Sony: PanicStations2?


This caused the third-party game developers, the most important people with regards to ensuring PS2's success, to start bitching and moaning about the new console and its capabilities. Oddworld Inhabitants, a developer for the original PlayStation has been hugely vocal on this issue, claiming that its game was struggling because of hardware-related problems with the PS2. Disaster. If the software is failing, the hardware must stack up. Uh-uh.

Then launch time came. The good people of Japan came, bought without reading reviews first and were profoundly uninspired. A high-profile Japside commentator even went as far as to say 'this is the worst launch line-up ever. Worse than even the Saturn's.' And that was bad. The games were no more then (only very slightly) prettied PS1 titles. Still, Sony held their heads high and said 'Wait until E3 (a huge games conference). We will come good there.' They didn't.

E3 was an utter nightmare for Sony. Sega, Nintendo AND the PC with regards to quality of games on show murdered them. The first sign of trouble came when you walked onto the Sony stand. About half of the floor space was dedicated to showing DVD's playing on the PS2. No games in one entire half of their stand. Hmm. The Metal Gear Solid 2 video, playing on a big screen, was beautiful and a huge Sony success. Things went downhill from there. Onimusha, one of PS2's top japanese hopes, looked desperate. The fighting was dire and, like new film Titan AE, the characters did not seem to be connected to the rendered backgrounds in any way. An unheralded shooter, TimeSplitters, looked promising but not as good as Quake 3 on Dreamcast. Madden NFL 2001 was pretty but uninspired. Gran Turismo 2000 was indistinguishable from the last one. EA's James Bond license, The World is Not Enough (TWINE) was a crushing disappointment. Average in many departments, it only really stood out in one areas; that of speed. This game ran slowly, even with draw distance turned right down. The frame rate was below 20fps. Poor indeed. Smuggler's Run and Star Wars E1: Starfighter were slow and dull.

To cap things off Ian Livingstone, CEO of Eidos Interactive (one of the biggest PS2 developers and the home of Tomb Raider), after saying how difficult it was to program for PS2, called Microsoft's forthcoming X-Box console 'a perfect development environment' and called the forthcoming Nintendo dolphin 'a

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