IGN has a preview of Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom:



I'm not impressed with anything they are doing with this game. Sounds more like an exercise of hardware utilization rather than a quality title. SOE is going to disapoint again.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/695/695890p1.html

can someone tell me what this picture is??



http://entertainment.news.com.au/sto...-10431,00.html

Umm a really horrible design concept?

Warp Five, Mr. Sulu.


That has to be a concept picture.

A design concept / rendering and from the looks of it possibly by the same guy who did the Atari Jaguar

Daily Update
16/03/2006

Watching the reaction to Sony's announcements about the PlayStation 3 yesterday, we couldn't help wondering if the planets have just aligned for Sony in a particularly favourable way - or if this has been one of the most finely stage managed corporate information releases in history.

In case you missed the announcements themselves, the news is simple. PlayStation 3 is going to launch in early November in every worldwide territory - yes, including Europe - and the company is planning to have six million units on the market by the end of March 2007. Final development kits will be shipping in mid-May; there'll be a free and fully-featured online service from day one; the system will have a 60Gb hard drive by default, with strong hints that larger drives may also be available.

In the context of such a flood of information, and such an optimistic promise regarding the global launch timeline, nobody really seems to care that Sony is going to miss its target of launching the system in Spring 2006. Indeed, while Ken Kutaragi apologised profusely, in typically Japanese style, for the huge amount of speculation which has surrounded the PS3 launch plans, you can't help but feel that it's played right into their hands. Analysts confidently predicting that launches in some territories would slip to 2007, publishers expressing concern about the console not hitting Christmas, and the widespread belief that any Spring or Summer launch would be utterly hobbled by a complete dearth of stock for retailers to actually sell, had contributed to an atmosphere of gloom about the PS3's prospects in 2006. By alleviating the gloom caused by that speculation, Sony actually managed to make the announcement of a slippage sound like a positive thing. The stock markets certainly thought so, anyway - they pushed videogames stocks up significantly in the wake of the news of the launch date.

Of course, announcing a global launch is easy - actually executing on one is incredibly difficult, and there are two negative factors that need to be brought into consideration here. The first is the Xbox 360, which last Christmas ripped the heart out of some sectors of games retail by executing a global near-simultaneous launch which left every territory (aside from Japan) with hardly any units to sell. Pre-orders remained unfulfilled, money that should have been ringing through retail tills stayed firmly in gamers' pockets or was spent on other, non-games items, and overall it was hard to come away from the whole affair without thinking that if you can't do a global launch properly, you're better off just sticking to the easy option of a nice, staggered launch.

So a global simultaneous launch is difficult - to the point where Microsoft's Peter Moore was heard to opine that the software giant might never have tried to pull one off if it had known how hard it would be. But if Microsoft knows that, Sony should know it twice as well - because with PlayStation Portable, it promised just such a launch and ended up with a European launch running nine months behind the Japanese date, having found itself with insufficient units to satisfy even the demand in Japan on the originally proposed date of the worldwide launch.

PlayStation Portable, in summary, was a launch disaster by comparison with which even the Xbox 360 shortages look like a flawlessly executed plan. The question is, have Sony learned the right kind of lessons from this - or will the proposed November launch of the PS3 somehow turn into September 2007 in Europe and give Microsoft a head start of almost two years in the marketplace?

For now, it's almost impossible to say - but it's worth pointing out that a number of factors suggest that Sony Computer Entertainment has, indeed, emerged from the PSP fiasco as an older and wiser company.

Consider that the PlayStation 3, when it launches in November - IF it launches in November - will have had one of the longest gestation periods of any console. Early development kits for the system, which most of those working with the kits described as being surprisingly advanced for such early hardware, shipped over a year ago, and the absolutely final development kits - featuring production models of the Cell processor, RSX graphics part, Blu-Ray drive and so on - will be on their way to developers in mid-May, giving them a massive five months of working with final hardware and libraries before they have to ship launch titles.

For developers, that's a huge amount of breathing room, and it means that some of the launch titles in November will have been in full production for around 18 months - quite a lot longer than most console launch titles. For the rest of us, what this means is twofold. It means better launch titles, almost certainly - sure, they'll probably still be a bit on the derivative tick-the-boxes side of things, but at least they'll be polished. More importantly, what this means is that by mid-May, Sony expects to have final versions of every component in the PS3 to give to developers.

Once you have final versions of components to put in development kits, in effect, your console is finished - which means that leaked reports from manufacturing firms earlier this week indicating that Sony will start producing PlayStation 3 consoles in June are probably entirely accurate. In other words, this won't be another PlayStation Portable style mess where units are shoved out onto the market while the manufacturing plants are still limping their way up to full production; Sony has given itself five months to build up launch stocks of the console, and more importantly, to iron out production issues and get its factories cranking out consoles at a million units a month.

