Playstation2 II (Or Is That Too?)

Last week's editorial on the Playstation2 definitely got the attention of a number of people. I don't think we've ever had a single article get so many hits here at DVDFuture. Hundreds of you read the article and then sent me emails about it.

It seems about 90% of the people out there who read the article are as excited about the possibilities it represents as I am, and the other ten percent just bought a Dreamcast. I thought I'd take the opportunity this week to respond to a number of comments from readers, debunk a few rumors about the Playstation2 and address the comments that say stuff like, "you're one biased dude".

David Houston was the first person in with a negative comment, "well written, just a tad biased on that PSX2 article. Remember, some of your readers don't have affiliations with Sony and after reading reports on the Dreamcasts launch your views are already shown to be false."

I will say, for the record, I have no affiliation with Sony (and neither does the site). I'm merely a person who is excited by the grand possibilities of new technology. The article is a positive article because I harbour no negative association about Sony or any of the other videogame companies. I wrote it based around the information provided by Sony following their announcement, as well as a number of other news sources. The reason we haven't covered the Dreamcast in the same way, is that the Dreamcast has nothing to do with DVD. When Nintendo gets around to announcing some real Dolphin specs, we will be covering it (for now, the only thing they've said is that it will be DVD based and it will be "as powerful as what our friends at Sony have".)

I haven't seen the system up close and personal as of yet, but I have seen the plethora of screenshots and MPEG movies making the rounds on the Internet. The fact of the matter is, this thing does live up to to the hype, and it's a monster. Given the overwhelmingly positive response to the editorial from last week, I'd say Sega will have their hands full trying to compete with this thing. The only things Sega have over the PS2 out of the box are price, online gaming and, by the time the PS2 launches, a decent library of games. The responses I've received indicate that price isn't a factor (and the price of the PS2 will drop before it launches in North America), Sony is going to have a huge launch library (as evidenced by the list of titles in development), and online gaming not being included out of the box is more than compensated for by the ability to play DVD movies (which is very important to a lot of people).

On the price front, I'd also like to point out that the Playstation2 is backward compatible with all the original Playstation games and peripherals. This won't mean a lot to the hard-core gaming public (they're not afraid of buying new stuff), but for the average Joe, it means they won't lose their investment in hardware and software which has been made with the Playstation.

Leon Parsons' email in regard to the Playstation2 did a nice job of summing up the majority of the email I received, "I think that the PSX2 WILL be big. All the screen shots, specs and industry comment I have seen has all been positive and the DVD angle is a killer."

Not all of the contradictory emails I received were of the "you suck, Sega R00Lz" variety, though.

Richard Ameen sent me an email pointing out that Sony's stated claim of 75 million polygons per second is a best case scenario, with all effects turned off. Absolutely correct. It's also worth mentioning that Sony's figures indicate with all effects turned on the system is capable of twenty million polygons per second. This is without artificial intelligence, physics engines, or anything of the sort. Most of the industry people (i.e. game developers) I've spoken with in the last week have indicated that a real world figure of ten million polygons per second is realistic with a game engine running behind it. Twenty million could be achieved for real-time cut-scenes.

To put twenty million polygons into perspective (no pun intended), consider the following: If a game is running on a television set at 720x482 resolution (fairly standard television resolution), that's 347,040 pixels per frame. If the game is running at sixty frames per second (the most a standard television can handle, and even that can get tricky), that means 20,822,400 pixels per second. Effectively, each polygon could be ONE PIXEL in size, and the Playstation2 could keep up. If we cut that number in half (to allow for in-game characters, etc.) the game could either run at 30 frames per second, or have to put up with some polygons which are two to four pixels big. The fact of the matter is, that in-game graphics which look like pre-rendered scenes are a very real possibility.

A developer talking to Next-Generation online said it best after the original announcement on the specifications for the PS2, "if your artists suck, it's going to become really, really obvious."

Sony has also stated that most of this graphical prowess will not be used for raw polygon pushing power, but instead to offer previously effects which would never have been considered on a game console before. Real world physics (i.e. hair looks like hair when the wind is blowing, with individual strands being blow around), depth of field (easy to spot in the screenshots for Gran Turismo 2000), motion blur, and curved surfaces.

Richard went on to discuss the Dreamcast, and how it's capable of around three million polygons in-game. Absolutely correct again. Although, like the Playstation 2, three million polygons is a best case scenario. To put this into perspective, if you were using exactly the same models on the Dreamcast, you'd get a frame rate of around nine frames per second. This isn't enough to simulate real motion. Still, if you cut down the models so they run at good speed, the graphics on the Dreamcast are very good. They're just not photo-realistic. It's also worth noting that the Dreamcast uses a modified PowerVR2 chipset for its graphics, and one of the advantages of the PowerVR over other graphic chipsets is that it only draws forward-facing polygons. Unlike other systems out there, the Dreamcast only draws what you're seeing, and the rest is chopped out. This can help performance immensely.

