluff -- there was fluff with the 80s generation of games too (remember ET)? The gaming industry, however, produces a lot of original ideas to combat the fluff, and frankly it's never been stronger.

If you think GTA3 was the first "truly mass market game", I guess you're not around that long. I think that title belongs to Tetris on the Gameboy, which is about the only game every single one of my non-Geek friends knows. Different opinions are always welcome, of course.

Basically, I'll believe it when they actually ship it -- in both cases. One of the mainstays of FUD is to announce your own much better product that won't come out for a long time, to try to distract momentum from the product you can actually buy TODAY.

Admittedly, in neither case can you actually buy the consoles in question, but Sony is going to be late to the party... so even if they don't ship what they promise to, or if it doesn't work as well as they claim, they might believe that the backlash would

I like the old PSX controllers, except for one point: the grips are too small for my hands; after a couple hours of intense gameplay, my hands ache from trying to squeeze something so small. The XBox controllers, on the other hand, fit my hands quite nicely (although I don't really like where the buttons are), and everyone seemed to pick on the controllers back when the XBox was released.

I hope they either provide a way to connect old PS2 controllers (bluetooth device with controller ports?) or release a 'classic' controller identical to PS2 model as option.

Since it is supposed to be - quoting TFA - "backward compatible all the way to the original PlayStation" - it will be obviously possible. Backwards compatibility was the key factor for me to chose PS2 instead of XBox - I just would miss Syphon Filter and my kids would miss Crash Bandicoot games too much to scrap all our old collection of our favorite games. PS2 even reads PSX memory cards, so we could move even our saved game profiles. I hope this will be possible with PS3 too. If it will - and it looks like it will - then Microsoft has nothing to offer me. Again.

Since it is supposed to be - quoting TFA - "backward compatible all the way to the original PlayStation" - it will be obviously possible. Backwards compatibility was the key factor for me to chose PS2 instead of XBox

What would the original Xbox be backwards compatible to? I'm sure there are lots of comments here about modding the Xbox already, but I'm quite happy that my Xbox is "backwards compatible" with perfect emulation of all 16-bit and earlier generation consoles/arcade games.

It provides an entry for people who are not PS1 or PS2 owners. I never owned a PS1, but have several PS1 games for my PS2. There are just a lot of fun games from the past that probably will never get remade, too.

Everybody said the same thing when they first got a look at the PSX controllers, too. It was crazy... the traditional D-pad was replaced by four buttons! How absurd!

Sony kept the same controller around for two console generations so you know they're not the type of company to come out with a new design just because there is a new console. They probably did hundreds of hours of user testing.

Each device can only be Master in one piconet. And last I looked there were no chipsets that handled scatter-nets properly. (Ie having a device be master in one piconet and client in another.)

IOW if they wanted more than 7 devices they'd need multiple Bluetooth adaptors. And I believe they really don't expect more than 4 players per game. But this allows you to keep other devices (Eye-toy etc) hooked up while you play 4 player games.

Only long hours of gameplay experience will reveal the merits of the new Playstation-3 controller. Don't get all huffy - yet. One thing I'm wondering about is the # of controllres. Why 7? Is it a bluetooth limitation?

So far all the wireless controllers are third party addons as well. I'm sure sony tested these things much more intensivly than any third party seller has. Simply due to the bluetooth protocol though, you are right there will be a lag, the only question is how much of a lag 10MS would be an accetable amount anymore than 30 would become noticable. I'm willing to bet they worked hard on this problem though. And as well any games that come out FOR the PS3 will be designed around the lag so it won't be a proble

This will get Blu-Ray players into peoples home like the playstation did with dvds.

Interesting to compare tatics, as MS is ending xbox games development this year and Sony is continuing for 2 more. Nintendo is also continueing development.

Also playstation will be backward compatable. This is great, because there will be a huge library of working games for it. Also they get that games are not just about the graphics, so HD will not be requires.

From NYT"While every Xbox 360 title must be developed in high definition, Sony officials are playing down that aspect of the new PlayStation. "Blu-ray technology guarantees the highest graphic quality," said Jack Tretton, executive vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America. "HD is not the be-all and end-all," Mr. Tretton said, noting that the depth of game play could be more important.

