Stories From The Past

While discussing bringing Monster Madness to PS3, producer Lee Perez complained that the one of the largest hurdles to jump was the console's RAM storage.

"The biggest thing is the memory. The PS3 only has 256 megs ofmemory. The 360 has 512 so you have twice thememory when you load a level," he told Videogamer.com.

"Now the offset to that is the Cell processor, so if you understand and your engine can understand how to use the multiple cores in tandem you can offset that," he continued.

While PSP has been a reasonably successful product by any measure, don't count Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Group, as a fan of Sony's handheld.

"The PSP is a reasonably successful product at the profit-and-loss level. But as a product concept, there are cautionary tales to learn from it," he recently told VentureBeat.

"While it is good at producing audio, it’s not a good music player because it doesn’t have local storage (except for flash memory slots). You can’t keep your music there. It has a beautiful screen, but you can only get the video under the Universal Media Disc format. That format hasn’t been successful."

Ever since Star Ocean 4 was announced, the platforms the Square Enix title would land on has always been in question.

In April, Famitsu reported on new details about the latest entry in tri-Ace's space opera RPG series, but the mag again gave the disheartening news that the platform the title would appear on will be announced at a later date.

Square Enix producer Yoshinori Yamagishi was asked directly by IGN today about whether it was an Xbox 360 exclusive or not.

Sega is one of the most recognisable publishers in the business, yet the company still hasn't cracked the top five.

Sega UK MD wants that to change as soon as humanly possible. And the ball is already in motion to make it become a reality.

“We have always been very clear in our ambition to become a top five publisher,” Pritchard said in an interview with MCV. “And the company has made acquisitions and investments as part of that strategy."

Now that Blu-ray beat HD DVD, the dust has been settling for a few months.

And it looks like the predictions of higher prices may not be entirely accurate.

According to SonyNEC Optiarc, prices will be dropping substantially by the time the holidays roll around.

Tom's Hardware is reporting that the firm has gone on the record with their expectations that Blu-ray combo drives, which can read BDs and write all sorts of DVDs, will reach the $100 mark prior to the holiday season.

DFC Intelligence has come out with its latest forecasts and the outlook looks very good for PS3.

According to DFC, PS3 will overtake Xbox 360 in 2009.

"The Xbox 360 was unable to take advantage of Sony's struggles to build the type of large lead needed to maintain a long-term advantage," the group wrote in its May 2008 Dossier.

On the whole, they predict that Wii will take win the next-gen race, because it "has enormous momentum and appeals to the broadest audience."

Toshiba took a huge gamble with its investment in HD DVD and the company lost big time -- reports claim they took a bath to the tune of up to a billion dollars.

But it looks like they're going to give it another go.

Crediting unnamed sources at Toshiba, Japanese daily Yomiuri is reporting that the company is working on a new DVD format extension that will feature quality that compares to both HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Yahoo reports that the rumored players will be priced lower than the current Blu-ray structure.

About a year ago, it was not an enviable position to be in Kaz Hirai's shoes.

He had just taken over from living legend Ken Kutaragi, the man who was known as the father of the PlayStation. And PS3 was not selling as it was supposed to.

But now some time has passed and things are looking up for both Hirai and Sony. This year, PS3 has been neck and neck with Xbox 360 for second place.

"I think that some of the initiatives that I put in place after I took over the job in Japan are starting to bear fruit. We talk about this all the time: the fact that we’ve repositioned the PlayStation 3 as being first and foremost a videogames console. I think that cleared up a lot of confusion in everybody’s minds – certainly people in the press as well as consumers," he said in an interview with Three Speech.

We don't usually expect huge companies to compare their products to drugs in any way, but Sony is the kind of company that keeps us on our toes.

At the 6th annual Wedbush Morgan Securities Management Access Conference in New York City, SCEA senior marketing manager was quoted by GI.biz as described PSP as a "gateway drug" into the console world, describing consumers that buy the handheld moving on to purchase PS3 later on.

"It's become, from a gaming perspective, a lot different than I think we even envisioned it when we first launched it," he said.

It looks like the classic PSOne role-playing game Suikoden is going to hit both PS3 and PSP.

The title has received ratings from the ESRB for both platforms, and that's pretty much money in the bank that it's going to eventually hit.

Video Game Generation theorizes that we're going to see a bargain basement pricing of $5.99 when Suikoden does arrive, although since it's a Konami title it could be as high as Castlevania: Symphony of the Nights, which clocks in at $9.99.

The PSP is certainly on a roll in Japan.

Sony's handheld once again demolished the competition, selling a whopping 70,536 units for the week of May 5 through May 18. The closest hardware competitor was the Wii, which came in at number two with 41,572.

