Your 16-bit Super Nintendo may be fine for now, but its best years are behind it. Same goes for your Sega Geneses, even WITH a 32X add-on. The race to create the awesome home video game standard of the future has heated up. Two existing machines û the 3DO and Atari Jaguar û both have their strong points, but suffer from potentially fatal flaws. (The Jaguar is a fine machine with virtually no software, and the 3DO is hindered by a dog-slow CD-ROM and a controller that makes me long for those crappy old Atari 2600 joysticks.) SNK is working on the Neo-Geo CD System, Sony has the Playstation in production, Sega is preparing to launch the Saturn, and Nintendo hasn't fully recovered from botching their Project Reality deal with SGI, but they're sure to do SOMETHING. It's gearing up to be a messy season.
There's hardly any area of the entertainment business that Sony hasn't expanded into. For this reason, I was a little disgusted when I first heard about their Playstation, and dismissed it as another example of the empty greed of the modern mega-corporation. Reports then began to filter in, saying that the Playstation was extremely impressive, and that Sony had already secured third party software support up the wazoo. But it wasn't until the Winter '95 CES that I became a true believer. There I saw a demonstration of a fighting game for the Playstation called Toh Shin Den. I was amazed. A few weeks later we had the Japanese version of the Playstation (already in the stores in Japan) at our office, complete with the Toh Shin Den game. All those other game system companies must be shakin' in their booties. It's a monster!
The Playstation itself is a small, unassuming little gray rectangle. It's a very simple design, with a top-loading CD-ROM, front plate connectors for two controllers, and power, open, and reset buttons in the top of the unit. The Japanese version connects to other components via RCA jacks, providing a clear picture, audio as good as your stereo can get, and eliminating the need for a PAL to NTSC signal converter to bridge the gap between the US and European television signal standards.
With our one test game, Toh Shin Den, CD access and loading time was almost unnoticeable. I've seen cartridges take longer pauses between levels than the Playstation did. The access speed can only improve for the US version, but even if it doesn't the Playstation is bound to be one of the fastest-loading CD systems around.
The Playstation's controller looks pretty weird, but it works just fine. The control pad is recessed into the housing of the controller with only the four primary directional points visible; still, it handles the same as a normal-looking eight-way pad, and is quite responsive and fairly comfortable. To its right are four buttons, configured at an angle just like on the SNES controllers. The Sony controller also features "top" buttons like the L and R buttons of the SNES, except that there are two buttons on each side instead of one, giving the Playstation's controller a total of eight buttons. As a whole, the controller was quick to respond and quite comfortable, even after long play sessions. Some mild tension and cramping was experienced by most everybody at the office who played for over 30 minutes at a time, which was universally blamed on the small size of the controller. Sony would do well to make the American version's controllers a little larger.
Toh Shin Den, the one Playstation title we presently have, is one of the best fighting games I've ever played. It exceeds arcade standards pretty easily, and makes every other home system out there look like a Vic 20 in comparison. Toh Shin Den is a 3D fighting game very much in the style of Virtua Fighter. Graphically, it's far beyond any other fighting game. It uses polygons to create its characters, backgrounds, and arenas, but you'd barely know it. The polygons are rounded, shaded, and texture-mapped to the extreme, and all of the characters look great, much better than the smooth-moving but cubist denizens of Virtua Fighter. Apart from the look, the game itself is also of stunning quality. Eight fighters are included, all of whom use weapons; they range from Ken and Ryu types outfitted with swords to a girl with a whip and a true badass with a staff of great suffering. Some of the moves are pretty standard (fireballs, throws, and sweep kicks), but there's some truly original ones as well. The special moves (four of 'em for each character) are spectacular. As an example, whip girl Sofia can twirl around on one foot like a ballerina, repeatedly smacking her opponent with her outstretched hoof, a move that combines true grace with bone-jarring power. There are a lot of fighting game fanatics at the IE office, and Toh Shin Den managed to wow every one of them.
The latest word from Sony is that it plans to release the Playstation in the US in August. Those of you wanting to get a jump on this date and grab a Japanese version have two things to consider. The first and most serious is that the two versions will not be compatible with each other, so Japanese games won't run on an American machine and vice versa. Also, buying the Japanese version right now costs somewhat over 700 American dollars, which lends credence to an old saying about a fool and his money. The current rumor is that the American version will be selling for as little as $250, dirt cheap for a system of this quality (assuming that quality software is abundant); this would place its selling price lower than the manufacturing cost, but rumor has it Sony is willing to take a $100 loss on each machine sold just to get the system out there. Naturally, they will make up for this loss with software sales.
It's too soon to tell how well the competition will stand up, but the Sony Playstation looks like a very solid buy for the near future. If the rumors about pricing and third-party software support turn out to be accurate, the Playstation could very well become the next mega-hit game system. So far it's batting a thousand.
