Let's
not forget the slew of really pretty dancing and musical titles
that are lined up for the system. Ladies and gentlemen, the most
powerful gaming machine on the planet is being used to power...Drum
Mania. Woo hoo! You laugh, but I'm not kidding. A number of
Playstation 2 titles are the kind of quirky Japanese games that
sell like hot-cakes over there, but likely won't make it to America.
An example: Popolocrois, one of those incredibly odd "girlfriend
simulators" that keep coming out in Japan (you may recall
that another game of this type accompanied the N64's Japanese
launch).
Even Square's
The Bouncer, which has a lot of people talking, bores the
heck out of me. It's going to be at least a year before we get
our first Final Fantasy title on the system, and boy, until
then, I just can't help but think the system's going to be barren.
Where's
Resident Evil? Wipeout? Heck, there hasn't even
been a Crash Bandicoot title announced for the system yet.
Which is very surprising, considering that Crash is the closest
thing to a genuine Playstation mascot (unless you count Lara Croft,
of course) and one of the first PSX 2 technology demos featured
an uber-high resolution Crash. Supposedly Naughty Dog, the developers
of the first batch of Crash games has decided to move onto other
projects and characters, but there are more games coming...when,
is of course the question.
What the
Playstation 2 announcement felt like to me was Sony jumping the
gun on their own product launch. These games could not have been
in development for more than a year, and the end result is that
the first run of games are going to be identical to PSX 1 titles,
only with more polygons. Since it's going to take that much more
time and money to make a good PS2 game, we could be looking at
a really long time before the decent games start to arrive. They'll
most certainly arrive, no question about that, but it's going
to just plain suck waiting for them.
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Cynicism aside, Gran Turismo 2000 really
is pretty (65k).
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But of course, this doesn't really surprise me.
Sony has gotten really, really cocky lately. And admittedly, this
is for good reason, but that doesn't necessarily always mean the
best thing for us hardcore gamers. The executives at Sony know
that if they release the system with not a single game available,
it will sell very, very well based entirely on the brand name.
But, they also know that they've got some very stiff competition
on the way from Nintendo, and Sega's very successful US launch
with their Dreamcast. So what do they do? Rather than release
another game system, they're going to release a new entertainment
appliance.
Sounds
like a stupid buzzword, doesn't it? Well, get used to it. Because
that's precisely what the Playstation 2 is. If you've read any
interviews with the Sony bigwigs, they almost never mention that
the Playstation 2 is supposed to be a game console, because it's
not in their eyes. It's the hub of everything in your living room.
Think
about it: the PSX 2 is a cheap DVD player. Give them credit for
that. It will soon have the ability to play movies downloaded
via cable modems (this is planned for 2001, but they made this
announcement alongside the console itself). It's Internet-ready
(with an additional PCMCIA card). Thanks to that FireWire port,
you can connect your video camera to the system (lord only knows
for what purpose, but they keep talking about it, so there is
definitely something planned). Oh, and it plays games, too.
Sony is
going to try and sell the system to people who want a DVD player
and want to surf the web - not just gamers. Gamers will love it
because it's freaky-powerful, and eventually great games are coming.
But until they do, you'll be looking at one heck of an entertainment
appliance that plays some decent, if not great, games, and your
entire DVD movie library. Woo-hoo.
-
Jason "loonyboi" Bergman is hungry. Could somebody grab
him a sandwich?