My problems with Sega aren't technical, but from a business perspective. The Dreamcast is a very good machine (and heads and tails above anything else currently available in a game console). The problem is Sega's huge debt. They're carrying billions of dollars of debt, and can't afford to compete with Sony and Nintendo. They sunk $100 million into marketing the Dreamcast, and so far the results have been astounding (the machine has already sold more than 400,000 units). The problem is, Sega needs the machine to sell millions of units before Christmas in order to stay afloat. If the North American figures follow the Japanese figures (which is rare, but does happen), this initial flurry of sales will be followed by a huge drought. If that happens, Sega will not survive. The Japanese launch is a failure (they had a great start, but then sales died off in a big way, much like the Nintendo 64). If the North American launch follows suit, Sega may no longer exist. Honestly, their best course of action after the Saturn fiasco would've been to jump into software. The hardware game is not their bag, and now they're in a position where they can't compete. To put it another way, both Nintendo and Sony have billions of dollars in the bank doing nothing but earning interest. When they launch their next generation consoles, you can bet Sega's $100 million marketing budget will seem wimpy in comparison.

Another good point Richard made was that the Playstation2 is very difficult to develop for compared to other game consoles. Because of the complexity of the architecture, developing for the PS2 requires real A-class talent, and it's going to be expensive. Of course, this hasn't kept the developers away. Sony has announced more than a hundred companies developing projects for the PS2, and to ease in development, Sony has also developed the middleware project. Middleware allows smaller (or less talented) developers to buy raw engine code for various things from a third party supplier. For example, if you don't want to write your own physics engine, you can simply buy one. It's not cheap, but in some cases it's probably cheaper (and more effective) than reinventing the wheel. Nintendo is following a similar approach with their next machine. As hardware gets more complex, it's inevitable that writing software for it increases in complexity, too. I suspect first generation Playstation2 games will only look marginally better than second and third generation Dreamcast games. As time goes on, the technical gap between the two will become more and more apparent.

OK. Enough on the technical stuff, let's kill some rumors

Probably the number one question I received was regarding the PS2 playing dual-layered discs. About a week before the PS2 was officially revealed, a rumor began circulating that Sony would keep the PS2 from encroaching on their stand-alone player market by crippling it, and not allowing it to play dual-layered discs. This rumor has been incredibly persistent, but Sony has stated for the record that the Playstation2 is not crippled in any way when it comes to DVD movies. To put it another way, dual-layered discs play just fine.

Another thing which I neglected to mention last week, but which Sony has also revealed, is that games will be able to be encoded in Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 sound. This means, of course, that the new Resident Evil game for the Playstation2 will be that much more frightening.

The Playstation2 is fully backward compatible with the original Playstation because it uses a "Playstation on a chip" as its i/o controller. This means it's 100% backward-compatible, but unfortunately it doesn't improve the original Playstation games in any way. Also, backward compatibility is the primary reason why only two controller ports were included (cost is the other factor), anyone who has a multi-tap knows that if Sony had built it in, some older games wouldn't work.

John Freiman sent me a note pointing out that the firewire (iLink) port on the PS2 may not be a "full blown" firewire port, but instead be like the one on some of Sony's computers, which can only capture stills. I did some checking on this, and the port will be capable of grabbing full-motion video. Sony kept the costs down by having the Emotion Engine do the compression on the fly, though (it should be plenty fast enough). As far as devices plugging into the unit are concerned (i.e DV camcorders), the firewire port is just your ordinary every day capture device.

I received an email from a guy by the name of Blake (no last name provided), which pointed out that the majority of Sony's games are developed by third party companies, and that unlike Nintendo and Sega, they don't develop their own stuff. This was very true at the time of launch for the original Playstation, but Sony has changed their ways in the past few years. They've developed some great stuff internally (Parappa The Rapper, Um Jammer Lammy, Gran Turismo), and bought some of the companies which provide the best games for their system (Psygnosis, 989 Studios). This doesn't include exclusives they've signed with companies like Universal Interactive (Spyro, Crash Bandicoot) and SquareSoft (Final Fantasy series, Ehrgeiz, Tobal, etc.). Even if Sony had no internal development (which, of course, they do), they have the money to lock up the exclusive for the games people want to play. And as I've been reminded time and time again in the past week, the hardware means nothing without the games to back it up.

Sony has also revealed a business model using the PS2 technology in set-top cable boxes in the New York area to provide movies on demand and games on demand. Essentially, they're going to be building a special box for that region which is a Playstation2 without a DVD drive but with a high bandwidth Internet connection. It'll be used for DVD quality pay-per-view movies, and to allow people to play Playstation and Playstation2 games over a cable line. The project will be on-line in 2001 in New York, and if it's a success it'll spread across the continent.

I also received an email from Paul Mais talking about the NUON. The NUON is another DVD based gaming system (sort of). It occurred to me that we haven't covered this here at DVDfuture at all, so I'm going to do some research and return with an in-depth article on it next week.

Last week's quote of the week was answered correctly by everyone and their dog (well over two hundred people got it right), but the person who got their answer in first was Ed Brunelle. Bonus points to a fellow who goes by the name "Big Dog", though, who not only answered correctly, but sent me a sound file of the clip in question.

After being buried under so many correct answers last week, I thought I'd make this week's quote a bit harder:

Woman: "Occam's razor. You ever heard of it?"
Man: "Hack-em's Razor. Sounds like some slasher movie."

As usual, if you know the answer, email me at ken@dvdfuture.com. For the first time, I'm going to track down a prize for the winner (what it'll be, I don't know, yet).

I'll finish off this week with two quotes from readers.

"I've never, ever bought or even wanted a game console before (I spend all my money on PC games and DVDs), but with the release of PS2 (which I now know a little more about due to your article), I am going to be waiting in those long lines at the stores next year!"
-- Chad Tanaka

"...interesting info on Playstation 2...if they'd just put a washer/dryer or a mini-fridge into it, it would be the ultimate appliance!"
-- Boris Harmic