It seems we’ve seen a lot of great concepts from Sony for their PlayStation 3 product line but very little has managed to hit the software virtual shelves. We’ve heard of Sony’s Afrika for the PS3 back at E3 in 2006 and we’re looking at it for 2008’s holiday lineup.
We’ve heard about Sony Home for years as well, but that’s now in some type of beta. It was supposed to be an open beta but that didn’t seem to work out and now it’s closed beta only. Recently they pushed out a firmware update that bricked PlayStation 3 consoles or at least screwed up many of them in varying levels.
Are they just really bad at software development and road map predictions? As a hardware development company they’ve put out some hardcore products, stone cold stable in terms of design and efficiency from the Walk Man to the PS3. Their products are practical in design, for the most part, fairly pretty, stable and function as designed. Yet they come up short on software time and time again.
One of the contributors at 2old2play had some things to say about Sony’s development efforts:
“Having worked at Sony as a Creative Designer two years ago, it doesn’t surprise me that they have still yet to release Home. While there, I was working on their Station Launcher application which was supposed to be released in late 2006. However, the Launcher app is still only in Beta to this day.” (2old2play.com)
In many ways their the anti-Microsoft in their approach and commitments. While Microsoft ships hardware that has what must be a 60% failure rate Sony ships hardware which works fairly well. On the flip side, Microsoft publishes a large quantity of software for all their products and has done very well in the business. Nobody can say it’s 100% perfect but it tends to get better with age or, at least, grow on you.
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EA Leaves SecuRom out of
You know why I hate Windows sometimes? Because it decides to do a reboot and a system update while I’m in the middle of writing a comment on a podcast episode…
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. I will keep it brief because I don’t feel like writing an elaborate post again after what just happened.
1. I got the T-shirt, thanks a lot! It fits perfectly and the cotton quality is excellent. Great gift.
2. X-bone launch date. It will not launch in Poland and some of the neighboring countries so it makes me care even less about the console that I did previously. Because of the limited launch range, the date hase everything to do with Black Friday and nothing to do with the PS4 double release date. We sort of have some sales like this before Christmas and people do get trampled over in stores but still it’s not as crazy as over there. Thankfully, there’s always Amazon and Cyber Monday so I’m going to stock up on stuff then. Also, we didn’t have labor weekend or anything like that last week 😉
3. PS4 controllers. Do they mean 4 Dualshock 4s or 4 controller of any kind? Maybe it’s the former which would mean that the console will support more RockBand or Buzz controllers? That would make little sense, though. Still, I don’t care that much. The last time I played couch co-op was maybe two years ago when I played NHL 3-on-3 Arcade with two of my friends. Other than that, I don’t remember what else I played. I use my second controller while the other one is charging and that’s it.
For move games you usually don’t have enough space in the room to fit 3 or 4 people playing so it’s 2 people time 2 controllers = 4 total and that’s enough.
4. External hard drives. This is unclear to me. Do they mean media storage as well, i.e. movies and music on an external hard drive? This wouldn’t make sense, again. It shouldn’t be that hard to support an external USB drive in the OS so maybe they do mean games and game data.
500 GB is not that much if you count all the games you download with PS+. I own a 120 GB PS3 and I need to cycle my games constantly, which is not convenient. I’m getting a 1 TB disk soon and I wanted to put it in the PS4 and move the 500 GB into the PS3. I’m not sure the warranty is void if you do it, to be honest, since Sony encourages the disks to be exchanged (see, the 12 GB Flash iteration of the PS3)
5. FF XIV – I believe the only reason they’re continuing to realease new games is to learn the Roman numerals…
6. QOTW – If it ain’t broke, I’m not getting a new one – that’s my way of thinking. And since I’ve never had a console break, I’ve never exchanged one. To be fair, I only owned an NES, a PS3 and a Vita (I’m not counting some old, old TV consoles that played Pong…), so my experience is limited. Maybe it will change with the PS4 which I will get at launch. The chances that it will last for 6-8 years are slim, I guess but hopefully I’m wrong.
7. @Jordan – have you played Killzone: Mercenary on your Vita? That’s a AAA exclusive you’ve been waiting for. I’m not a huge FPS fan and I’m not that good at them, especially online, but I really like this game and it plays extremely well on the handheld.
8. I’m going off the grid for over a week so I will miss the next episode. You will probably talk about the new Vita model. Have you noticed that the mysterious connector has disappeared from it? The one next to the game slot on top of the device? Any ideas what that was supposed to do anyway? 🙂