Did I say that I would have this posted on Wednesday? I guess I meant Saturday!
Anyway, where was I…oh that’s right…Sony and their Playstation!
Playstation
I remember when I first heard that Sony Entertainment was going to get into the console game, I thought that they ought to just stick to their Televisions and Electronics, I mean that was what they were famous for anyway. I did not think they could become players in a market that was dominated by Sega and Nintendo.
Apparently, I was mistaken.
The Playstation 1 was launched in September of 1995, a few months after the Saturn launch. Playstation was loaded for bear. It was small and compact, and it had a pleasing design. These two factors alone made Playstation a desirable purchase. Of course the price point of $299 was $100 dollars less than the Saturn ( I remember saying that if Sega were smart, they would lower the Saturn’s price just in time for the playstation launch…never happened..at least to my recollection anyway) and had what had to be an “A” list of games and developers on board at the time of launch.
The games were also excellent…Battle Arena Toshinden ( my favorite!), Warhawk, Ridge Racer ( which was a much better game than Daytona on the Saturn ) and a game that would turn out to be a real renter for my business Twisted Metal, featuring a demented Clown driving an ice cream truck, and other characters.
For a first effort, I thought that Sony just handed Sega it’s head.
The Playstation had just one CPU which made it much easier to program for, which would explain why the unit did not have a problem having developers jump on board right from the launch.
While there were several different versions of the Playstation 1, with different configurations, the basic premise of the unit stayed the same…small, compact, and one cpu driving the graphics.
Sony finally stopped production of the Playstation about ten or eleven years later, and I cannot imagine that anyone reading this post did not at some point in that time play a video game on of these consoles.
On a side note…what I found troubling at the time was Nintendo’s not getting into the 32 bit wars, and I say this because of the NES’s dominance in it’s time, but Nintendo stood behind the Supernintendo or Superfamicon in Japan.
Don’t get me wrong, the Supernes had a great line up of games, with plenty of support from third party developers, but I thought that this was move that would bite the big N in it’s behind, and in my opinion it did.
To this day Nintendo is definitely the third player in today’s console wars with ( and this is just my opinion okay, so don’t bite my head off here ) XBOX 360 being the console to beat right now, with Sony’s new Playstation 3 coming in at the number two spot right now, and Nintendo’s Wii in third right now.
I will say thou that if you were a parent looking for a Wii this past Christmas for the kiddies, you might have been very frustrated, as they were very ( if not impossible ) to come by. The big retailers were constantly out of stock of them, and now Nintendo has a new commercial use the phrase ” We ( or Wii, which is what is really meant here ) finally got one home, with the commercial showing the interactivity of the unit, bringing family together is what Nintendo is targeting.
I have gotten to play the unit twice now, once with my family on a visit, plus once in an EB store that had ” Mario Galaxy ” playing and I was hooked, but I have always played ( and yes been frustrated by ) the Mario games, but the Wii console definetly is lacking when it comes to graphics in comparison to the other two consoles by Sony and Microsoft.
Well, this was the console war beginnings, and of course the war has only escalated in today’s generation of everything on the go, the internet, which I think all three new consoles can take advantage of, which only adds to the playability of these new games and consoles, and only enhances our gaming experiences in today’s console wars.
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