Racketboy

With Nintendo’s commitment to having their (along with Sega and NEC’s) back catalog of games avalible on the Wii’s Virtual Console and Microsoft’s success with the XBox Live Arcade, Sony has a lot of catching up to do.

One of the nice things (at least for us retro gamers) about the Playstation 2 is that it played original Playstation games with relatively good compatibility. In fact, the Playstation 2 actually enhances the graphics with texture smoothing. (Although it didn’t actually improve PS1 games as well as the Bleemcast emulator for the Dreamcast).

Sony announced quite a while ago that the Playstation 3 would continue the tradition of backwards compatibility. Howver, 1UP.com is reporting that Sony’s Phil Harrison announced that the PS3 will offer no such visual enhancements (including resolution enhancements) for the previous generation titles. “They are as exactly as they were,” said Harrison, who claims Sony preferred to rather deliver them in their original state. Shouldn’t Sony care more about what the customer prefers??? Sounds like an excuse for hardware limitation to me…

Anyway, Sony also showed off their Playstation Online Store (which is a similar concept to the Wii’s Virtual Console). It will allow gamers to download a number of PS1 or PS2 games to play on your PS3. I have to admit that this sounds fairly impressive considering that most PS1 and PS2 games are much larger than any classic Nintendo game or XBLA downloads. It will be interesting to see how this works out in terms of bandwidth and storage space.

Harrison stated that Sony hopes to have most of the Playstation and Playstation 2 library availible for download in due time. (Only the original Syphon Filter and Twisted Metal will be availible at launch) The only real limitations will be games that have licensing issues (such as licenses for talent or music tracks having expired).

“Unfortunately, when these games were originally developed, licenses weren’t negotiated with this sort of future distribution in mind,” stated Harrison. This is a similar problem with Nintendo’s Virtual Console (especially with some Rare-developed titles) and even some TV shows that publishers would like to release on DVD.

Harrison also mentioned that he is looking forward to being able to offer people games that are essentially impossible to find, such as Motor Toon Grand Prix or Vib Ribbon. I think this is the most interesting aspect of the digital distribution method. Many of the rare games that have become Holy Grails of console collecting have been the result of games that just didn’t have many copies printed.

You can read more about the specifics of how the online downloads will work on both the Playstation 3 and the PSP by reading the full report on 1UP.com

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Playstation, PS2, PSP