Monday, March 13, 2006

Looks Bad for Sony in the News

Sometimes things all come at once and after watching the presenters on Channel 5's The Gadget Show say Sony's TV in their HD comparison was horrible I checked the news to find these:

Appeal Denied
Sony Has Lost it's appeal against Immersion's intellectual property suit forcing Sony to stop selling "Dualshock controllers and a few dozen games, including Vice City, Final Fantasy X, and Metal Gear Solid 2".

Better Design
A Design Blog compare Sony's PS3 design to one some designer did in his spare time. The writer does highlight a few issues with the PS3 like Sony's abandonment of it's iconic PS2 logo for some Spiderman text.

Following The Pack
It is known in product development that whenever your products start imitating your competitor's designs then it is time to spend some money in R&D because you will racing to keep up (see Red Queen Effect). Well there are Rumors that Sony will be following Microsoft and possibly Nintendo in the digital distribution race.
Unnamed sources claim that Sony has been discussing the technical requirements needed to provide this service, and in turn, investigating the possibility of remastering select PS2 games so that latter parts of a game can be streamed over a network while earlier segments are being played.
That is what Valve tried with STEAM Beta 1, but it resulted in very long load times and an unstable service so they switched to full game downloads (load times now significantly better).

Good News
And finally some good news IGN has Reviewed Syphon Filter Dark Mirror for the PSP and given it a 9.3 rating and looking at the videos it does look great. However this title is probably too late to boost interest in the PSP.

Still at least the PS3 is going to be released this spring and pawn the competition, right!?