Microsoft executives have decided to end internal development of games for the current Xbox this year, but Sony will continue to create titles for the PlayStation 2.

Completely untrue that microsoft is ending xbox game development this year.

also, blu-ray technology guarantees the highest graphic quality....what. i guess sony are planning on making FMV games then? Sure you might be able to store more textures on a blu-ray disc, but really you could do the same exact thing with DVDs, just might need multiple ones.

from gamespy

"While just about everyone is (rightfully) focused on the future, Robbie wanted to make sure gamers knew that Microsoft would still be very suppo

I don't get it. GP make it sound as if there was an impending end of xbox games. This guy then pointed out this wasn't true and even quoted a very relevant quote. What more was he supposed to say?

As far as blue-ray, it think it will be a cool extra. However, at this point I think the extra storage is a bit of an after-thought for Sony. XBox 360 I've heard is going to require all games to be HD while Sony isn't. Not that its a big deal, but with that info I doubt many games will require more than one DVD even with HD (otherwise MS is going to annoy a lot of people with having every game require more than one DVD). The reason Sony is including Blu-Ray is to push thier standard. Right now there is competion for the next DVD standard and Sony being able to ship millions of units including Blu-Ray will certainly tip the contest in thier favor. This is smart and good. I'm guessing they will need to make price competitive with XBox, so I'd guess they'll even include Blu-Ray at a loss to keep the price down. They can easily recoup this if Blu-Ray wins the standards war through licensing. Now if this is the case, it could be a great chance to get the "next" DVD player at a great price and makes the PS3 even more appealing, but I don't see it as an issue in game play.

Also, what is XDR RAM? I've never heard of it, but the PS3 has 256MB of it running at 3.2GHz. It also has 256MB of GDDR3 VRAM at 700MHz.

The xbox360 has 512MB GDDR3 RAM at 700MHz unified, for the ATI video chip and CPU to share. How will these compare? Unified vs 256MB of blazing fast? Is it too late and or costly for Microsoft to switch to XDR?

Revolution will be "two-to-three times more powerful than GameCube," according to Nintendo, which also acknowledges that the next-generation race isn't solely about new technologies. By contrast, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is 13-15 times more powerful than the first, according to the publisher. And Sony says it's PlayStation 3 is roughly 35 times more powerful than PlayStation 2.

What does it all mean? Absolutely nothing. Statements like this show how it's all marketing b.s. that can't be believed. When we see how the technology is used in an actual game, then it will matter. In the meantime, I'm about four-to-five times more excited for this generations console launch then I was last time.

"Nintendo never gives what I call "pissing contest" specs, even when asked for them."

That's because it's been *years* since they've been in the technological lead. They used to tout the SNES' scaling and rotation over the Genesis every chance they could. Even with the N64 they constantly talked about their fog effect even though it was really nothing more than a way to hide the system's horrible performance at drawing scenes at a distance (where you could see the background being drawn in on racing games, for instance).

Nintendo still makes a great system with some great games, but they just don't compete with Sony or MS technology. They have to win with great games.

What isn't being explained to the uninitated is that line for the Cell on '7 x SPE @ 3.2Ghz'.

The Cell isn't a single core: it's 8! The CPU (or PU as it is called) is a POWER5 core. It is connected to 7 APUs/SPEs (Attached Processor Units/Single Processing Elements (whatever you want to call them)). Each SPE is a limited CPU in its own right with its own local caches and memory. The PU acts as a controller, dispatching work to the APUs.

Each APU is essentially a very fast CPU optimized for moving data streams and calculations. Cell was designed to chew on large amounts of similar data very, very fast. It isn't a general purpose core like the POWER or Intel cores found in Xbox 360 or the original Xbox (or your PC for that matter).

Caches aren't everything. PCs and XBox depend on caches to maintain performance levels as in a mixed instruction stream it is tough to know what's going on. A cache miss in a general purpose core can (and is) expensive in terms of cycles. Cell (and the original PS/2) get around caching issues by simply not having them (or just enough to feed the processor) and rely heavily on moving data across a very wide and fast memory bus on demand, as needed and repeated as necessary. Dramatically simplifies the architecture and permits much more focused optimization of code. Programmers for PS/2 had to learn to live without caches and learn a new way of development since PC experience doesn't translate over into the PS/2 world and clearly not into the PS/3 world.

