The debate raged on over at Curmudgeon's place, with the general consensus from that side of the fence being that keeping your PS2 hooked up is a small price to pay.
Well, it would have to be a small price to pay - because Sony is significantly reducing the PlayStation 3's game library while offering little in return. For $250, you could get a Wii and play every Wii game, every GameCube game, and every N64, NES and all the other Virtual Console games you have at your fingertips. Or for still less than the 40GB PS3, you can get a 360 and play the majority of Xbox games out there - and have them upconverted to HD to boot.
Or, you can spend $400 and play flOw. Which you could have downloaded for free on the PC anyway.
I think the main thing people are overlooking is that unlike when the PS2 offered some backwards compatibility (hey, it didn't play X-Com, and I'm still bitter about it, k?) - is that these days there's a larger number of existing games still worthy of playing.
On this point, though, Matt and I agree - we both have a wall of games left to play. So the real question is - why not just keep both around?
Well, because to be honest, I find it pretty silly. The whole notion of being forced to double up on what should be one console simply because Sony is getting the shakes on the pricing scheme is rather annoying. The PlayStation 3 was supposed to clear room from our media cabinet, by replacing both the DVD and PS2 - not just add to the clutter. Without backwards compatibility, the PS3 is little more than a cheap media player - and if see from that point of view, there's a lot more options out on the field. If I can't remove the PS2 from the cabinet, I might as well swap out the DVD player with the Mac Mini and just wait for the format war to be over.
Heck, that way - I could still play flOw.
If Sony wants to make a cheap Blu-Ray player, I say all power to them. I'm just not in the market for one just yet.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
More On Backwards Compatibility
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7 comments:
Unless I'm mistaken, the version of flOw on the PS3 is a far different experience than the PC version. To quote Wikipedia:
"The PS3 version of flOw has several added features, the most obvious being that there are six creatures to play as, all with different abilities. In addition, the player can also eat power-ups which will cause their creature to move faster, and have a bigger mouth to eat more organisms with.
The PS3 version has multiplayer action for up to 4 people. Other players can join in at any time and will be the same type of creature as the first player."
That's not the same as free on the PC, sorry. It's an exclusive deluxe version, if you will, and there is no other way to play that version except to own a PS3.
Additionally, playing with the sixaxis controller is quite nice. Another feature you don't get on the PC...
And surely $400 is worth playing an enhanced version of a Flash game :P
I'm not saying PSN isn't delivering some quality content, I'm saying that content doesn't trump having access to one of the largest singular game libraries in the history of man. BC is not a trivial feature, especially when it is the PS2 we're talking about here, and it is a feature Sony's competitors are now both handling far better.
My point was that if you're going to use flOw as part of your argument then you'd probably best be comparing apples-to-apples. You aren't.
Fine, it's apples to candy apples. I don't think it fundamentally shifts the argument.
Meant to add yesterday, but forgot to get around to it, the PS3 plays X-Com for the PS1. :^) It's no longer the hardware solution in the PS2...it's purely software. That's how they get the PS1 games on the PS Store to run on both the PSP and the PS3. And I'm fairly sure that the PS1 games you have discs for are using the same emulator.
Well I gotta say that my pure love for X-Com pops another check into the plus column for it then.
The PS2 actually *plays* the game ... but won't *save* the game. Which, as I'm sure you know, isn't very helpful for X-Com.
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