Here’s what happened when British men’s mag Zoo got hold of a PS3 for the first time.

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So-called fanboys are the lifeblood of the games industry. As with comics, manga, films and music, certain games franchises or even games companies attract fanatical followings convinced that the object of their affections can do no wrong, and who habitually buy every product they make. A quick trawl around the internet will show you that Nintendo and Sega have massive fanboy support – and even Microsoft, although Microsoft’s fanboys are pretty much hardcore ex-PC gamers whose lives now centre around Xbox Live. Obviously, World of Warcraft has an enormous pool of fanboys, as do, for example, Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy Series and Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer and Metal Gear Solid franchises. But do Sony fanboys exist? If they do, there’s precious little evidence on the web to suggest it.

In a way, Sony is a victim of its success – when it launched the original PlayStation, it cleverly courted the early-90s clubbers, who grew up with games but had drifted away from them, in line with the then-prevailing belief that games were the sole province of thirteen-year-olds. The PlayStation asserted that it could be cool to play games, and the PlayStation 2 reiterated that. But being a fanboy is definitely not cool – indeed, it is utterly geekish. So, are Sony’s fanboys too cool to admit what they are?

Possibly so, based on the evidence of having a PlayStation 3 and taking it around London to show various people. I took it, for example, to Radio 1Xtra, to show Rampage’s Mike Anthony and TTT, and the response was ecstatic to say the least, as you can hear for yourself by checking their blog on the 1Xtra site. They spoke about their loyalty to the PlayStation brand and were generally so enthusiastic that it took me about an hour to extricate myself from the building.

But does the prevailing view on the web and the blogosphere – that Sony has terminally shot itself in the foot by bodging the PlayStation 3 launch, and thereby alienated its loyal PlayStation customers – hold up among the larger population which doesn’t treat the internet as the centre of its collective life? And that is PlayStation’s core customer group.

However, there are question-marks which Sony will have to answer, as far as the PlayStation 3 is concerned. PlayStation enthusiasts have become what they are thanks to unforgettable games experiences, most notably the Grand Theft Auto series, which has appeared first on PlayStations since it went 3D. But that will no longer be the case for the next instalment, GTA IV, which will come out on PS3 and Xbox 360 simultaneously. Admittedly Metal Gear Solid 4 will be a PS3 exclusive, as will the most desirable of the forthcoming (and confusingly profuse) Final Fantasy games.

But is that enough? Sony has come up with some fantastic new franchises recently, such as Shadow of the Colossus, God of War and LocoRoco, but it needs to bring these, as well as the likes of Gran Turismo, to the PS3 as quickly as possible, to give potential PS3 owners the justification for lashing out £425. And the more exclusive agreements with third parties it loses (the same, for example, applies to Pro Evolution), the more important it becomes that its internal studios come out with stunningly brilliant – rather than mediocre-to-good – games. Eight Days, for example, could be such a killer game, but so little is known about it that we can’t count on that, and would anyone who played either of the PS2 versions of The Getaway, for example, use the PS3 version as a spur for upgrading their console?

By Steve Boxer

Following on from the images we posted last week on the new Xross Media Bar, here is some footage taking you through the web browser function… (you’ll have to ignore the slightly annoying voiceover).

All 14 secs of it! (with the focus being on the 11/11 launch date in Japan)

For those that haven’t seen the Xross Media Bar, here are a few pics…

Ken Kutaragi’s keynote speech at the Tokyo Game Show this year was, to put it mildly, a bit of an odd one - but there were two big pieces of news in there. One was a price drop for the 20GB PS3 in Japan, and the other, which affects the rest of the world a bit more, was the announcement that the 20GB model is also going to have a HDMI video connector, which was previously only intended for the 60GB model.

That’s good news, obviously - it means that if you buy the basic version of PS3, you can still hook it up to even the most high-end of flat-screen TVs and get the absolute best picture quality possible. On the other hand, isn’t it a bit late in the day to run around changing the specification of the machine?