Much of this, admittedly, is conjecture - but we know the timeline for the development hardware and software, and huge amounts of information can be inferred from that data. All of it points to a PS3 launch which will be unlike anything we've seen from Sony previously, and a company which has learned bitter lessons from the miserable failure of its best-laid plans with the PlayStation Portable. Only time will tell if the company can really apply those lessons and execute on its ambitious plans - but for now, the enthusiasm of the stock market is understandable. Microsoft has an undeniable head-start, but as of this week, the market leader is back in the game.


Chris

one thing is for sure 70% of the games in the launch lineup will be ports from Xbox 360

Correction: EA's launch lineup will be ports from Xbox 360. Even having little interest in the system and games at this point I am confident that there will be at least more variety than the Xbox 360 had.

This sounds extremely promising. Technically, they could've still done a spring launch in Japan in June, if they wanted to. But they are delaying Japan so the world gets better games.

Based on the above, I take this report with a grain of salt. That is not at all what the reports from developers I have read indicate. IIRC the website this article comes from is infamously unreliable.

I only read one report from an unnamed developer, and it was as full of speculation as anything we've seen in the last two days. I'll bet we'll see what we see with every launch: Some bad and some good launch games, and no truly great games that take full advantage of the system until later.

News on the HDD. A PS source has confirmed the HDD is included.

http://www.xbox365.com/news.cgi?id=GGruHuuuPL03171103

I love it. PS3 news on an XBox website!

Chris

Great news. Has there been any word on how/if we will be able to transfer save files from memory cards to the ps3 hdd?

Sadly, there may not be a way. Has anyone heard about them including memory card ports?

Also, I spoke with a Sony rep recently, asking him if it would be possible to play games like Guitar Hero on the PS3, since the guitar controller has a PS2 controller end. He said third parties will make a PS2 -> USB 2.0 adaptors, and that's what we'll need to use to play a game like Guitar Hero.

I am very sceptical at this point. I hope Sony can do what they claim, but what they claim is pretty fantastic. If it was just the announce of a delay for launch to Nov., I could buy that. But a delay to Nov. but that will include a global launch? I don't think they can pull that off. In fact, with dev kits not even out, but going out in Mid May (hopefully there is no delay there) and production no where close to being possible, a Nov. launch doesn't even seem possible.

As odd as it sounds, I would be more comfortable if they took the ID and Valve approach and just told us, "It will launch when it is ready." because if they don't make the Nov. launch after a 6 month delay, they get hurt.

I am all for the inclusion of the HD, but that makes the minimum the thing is going to cost is $399 and my guess is that a "core" system with 60 gb hd, etc. will actually be $499 and they will try to do some bigger deal and see if they can actually push the envelope over the $500 mark, which I don't think they can.

This delay certainly makes a Halo3 at PS3 launch a lot more likely, though I don't honestly think that really hurts the PS3 sales much, despite what others think. It may delay some sales, but it will be so tough to get ahold of one at launch anyway.

This confirmation from an unnamed Sony official is of questionable reliability. Just a couple days ago during the announcement of the delay, Kutaragi himself said Sony "might end up installing it [the HDD] in all PS3s, though that depends on the market".
See http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=135658

It is clear at this point that Sony is trying to put dangle some carrots out there to try to convince people to wait for the PS3 instead of getting a 360. I have no doubt the PS3 is going to be a great machine, but you can count on it not being all that Sony is trying to make everyone think it is...

I can't imagine it not having memory card ports. There is too much maoney made on the sale of accessories for them to decide not to have it.

What I find amazing is how Sony just flat out lied about the reason for the delay and no one is taking them to task for it. Sony said that the reason for the pushing it out to November had to do with copyright protection issues with Blu-Ray.

There was absolutely no indication that Sony was in a position for a Spring launch. Sony bought themselves 6 months by announcing a Spring launch, and another 6 by announcing a Nov launch. Sony couldn't simply say "it will launch when it is ready" or state a Nov 06 launch when the 360 was released because some/many would buy a 360 in the meantime. Sony needed to dangle the carrot.

Amazingly though, their tactics won't hurt them a bit. Playstation fans are rabidly loyal and will wait until March 07 (when I believe the PS3 will be widely and readily available in the US) for a PS3.

What really sucks about this is you can now expect nearly every third party game to be a port of the 360. Developers aren't going to invest extra money to produce games that take advantage of ps3's extra power (if there is any).

That's how it was for the Xbox last gen, but at least this time the power difference is minimal.

I don't see that at all. In fact, I think this generation, you will see far less multi-platform titles. The difference in the systems is becoming too great.

Um, I can see the differences between the Revolution and PS3/360...but what's the real difference between the 360 and PS3?

What I expect is for most third parties to put out games on the 360 and PS3, and they'll probably look exactly the same on both. As for the Revolution, they'll probably either completely ignore the Revolution, or just require the Rev shell to play.

I think you are both wrong. All three systems will be pretty even when it comes to capability. The only known right now is what 360 is like anything else is speculation.

I don't think it as easy as just a port since they use different graphics chips and different ways of using the cpu cores.