A big part of this contest between XBox 360 and PS/3 is seeing how programmers managed to take advantage of that parallel power. Multiple cores in XBox will be useless if they can't be taken advantage of. Same goes for Cell.

I think PS/3 has the advantage and will eventually win. I'm surprised at the specs as original discussions on the machine had indicated it would be fitted with FOUR Cell processors, not one. Perhaps the initial round of prototypes are single Celled (forgive the pun) to permit development and gaining familiarity with the hardware. Perhaps inside are empty slots for more chips.

Don't confuse PS/3 with a PC because it's not. It is designed to be a very fast SIMD media machine focusing on graphics, video and audio. It may suck as a general purpose server and perhaps a PC can hammer it on some benchmarks but if Cell performs half as good as the information on it speculates in the media realm, there isn't a PC (or Xbox) out there that can hope to keep up with it.

But the team didn't just take an existing core like the PowerPC 970FX and build an SoC around it. The core for Cell is new and appears to have been designed before the clock-frequency-is-dead era. The core was designed to reach certain power and die-size goals and is designed to be able to run at clock frequencies in the 4+GHz range. The engineering theam did simply some of the core design (for example, it's an in-order design and only a dual-issue superscalar) and used some dynamic logic in the design in certain critical timing areas.

The core complies with the PowerPC instruction-set architecture version 2.02 (and the 2.01 public version of teh specification). The core was designed with a particular balance of die size, clock speed and architectural efficiency that is different from that of PowerPC 970. This instantiation of the Power Architecture still has a relatively long pipeline, much like the Power 4 and PowerPC 970, but the Cell design does not have a very wide issue pipeline or out-of-order execution, nor does it have as many functional units.The Cell Power core has hardware fine grain multi-threading.

So it looks like the PS3 core is a lot simpler than even the simplified Power4 core in the PPC970. Looks like they decided that instruction level parallelism does not help with game code and went with a smaller dual issue design with reduced number of instruction units.

This is quite insteresting. Unlike general purpose processors, which are often optimized for a set of specific benchmarks, the processor for a game console is actually designed to optimize the performance for a specific set of applications, i.e., 3D games. The most demanding applications driving the performance of high end PCs today also happen top be 3D games. I wonder if we are going to see a transition to back to simplified cores with higher clock speeds soon. Given the current trend to integrate multiple cores on a single processor die, a multi-core design with a large number of simple, high speed processors would be an interesting design trend.

The multi-threading feature of the Cell core may be ported over from the Power5 design as a way to deal with memory latency at high clock speeds.

I think it would be pretty safe to assume that the PowerPC core in the Xbox360 chip is very similar, if not the same design.
Here is an IBM paper [ibm.com] that shows, at least in the lab, they were able to run the cell processor above 4GHz.

While they did not say it is real-time or not, as far as Killzone is concerned, the PS3 seems more than capable of making a game look like this. The only issue I have with how the clip is presented is that it's a hell of a lot more "cinematic" than what actual gameplay would look like. I don't care if you script the hell out of everything that happens on the screen, it will still not end up looking like you're inside a CG "movie". It probabl

Of *course* we want to believe it - eye candy is important to most gamers (as is good gameplay, etc, of course, but it's eye candy that makes that all-important lasting first impression, and gameplay is very hard to see in screenshots).

Note:
* Derived from CPU Game Math Performance of 9 billion dot product operations per second
** Derived from subtracting published Overall System Floating-Point Performance of 1TFlops with derived from CPU Game Math Performance of 9 billion dot product operations per second

115.2 GFLOPS for the 360 CPU. And like I said, there's an photo at the PS3 press event that showed the same thing on a graph. Surely you've seen those pictures?