Worldwide studios boss Phil Harrison admits that he doesn’t know exactly when the decision was made, but he can shed some light on the thinking behind it. “The reason for the change was in reaction to a market trend, which is that much more displays are being sold with HDMI, earlier, than had been previously forecast,” he explains to us. “Not just Sony, but all the other TV manufacturers.”

In fact, according to Harrison, the decision to move HDMI onto the basic model wasn’t really a surprise at all - it just happened faster than anyone expected. “Although we didn’t say it at E3, I think that the unspoken assumption was that we would always merge everything into HDMI eventually. We just made that decision earlier.”

That’s all very well but if you’re changing the spec of the machine just weeks away from launch, doesn’t that tend to imply that you haven’t actually started building the things yet? Which doesn’t bode well for stocks of the unit at launch (already projected to be thin on the ground, even despite the European delay into next March). According to Harrison, it’s not quite that simple.

“The criticial question,” he says, “is not ‘when do you start manufacturing’, but ‘when do you start assembly’. The HDMI port - whether it’s enabled or not on the machine is an assembly issue, not a manufacturing issue. The parts have been procured, clearly, in anticipation of this announcement. It’s not like we’re going to make a decision of that magnitude and then call up our suppliers and say, ‘oh, can we have a few more HDMI ports?’ Clearly this had been well planned.”

Well planned or not, it’s obvious that Sony has had some big problems with manufacturing. Looking past the question of the HDMI port to the bigger picture, it’s clear that with only 500,000 units available for launch and the European date pushed back four months, Sony has over-stretched itself. Isn’t that a bit, well, worrying?

Harrison nods. “There’s no denying that we’ve had some very public challenges,” he says. “Today, it looks like a very difficult situation - but in the weeks, months and years to come, this will pale into zero.”

“Yes, we have overreached in production of the Blu-Ray component - I can’t deny that. But that’s the price you pay for adopting brand new, leading-edge technologies that will be future proof. We will resolve those issues - we are already catching up. We will continue to catch up on the production, and as you know, we haven’t changed our full-year forecast of six million units, so we’re only talking about a ramp-up issue. We’re not talking about the fundamental design of the product itself.”

Taking the long view, there’s a ring of truth about that. Few consoles have launched without a fairly hefty dose of problems in the first few months - although for the god-knows-how-many people who expected to have a PS3 in their hands this Christmas and now almost certainly won’t, that won’t be much comfort in the next few months.

Now that we’re starting to get our hands on the PS3 launch titles in a little more depth, personal favourites are emerging. I’ve got friends who are all over Ridge Racer 7 like a rash; others are intrigued by MotorStorm’s ace physics and combative gameplay. It’s a good sign, I guess, that people are finding their own titles to fixate on rather than everyone pointing at one single launch title as being the pick of the bunch - or worse again, everyone sounding a universal “meh” sound and being uninterested by the lot. For me, though, the title to watch is Resistance: Fall of Man - a first person shooter which I initially wrote off as being a cynical attempt to make a World War 2 game by the numbers look interesting by adding aliens, but which looks more and more like a genuinely brilliant game every time I see it.

Today, then, I’m having a quick chat with Ted Price - the head of Insomniac Games, the company making Resistance. You might know them as the developers of Ratchet & Clank, and although Resistance is gritty and unrelenting, depicting an alternate history where real British towns and cities are under the control of a nasty extra-terrestial force in the late 1940s, you can still feel the influence of Ratchet in the game’s weapons. The team has really cut loose with the PS3’s physics capability, giving us a host of really interesting weapons we’ve never seen in a game before - many of which, Price claims, couldn’t have been done at all on the PS2, because they rely so heavily on working out the physics of hundreds of individual bullets, spikes or particles.

That being said - isn’t Price worried that most people will just dismiss the game as yet another WW2 shooter, which is exactly what I did when I first saw it? Apparently not.

