Are we a bunch of Sony haters?

[Gooch]

No hate here. If the 60GB PS3 was $400 or less, I'd probably already own it, Resistance, RR7, and be waiting for VF5 to hit in a few. Unlike that other new console, there's a point to owning a PS3 in 2007, just not at the current prices.

[J2d]

They have added absolutely nothing to the industry while they have been in it. Sega and NEC brought disc-based media to consoles. Nintendo has brought many innovations (even if they are credited with far more than reality). Sony just kept throwing money around and benefited almost entirely from third parties that were on the take. Sly Cooper and God of War, which are about the extent of Sony's useful franchises, don't justify their success or even their existence.

I thought Microsoft was going to play the same game when the XBox was announced. However, things like Xbox Live and Achievements have proven that at least Microsoft has some people that "get it." They have evolved the industry, while Sony is being drug along because they feel like they have to.

LOL

[Yoshi]

Nice retort. Feel free to state some things Sony has brought that were new.

[outRider]

Sony did do one thing right (or wrong, if you're one of those people that still complains about the "death of 2D gaming"): the PS1. It basically kick started the consumer 3D hardware industry. If Sony hadn't outfitted the PS1 with what was then a monster GPU, we'd probably be ~5 years behind on graphics today.

That's probably where their arrogance and egomania comes from.

[Yoshi]

The N64 did better 3D than the PS1, and it came out in 1996. So we might be one year behind, if you ignore the fact that PCs would have driven the revolution with or without Sony and Nintendo.

[Fe 26]

they knew how to advertise

[ChaoofNee]

PSX? That absurd PS2/DVR hybrid thingie? Does that even work outside Japan?

Oops. Sorry, no I meant that as "Playstation" to distinguish between the big fellah and the one attached to the LCD screen.

I forgot about that thing and I believe rightfully so.

[outRider]

The N64 did better 3D than the PS1, and it came out in 1996. So we might be one year behind, if you ignore the fact that PCs would have driven the revolution with or without Sony and Nintendo.

Nobody thought of doing 3D on that level before the PS1 came along. Sega was designing their hardware to do very basic 3D so they could mostly use it for scaling and rotation of their 2D sprites and BGs. Nintendo wasn't even talking about a new system. 3DFX wasn't in the picture. nVidia was just starting, and had some simple hardware similar to Sega's.

Then the PSX arrived in 1994-5, and this thing was an absolute monster. It drew and textured triangles in hardware, it provided depth sorting in hardware (long before the z-buffer), it did hardware T&L, and it did hardware MPEG decoding.

Sega shat a brick and tried to throw another processor in their machine, which really didn't change anything. 3DFX released the Voodoo in 1996, which only drew and textured triangles. Nintendo used some SGI HW that basically did what the Voodoo did, although better. nVidia released the TNT in 98, which had depth sorting via z-buffer, and the Geforce in 1999 which finally did T&L in hardware. I don't know when the first card that did MPEG decoding was, but it was probably after 1999.

So, it took until 1999, about 5 years, for the rest of the industry to catch up and do everything the original PS1 GPU did. Of course by this time they also did a lot of things better, but it still blows my mind that Kutaragi and co. thought of this stuff way back in 1994, when the rest of them were concerned with how many BGs they could draw with parallax and how many rotated and scaled sprites they could draw on a single scanline.

[kedawa]

Up until the mid 90s, the console industry followed the arcade's lead, and there were 3D arcade games out well before the PS1 that were fully texture mapped with 60Hz frame rates.

Sony may have anticipated the shift to 3D, but they were certainly not behind it.

[J2d]

Nice retort. Feel free to state some things Sony has brought that were new.

Dual analog sticks, dvd format(for games of course), Eyetoy. I might as well bring that Buzz quiz and Singstar stuff in as well since you talked about evolving the industry.

How does one go on to argue that Sly cooper and God of War is the “extent of Sony’s useful franchises”? It’s such a ridiculous statement that could only fly here. Let’s just ignore the fact that Sony puts out a huge variety of games with plenty of million sellers yea.