History repeats itself?..

Note: (Spoilers ahead) I liked Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune a great deal…It was very Indiana Jones, with a dash of Tomb Raider,(redundant, I know) and a little Pirates of the Caribbean on the side. Then it turned into Gears of War. Then, it became The Descent. What I was left with by the credits was an incredibly derivative, but enjoyable surprise from Naughty Dog. While I wasn’t as amazed with it by the end of my journey as I was at the very beginning, it was a very enjoyable ride. Did I forget to mention that it was absolutely beautiful? My word. ND really knows how to push every console they’re on. Dare I say that they’re the Rare of our times?

Rhetorical questions I must leave for later though, I have another problem.

Is it yet another complaining EP post? It might be, but bear with me.

I fired up the RE5 demo on the PS3 last night, expecting to have a rocking good time. Having played the demo back in December for the 360, I already knew what to expect. Stunning visuals, a gameplay style that was almost a little too much like RE4’s (not that it was a bad thing, mind you) and all the intensity with a side of mayhem that comes from being chased by a horde of bloodthirsty parasitic Africans. I was ready. Having lost my 360 two weeks prior, I was ready to jump into the hordes once again, hopefully with a friend in tow.

I fired up the game, and nearly dropped my Dualshock.

The screen was washed out. The textures didn’t seem quite as sharp. I moved Chris a few steps forward and gasped. Something happened to the framerate. It went from that generation standard PGR/Lost Planet/Gears of War (1, not 2) rock solid 30-45 frames per second and was clearly, by my eyes, dropping into the 25 range at random. These were all minute differences, and the average player wouldn’t be any the wiser if they’d never played the 360 version, but they stuck out like a sore thumb for me. Mind you, the game is every bit as exciting and tense as the developers intended, but it’s technically inferior to its Xbox counterpart.

This is not an isolated problem.

If I may be allowed a bold statement, I am practically convinced at this point that the PS3 cannot handle multiplatform releases. The console simply excels when a game is made specifically for it (see my nomination for Killzone 2 as the best looking game I’ve ever seen), but whenever it comes time for a release across the board, the PS3 versions always suffer from the above mentioned problems. Framerate drops, color problems, clarity, even the screen resolution of the PS3 versions takes a noticeable hit for anyone paying enough attention to notice. I hold the Framework Engine (Capcom’s next gen engine powering Dead Rising, Lost Planet, DMC4, etc) in very high regard, up there with Unreal Engine 3 (Gears of War), and RAGE (GTA4, Table Tennis), but it seems that even Capcom’s juggernaut can’t undo patterns.

I hear you asking, is it the developer’s fault? Sony’s?

It’s a little bit of both.

Sony has crafted a powerful machine, a media based, audio/visual juggernaut, a future proof marvel of technology….that no one understands or cares to. On Sony’s end, this is a winning strategy, they’ve already got their popularity in the bag, as long as developers get to their system first, they’ll be the standard environment, however difficult the transition may be, and they’ll get the best of the best. It certainly worked for the PS2, even though the Dreamcast, GameCube, and Xbox were much easier to develop for, with more power on hand, devs were already used to the PS2 by the time they rolled around. That, and the hype machine fueled their tenacity to succeed on the lead platform. The only problem with that strategy this time around is this:

They aren’t in the lead anymore. This is the kind of thing that killed the Saturn.

Let me explain. Hardware failures and red rings of death be damned, Microsoft got to market first, got their technology into the hands of developers first, and as such, became the lead platform in a way that literally changed the face of third party development moving forward. Every engine I described a few paragraphs up was tested and flexed on the 360 first, then modified to suit the PS3’s needs. This is what leads into these inferior ports. Not every developer has the time, or money to sit and custom craft their game to suit the PS3, and while I would love to sit around and entertain the idea of a benevolent developer, the truth is that only publishers with deep pockets like EA or Activision are up to the task. Even then, they occasionally slip up.

In the face of a tricky system to program for, the easier to develop for 360 has become wholly more attractive to those looking to get the best result without having to sink a ton of money and resources. Being a developer, would you rather spend twice the amount of effort to make a game that is visually indistinguishable from a 360 title, or would you rather just make a 360 game? Rather than jump through hoops and try to wrap their minds around the Saturn’s dual processors in order to make a Playstation-quality game, everyone decided it would simply be easier to make Playstation games and port to Saturn if necessary. Did it matter that in some cases, the Saturn was more powerful and it occasionally shone through? No.

Show me a bike with four wheels and three pedals and I’ll learn how to ride it, but, if it goes no faster than a normal bike, what’s the point?

I’d hate to say that this is going to the the major sticking point moving forward, this lack of prowess, but it seems that with two years into the system’s life, this is only going to keep happening more and more. While there’s no doubt in my mind that the PS3 is an extraordinary console, it seems that its exclusives are the only way we’ll ever come to realize that. Multiplatform wise, it has the public stigma of being equal or inferior to the 360, and this isn’t to say that the 360 is a wildly inferior console, but it screams aloud another stigma that perhaps, the PS3 isn’t worlds better like we assumed.