May Contain Nuts

So apparently Sony’s launching a new 40GB PS3 model in Europe next week, for the low-low price of €399.

Unfortunately, if you swing for this model, you apparently lose all backwards compatibility with PS2 games. This, my friends, is patently retarded. Allow me to explain.

I have all of two games for the PS2: Okami and Shadows of the Colossus. I do not, however, currently own a PS2; Ash and I bummed off of my brother’s while we were living in Kentucky, since he was basically on gaming probation for most of the school year. Ash is also regularly eying FFXII (or, perhaps more accurately, the picture of Balthier on the cover of FFXII) increasingly forlornly, since she never managed to finish the game before we moved. That makes 3 PS2 games which are guaranteed to be played with considerable regularity in our house provided we ever get the scratch together to bother with getting a PS3.

Now, on the subject of getting a PS3 in the first place, I’ve been looking at games like Ratchet and Clank Future and Little Big Planet rather forlornly myself, and I know that in its current state, the PS3’s game selection really has very few places to go but up (I hope). It seemed pointless to try jumping onto the PS2 bandwagon this late in the game when holding out for a little longer was likely to ensure I’d also be able to play new games (though for some reason, the PS2 continues to have more launch titles per week than the PS3 on average…), for a slightly larger investment. However, the understanding was that the PS3 was an up-sell from the PS2 (akin to getting a large-sized combo at some obscenely over-priced drive-thru window), not a completely separate product requiring an additional purchase for existing library titles.

Needless to say, I’m considerably annoyed at this decision, and I don’t even have definite plans for buying the damn thing (suffice it to say, these vague plans are now far less definite than they were before today). I knew there was no way in hell I was going to be dropping $600 on one, and while $500 is slightly more palatable, I could find several other more useful things to spend that much money on. $400 was a point at which I was going to start seriously considering it (interesting, that I had the same reaction to the iPhone…), but if I have to then go spend another $100 on a PS2 which will simply take up even more space in our incredibly tiny apartment, that makes it a zero-value product for me, and I might as well swing for the $500 version, which as I already mentioned, is very expensive (but not “expensive as f***”, as the $600 model is).

I’m wondering if there’s any aspect of the PS3’s launch that Sony hasn’t managed to fumble horribly. It’s like they put the Cincinnati Bengals in charge of their marketing strategy (ouch… and also perhaps the only sports reference you’ll see on this blog all decade, so double the shock value).

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Games, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.