PlayStation 3: Nice box, hefty price

Starting off, we have a pile of stuff around the Playstation 3. There’s been murmurings around a price cut for months now, with developers crying out for one and Sony steadfastly refusing to do anything about it. With this there’s a bit of history – at launch the Playstation 3 wasn’t a must have accessory. People weren’t queueing up to buy it as they had all picked up Xbox 360s and were having fun with them. The only real pitch Sony had was to position it as a cheap Blu-ray player as well as a games console and pick up some purchases from the enthusiast AV/home cinema crowd. Moving forward, now they’ve got a stack of top quality games on the platform but there’s still nothing there to help persuade players to switch from the Xbox or Wii. In fact, there’s a handful of reasons why players like myself aren’t running out there and buying one.

• That £300 price tag. It doesn’t matter if the build quality is better or the technology’s superior if there’s two other consoles out there for significantly less dough. With the 360 for £170 and the Wii at £180, I’m really struggling to justify parting with three hundred notes for Sony’s box. I don’t have a blu-ray player and my TV only does 720P, so I’m in no rush to upgrade to hi-def film and will probably only do so when my upscaling DVD player breaks.
• The friends list tie-in. On Xbox Live I’ve got all my friends listed there. I get alerts when they come online and get invites to multiplayer sessions through it. It’s all seamless, and it all ties in with my MSN/Windows Live neatly. If I move over to the PS3, I lose all that and have to rebuild it again. Coupled with the problem that most of my mates aren’t PS3 owners anyway and it means that most of my tine would be made up of solo play or multiplayer with some random teenager with Tourette’s.
• The lack of compelling exclusives. Most of the stuff I want to play is available on both platforms and where you have an exclusive deal on one you can usually find an equivalent title on another (think Gears of War, Killzone and Resistance: Fall of Man). There is stuff on there like Flower and Pixel Junk: Eden, but these are just downloadables and certainly not something I’d splash out a huge chunk of wedge just to play.

Now I might not be your typical Sony customer, but it’s just the way I read things at the moment. The only thing the PS3 has going for it at the moment is the technology. If it can hang in there for about another year, you’ll start to hear developers complaining of capping out on what the XBox 360 is capable of. If that starts to happen and you get simultaneous releases that have a huge difference in quality between versions on the two consoles, you might find people more willing to bite the bullet and migrate. Until then though, about all Sony can do is change the price and encourage more people to give the system a try.

The PhysX Card: Substituted with a Software API

The next thing I’m struggling to grapple with is the flavour of the month feature of doing physics work on the GPU. This has been kicking around ever since NVidia bought Ageia, a small company that specialised in making expansion cards and an accompanying API (called PhysX) purely to deal with physics based calculations. The idea was that effects could be made more realistic by performing more accurate collision modelling, cloth effects and so on. NVidia bought the tech, turned it into a software API and got it it run on their own graphics processors. They’ve now licensed the tech to Sony for use in the Playstation 3, meaning that developers can now use the GPU instead of one of the Cell cores for physics work. I’m still trying to work out why anyone would bother with this, as devs are still struggling to push the Cell to it’s maximum performance with current titles. Besides, most places seem to be using Havok for their middleware, so why trying to grapple with something else that’s not really needed? And wouldn’t it be more sensible for someone like Intel to pick this one up if it was really needed and cram it into their line of processors before shunting the frames off to the GPU for assembly and rendering? The whole thing feels like a tick-box feature without any real use and will probably be made redundant with CPU development over time, just like maths coprocessors.

Finally, this year’s conference seems to have a large chunk of it devoted to the legendary Casual Gamer. The general punditry goes that the Nintendo Wii is a casual gaming platform designed for casual gamers. As it’s shown that there is a market out there for casual gamers due to it’s astronomical sales, the logic follows that developers should be making games to target them. Now, without getting into the whole debate over what a casual gamer is (I’ll save that for another blogpost) are these people actually picking up many thirdparty titles to play on their console? I’d love to see some stats on this, as my gut feel (and I hope I’m wrong) is that most Wii owners are playing Wii Fit/Music/Sports, or a Mario, Sonic or Zelda game and not much else besides. My other wonder is how platforms like the DS or iPhone come into it – are these casual gamers trying something out, or hardcore gamers having a bit of a “game snack” during their free time? Again, I’d love to see some stats.

So, while the yearly developer gathering takes place it’ll be interesting to see what comes out. I also wonder what their hopes are for the year and what direction they’d like to see the industry head in. Till then, it’ll be gamers like ourselves who are peering in from outside, guessing at what’s going to happen next. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll work out if I fall into the Hardcore or Casual bracket.

Such retrospective navel gazing brings me on to a game that caught me by surprise while watching the weekly instalment of The 1Up Show, a free stream and podcast that I download occasionally. In one of their recent episodes they covered Flower, a game that I can only describe as “playing the wind”. Since such a description is flimsy at most, I’ve embedded a video below to demonstrate what I mean.

I was quite surprised by this – I hadn’t heard of thatgamecompany before and was caught by surprise by a new game concept that seemed to come out of nowhere. A short while later and I discovered the history of two students from the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media division, and suddenly everything  linked up. These are the guys that tried out new game mechanics through Cloud and later flOw, and come from the same course as the team that developed PMOG. Both these games are expose their raw gameplay through an uncluttered interface and simple mechanics, all of which help to make the game fun as well as making it simple to implement. Progress information is supplied through in-game elements, such as the size of your cloud in Cloud, or the length of your creature in flOw. The mechanics for flOw worked so well that they were borrowed heavily for the cell phase of Spore.

The culmination of all of this means that flower, rather than being something unexpected, is more of a natural evolution of previous concepts produced by a niche developer. That doesn’t mean that their efforts should be belittled, but instead followed closely. Such primal concepts as the ones demonstrated here are useful to track, as they provide a canvas on which to build further games, in much the same way as Spore has done. It’ll be interesting to see not only what thatgamecompany produce in the future, but also which other games currently in development by others are influenced by thatgamecompany.