h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The sony Playstation is the best gaming console out there. With this in mind...think about the new Playstation 2. It will show the way in the gaming world. I can hardly wait...

I'm excited about PS2 also, but I'm not going to get hyped up about it before I see it in action. I don't mean screenshots in EGM or GamePro, I want to get my hands on one for real before I commit myself to it.

Playstation the best gaming console in the world?

Hardly...sounds like Sony has blathered you with their marketing hype into believing you are part of generation Playstation...ever tried a Dreamcast or N64? (by the way I used to work for a subsidary of Sony)With only a dozen quality AAA titles out of a worldwide catalogue of 2000, and no landmark games (think Mario 64 / Zelda/ Goldeneye/ 1080 snowboarding) it looks poor compare to the N64's 8-10 AAA games out of a mere 200 worldwide titles.

Ps2 may look good on paper but according to UK sources coding that platform it is a pig to work with, with a lack of memory and small cache..plus some unconventional architecture that means coders and artists have to work through middleware until they can figure it out better. Expect rehashes of current PS games in the lineup until the original software hits 6mths-1 year later.

The release games will stun visually but no new gameplay ground will be made. Square's the Bouncer is looking interesting though....

Expect a wait of 1-2 years for the quality games...but Dreamcast already has AAA quality games like Powerstone, Soul Caliber and PC conversions like Quake III and Half-Life headed it's way.

Dolphin is the mystery machine, in benchmarks its' running 30% faster than PS2, is much easier to code and with the dvd format has a more accessible business model for 3rd party developers. The Ninendo machine will retail around £100-£150 whilst the Matsushita (Panasonic) version with DVD M-PEG will retail around £300. The Ps2 will be around £350-400, hardly accessible to children and young adults!!

Though the original PS went out at £400-500 in HMW, etc. when first released, and now retails around £70-100, Sony have never made profit on the hardware. With production costs for PS2 much higher (the chip plant for the "emotion engine" was £580 million alone) you won't see the price dipping much even after 2 years. This saddly cuts out much of the market as £350-400 is way too high for a games machine, when you can buy a PS or N64 for £70-80 and a standalone DVD for £200 (which incidentally will have better picture quality than PS2 which uses a software emulation of an M-PEG2 decoder.