Coming it at three for the week was Nintendo's DS, which cleared 34,905. Next up at four and five were Sony's PlayStation 3 with 7,701 units and PS2 slightly behind at 7,022.

As always, the Japanese are still not fans of Microsoft's Xbox 360, which came in last at a measly 1,474.

According to the cover story of the UK PlayStation magazine PSM3, the Xbox 360 exclusive BioShock is coming to PS3.

While no details are available about the upcoming title, the website CVG states that the issue, which comes out June 5, will include a detailed preview of the new PlayStation 3 version as well as a plethora of screenshots.

When asked for a comment, Take-Two issued a blunt "no comment", but that's to be expected. There is also another European magazine that's promoting the PlayStation 3 port of BioShock as well...so there's obviously something in the works.

Last year Peter Moore was the biggest Xbox 360 cheerleader on the planet.

And this made sense, considering he was Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division. But now he's head of EA Sports, so he's more interested in all of the major platforms now.

In a recent chat with GI.biz, Moore gave a rundown of what he thinks of all three.

"Clearly Xbox is about online, connectivity and social entertainment; the Wii is about fun and pick-up-and-play and getting off the couch; and the PlayStation 3 seems to have benefited from the GTA launch well, and we're starting to see some hardware numbers and it's finally started to pick up speed. So what you've got now is three platforms doing well," he said.

Many analysts thought that April would be a very good month for both PS3 and Xbox 360, given that Grand Theft Auto IV hit during the month and was one of the most anticipated titles to arrive this year.

But sales were down for both PlayStation 3 and 360.

However, GTA IV hit very late in April, which hardly gave new gamers time to purchase a new system.

“We were surprised by relatively weak PS3 and Xbox 360 sales, especially given the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV late in April. We had expected sales of both consoles to increase month over month, as we thought that many potential console owners were waiting for the game to launch before purchasing a system," said Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

The popular theory was that once Blu-ray vanquished HD DVD, sales of the the victorious players would increase substantially.

But according to a new poll by Harris, this isn't exactly the case.

At the present, only 10% of HDTV owners additionally have a Blu-ray disc player. But when 2,500 U.S. adults were surveyed, only 14% of them said that they intended to go Blu within the next year.

Even worse, only 9% of those surveyed who don't own an HDTV and don't already own a player said that they intend to get one in the next year.

DICE Studio general manager Sean Decker has been around the block, and with his experience he's quite confident that the limits of PS3 will not be pushed for several years to come.

When asked by VideoGamer.com about if PlayStation 3's capabilities had been fully realized yet, Decker explained how cycles go down.

"Oh no. I've been around for two different console cycles now, this is my third one, and it's always the case that the first several years everybody's exploring the bounds of it, and it's not until several years down the road that you're able to squeeze every drop out of it," he explained.

While PSP has risen like a phoenix from the ashes with its success in Japan, Sony would truly prefer to see a lot more games released for the handheld.

"Hand on heart, would we like more PSP games? Yes, we would. We really would," said Europe head hocho David Reeves in an interview with gamesindustry.biz.

Nevertheless, he's pleased with the trend these days of PlayStation Portable outselling Nintendo's DS in Japan.

"It's phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal," he gushed.

While many PS3 gamers have added their own substantial hard drives with Sony's blessing, there has never been an official peripheral offered by the company.

But that could change in the future -- Sony is looking at putting more choice in consumers' hands.

"We launched with 60GB and to reduce the price we went to 40GB. We're not sure we want to stay with that configuration of hard drive, and I think what you're going to see in the future is maybe consumers can choose," SCEE head David Reeves said in an interview with Eurogamer.

Ever since HD-DVD lost the high definition DVD race, rumors have abounded that Microsoft was going to start making Blu-ray drives for their Xbox 360.

The company has consistently denied the allegations.

Late last week, Economic Daily News reported that Pegatron Technology had received a direct order from Microsoft to start production on new Xbox 360 consoles with internal Blu-ray drives, supposedly for release this autumn.

No dice.

"As we have stated, we have no plans to introduce a Blu-ray drive for Xbox 360," said a Microsoft official wrote to the website GamePro earlier today.

When a next-gen multiplatform title is released, it's usually Xbox 360 or PC that was used as the lead platform.

After all, they both have been around longer than PS3, and devs usually go with what they know. However, with the upcoming Ghostbusters game, Terminal Reality started off working on PlayStation 3. Then they worked backwards from there.

“We’ve found that writing for the PS3 first and then porting to the 360 and PC is a much simpler and more efficient procedure,” Terminal Reality president Mark Randell told MTV.