I wouldn't bank on a HDD being included until they say so. If they were planning on it, I suspect they would have said 'HDD included' and not specified capacity if they hadn't decided on that point yet.

backward compatibility edge for Sony (in overall "you don't have to worry" scope, in vastly larger number of games, and in previous market share);

WiFi ready as opposed to built-in

Technical specs could theoretically have made the difference for Dreamcast -- if one or the other had just conspicuously kicked the competitor's butt -- but for Joe buyer it comes down to "There are two cool new systems, and they're both about the same in coo

While we know there is marketing hype involved, at least one demo was shown to be real-time. From the Gamespot article:

To show off the PlayStation 3's graphical brawn, Sony showed several game demos, including an Unreal 3 engine show-off of what appeared to be Unreal Tournament 2007. In what must come as a relief to developers, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney was on hand to vouch for the PS3, saying it was "easy to program for" and that Epic had received its first PS3 hardware two months ago. He proved the tech demo was real-time by showing it again and by manipulating the camera and zooming in.

Why is it hard to believe that Sony, working on this project for the past 3 years or more, might just be able to best Microsoft's 18-month project? It should not be. While the specs might be a tad inflated, it's probably safe to say that the PS3 is a more graphically and computationally capable machine than the Xbox 360. What that means for market share remains to be seen.

Both MS and Sony are going to be pulling out all the stops. Nintendo is likely to step up to the plate as well. You know what? Competition is good.

I have a logitech dinovo blouetooth keyboard/mouse combo and I do not use that mouse for gaming. It's way to laggy, I think bluetooth has maximum update of 80hz or something. Have they worked around that?

Why not stick with a controller for a few systems. I understand new items are added to controllers to upgrade performance or add some new element to the game (rumble pack for GC for example), but there's a clear threshhold where a controller doesn't need to be "enhanced" much more to be suitable for a new system. Just update the system, gamers will probably like you better for it. Then again, they aren't getting the extra sales for those controllers they would have been selling... perhaps thats the motivation.

You guys should check out the gamespot.com E3 coverage. You can use bugmenot.com to login for free and take a look at the Sony Press Conference. Also it is a windows media stream, sorry *NIX guys. The stream is about 1 hour 50 mins long. It shows all the new games and tons of presentations. Lot of stuff about capturing new markets but the PS3 console looks amazing.http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3live.html [gamespot.com]

The Cell processor is IBM's jewel, it might be the single killer against the x86 market. Not to mention that the Cell processor in PS3 is revision 3 while the one in the xbox is revision 2. The new cell processor is gonna knock the socks of all you folks.Trust me:)

Another thing is that 7 controllers that run Blue Tooth, I don't get it either. But the main thing is that games will be more and more interactive. But the Final Fantasy games out there look amazing but beyond that the Gran Turismo games are also kick ass (please cars flip over...please ) But the Tekken for PS3 was an amazing intro. You could see Jin's muscles and sweat and then the heat rising from his body and with the punch you could see sweat fly from his fists. There was another game a FPS that was amazing where marines come in through the sky and fight on the ground urban warfare style. I don't know how much of it are rendered movies and how much is real time work but the Unreal PS3 engine was amazing, it really was the explosions with the rockets and the smoke. But beyond that they had the CEO of EA come in ( yeah I know he didn't pay overtime ) and brought in Fight Night, that was great with the facial expressions of the boxers at every punch I just can imagine Rockstar Games' new GTA will definately be something. And also there are tons of new API's in the Nvidia GFX processor subsystem that have tons of stuff, like transparency and skin diffusion, water refraction. Amazing stuff. Xbox to be cool had to come on MTV, Sony being classy just went to E3 and showed who's who what there lil box can do. But over all whole press conference was kick ass, marketing venture yes. But the xbox360 on MTV was so.... teenager oriented that the PS3 is for bigboys, and the lil'boys. Sony was cool and professional while the Xbox 360 was like in your face kind of advertisement. End result xbox360 looks good PS3 looks kickass, kungfu punch, matrix lobby scene better. Also the PSP using 802.11 can become an auxillary input into the PS3 ( huh, why what do they want us to buy everything that Sony has to offer or what?? ).But the dual HD output is great, and it also takes VGA:) . And it is backward compatiable with PS, PS2 etc.But the estiemated price of the PS3 is $250 for just the gaming rig and $500 for the works. But definately they will sell there console for a loss.And make money on the games. Looking at the way the PSP sold I wouldn't be suprised it would sell for US$300.Also our beloved Hedijo Kojima of MGS showed up, may the Lord Bless his soul, yes there is going to be a MGS for the PS3.The xbox 360 has major major competiton. Cell technology puts them on the same playing field including the Nintendo Revolution. What makes them different are the games they have to offer. Even with life like reality in the end it is the simple thrill of Pong and Pacman and Mario Bros. that makes us want to play more and more games.Frag away, Drive away, Super Combo away and what ever Final Fantasy does...

