Playstation 3 is still a work-in-progress
It will come as no surprise to many of us that the Sony Playstation 3 is not done yet. If you consider the launch is a good 9 months away then the next thought in your head should be, "that gives them a good 6 months to work on it." Making a console is like any other project out there — changes will be made right up to the 12th hour.
Where it gets tricky is when you apply this logic to what we all saw at Sony's E3 PS3 launch. As I said in the podcast we did with Engadget, the Killzone 2 clip is a lie. There's no way it's captured real-time gameplay. When actual gameplay footage is eventually released a few of us will whine about the discrepencies, and the official word will be that E3 showed a representation of real gameplay, or somesuch nonsense. Yes, Sony has repeated that the Killzone 2 clip is real, but that doesn't make it true. Hey, I hope I'm just being a cranky old man, but I lived through the Emotion Engine and a Metal Gear Solid 2 gameplay/cutscene clip that made reporters cry. Traumatic stuff.
On top of the Killzone 2 thing, the Fight Night Round 3 demo showed Kudo Tsunoda with a controller in his hand, as if he were playing the game. It's more likely he used it to rotate the camera during the sequence where he talked about the realistic look of the characters. Notice how still the characters were at that point. Yes, the FF graphics were probably real, but add a stadium of boxing fans, real-time action, audio and all the other bells and whistles we expect in a game, and my bet is that the final build will show a less impressive-looking game. Of course, many of us will point to the controller as proof that it wasn't an illusion, but it was.
Both MS and Sony are trying to sell us on illusions. But, as time passes, I feel like Sony tried extra hard to pull the wool over my eyes. This article just drives that point home.