“The fact that we set it in Great Britain is a big clue for people that this is not a World War II game,” he explains, “because in World War II, there wasn’t a lot of fighting in Great Britain! Secondly, the Chimera have a greater and greater influence on the environment as you move through the game - and even though we’ve shown some settings that are more terrestrial, there are plenty of Chimeran structures that set it apart from any other first person shooter out there, especially those that are World War II shooters.”

“Finally,” Price continues, “we make a big point in the story to emphasise the difference between this time period and previous time periods - in particular, with the technology that we present. You’ll notice that we have VTOLs [Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft] flying around - that’s the standard mode of transportation in this world. Those didn’t exist in our world until the 1990s perhaps, the 1980s? That freedom of creating very different technology was one of the great aspects of working with this alternate history - and I think that as people play the game, they’re going to feel that it’s a very different setting.”

One of the interesting things about Resistance, from a gamers point of view, is that it doesn’t look like a launch title - which in general are games that are a bit rough and ready, with graphics that don’t take advantage of the hardware, not much in the way of content and loads of bugs. By contrast, Resistance is a really polished game - the kind of thing you expect to see a year after a console launches, not the day it comes out. So did Sony play favourites and give Insomniac access to hardware before all the other studios, or something?

“Not necessarily,” Price says, “but we worked closely with Sony at the very beginning to understand what the architecture was going to be all about. We participated in that early aspect of development, before we even had dev stations. As a result, we were able to get ready for when those dev stations came - so as soon as we got the dev stations, we jumped on it, and we had our levels up and running very quickly. We began building assets long before we got PlayStation 3 development stations.”

He pauses and thinks for a second. “The other thing to keep in mind,” he says, “is that we’ve been on PlayStation hardware now for over ten years, and I think our team of engineers is used to how Sony develops hardware. Even though the Cell and the PlayStation 3 are very, very different from PlayStation 2 and PlayStation, there’s a certain design sensibility that you get in terms of working with the hardware. Sony, for example, their hardware allows you to get very close to the metal - and our guys are used to working at a very low level and really squeezing a lot of power out of these machines. So, they were probably more ready because of our experience on the previous Sony platforms than had we not worked on PSone and PS2.”

Aside from the singleplayer campaign, Resistance also has extensive multiplayer support - both four-way split-screen, and online play for up to 40 players. Online games are hosted on servers provided by Sony, and Price claims that the team has experimented with 40 player matches involving gamers from locations as far afield as the United States, Spain and Japan, with near-perfect gameplay experienced between those countries. The game also has a built in buddy list, support for clans with up to 200 members, and the ability to form temporary parties who join a match as a group, thus simplifying the process of getting all your pals into the same game. However, disappointingly, it won’t hook into the main buddy list of the PlayStation 3 - instead you’ll need to build your own buddy list which is specific to the game. Price wouldn’t be drawn on whether this will be fixed by a future update to the game, but he made a point of saying that the buddy lists are separate “currently”, and said that “it is definitely possible to update the game via online” - so perhaps there’s hope on that front.

Finally, we leave Price with a question about the locations in the game - which takes in action from cities including York, Manchester, Grimsby (yes, Grimsby - “it had a great fish cannery,” Price explains cryptically), Nottingham and London, plus quite possibly a few more. “We actually went over to England - one of our artists went over and took a lot of photographs of all the places that we built,” Price explains.

“We also used maps of the era. For instance, if you go into Manchester, you’ll notice that the Manchester cathedral is there, the bridge leading to the cathedral is there… It was all based on real maps of the areas. Also, London is in the game, but it’s very different because it has a lot of the older structures that we believe would have existed had World War II never occurred in real life. So, it does look different to what you see today - it’s not quite as modern, simply because it never had a chance to be modernised.”

All of which, as a Londoner, just leaves me all the more keen to see the game in its final form. When all’s said and done about the hardware, PS3 will - like any console - live or die on the strength of its games; and Resistance is definitely one to watch to get a feel for what developers are starting to accomplish on the hardware.

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