I think it is shaped that way, so that if you get really mad because you lost for the 100th time, you can throw the controller away and it will come back to you as a boomerang. You don't have to get up anymore to get te controller.

At this point I am just excited to be able to buy bluetooth controlers. I assume that they will be normal bluetooth and compatible with PCs. Maybe this will spur the development of bluetooth devices the way the original iMac made USB ubiquitous.

It's pretty sad when I can look at an Xbox 360 Controller and say it looks better than this one.

I won't finally judge it until I actually hold one, but I dont understand why Sony would screw up a good controller design for what looks more like an asethethic change rather than a functional one, unless they had to make it bigger to hold the wireless circuity.

While there's a lot to like about both consoles, I don't like the design of either of them.

This stand-it-up-on-the-side crap might look cool to some people, but it really doesn't fit in to the scheme of most media rooms very well.

And both of them have goofy contours with absolutely no function dictating the form, and not even much appeal from an aesthetic sense.

It's like Sony wanted their console to remind people of a Toyota Prius... And Microsoft has a consultant tell them that curved panels are "hip" right now.

The PS3 "boomerang" controller looks like an interesting industrial design choice, though. As a typical adult American, it will be fun to try playing Sony games with a controller that actually fits my hands, for a change. (Although I'm sure there will be howls of anguish from old-school Playstation bigots who think anything bigger than a suppository tablet is way too big for a game controller.)

I'll take your $20. Too bad they've already announced that the XBox 360 will be out this holiday season, and the PS3 will be out 6 months later. What you're predicting is that the XBox 360 will be MORE than 1 year late.

I highly doubt that Microsoft would risk such a leathal blow as to slip the all-important holiday season. They'll need all the help they can get now that the PS3 has announced they're full backwards compatible, with some nifty features that the Xbox 360 doesn't have (Bluetooth, 1080i).

I assume you mean this goes for any gaming system and/or game right? Halo/Doom3 is nothing more than a FPS with prettier explosions. The XBox2 is nothing more than a typical game system with more horsepower, right?

I'm glad to see you understand.

Don't get me wrong - I've been a computer/video/arcade gamer for 30 years now (they didn't exist for the first part of my life). I currently own two PS2s, a PC, a Linux server, a couple of Powerbooks, a GBA-SP and a PSP. (I'll omit the list of all the machines I u

Yes, it's called Bluetooth. 79 frequencies available cycled 1600 times a second (23 frequencies in the Japanese spectrum). Once a piconet links up (which is what a given console and set of controllers will be) they cycle frequencies in sync. Unless you plan on having more than several dozen systems within about 10 meters there won't be a problem. Bluetooth was designed to be ubiquitous.

Oh and another possibility that seems more likely when I think about it is that a console will have an "acquisition mode" in which it's willing to accept new controllers. Probably something accessible from a Pause or System sort of menu so you can access it during a game.

Back in the Xbox 360 article I said that Nvidia is probably putting the most powerful silicon they can in the PS3, and at 1.8 TFlops They didn't disappoint, and either did sony with the Cell. This thing is almost 2x+ the Xbox 360 in just about every stat but RAM.

The SDK however, has got me a little concerned. Sony is notorious for having bad SDK's for their hardware, specifically the PS2 at launch. Although it's unclear what the Xbox or PS3 SDK is like, my guess is that Xbox 360 dev kit is going to be easier than the Sony one, simply because it's what Microsoft does; make software and programming tools.

Nvidia in the PS3 is definitely going to make it a lot easier for devs since it's probably going to be documented by Nvidia, and will most likely use hardware calls that are similar to their PC counterparts. The only question left is how easy is it to program the Cell, and how will Sony's SDK stack up to the MS one.

Overall if these specs are attainable, Sony's got something here, and it's Developer base will see to it that it trounces the Xbox 360 with it's sheer power, it just might take a year for it to show it's full potential. Nintendo, on the other hand, better show off something that truly lives up to it's "revolution" name.