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To: milo_morai who wrote (41756)	5/8/2000 11:18:00 PM
From: Don Green	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

PlayStation 2 Hold your fire?and your dollars By Kenneth Terrell On a battlefield, hundreds of horse-mounted soldiers suited in ornate, ancient Japanese armor line up for combat, their banners fluttering in the wind. A cannon fires, and the plumes of its explosion morph into a white rose, changing the scene to a lonely woman lamenting the dangers her lover faces in the battle. Don't check your Akira Kurosawa videotape collection for this sequence. It's Kessen, one of the first games for Sony's much anticipated PlayStation 2. The machine is already a hit in Japan, where gamers snapped up more than 1 million in its first week of sale. When it arrives in the United States this fall, the PS2 should up the ante in the high-stakes game of interactive entertainment. The PS2 is aiming to be the ultimate entertainment device by offering unparalleled animation details in video games, playing DVD movies, and using a broadband modem for high-speed Internet access and a hard drive to store data. Powerhouse. U.S. News tests of a Japanese-issue PS2 found that while it offers more than enough animating power and speed to raise home video games to a higher level, its first games are less than engaging. They leave plenty of room for current competitors and those on the horizon. We tested five Japanese-issue games?Koei's Kessen, Namco's driving game Ridge Racer V, Capcom's fighting game Street Fighter EX3, FROM's fantasy adventure Eternal Ring, and Sony's Fantavision. Though each offered a visual realism unmatched in the current game market, none provided new play features that made the games significantly more challenging than those for lesser-equipped video game consoles. These disappointing games, combined with the device's price (expected to exceed $300 in the United States) and Sony's unclear online strategy, suggest it may be worthwhile waiting to see forthcoming consoles such as Microsoft's X-Box and Nintendo's Dolphin before buying a PS2. Powered by an innovative, 300-megahertz processor dubbed the Emotion Engine, the PS2's graphics nearly equal those of big-screen computer animation such as Toy Story. Players won't get aggravated by the stalls in play that typically occur when consoles strive for such detail. In Kessen, a military strategy game set in ancient Japan, almost all of the player's tactical moves are illustrated with an elaborate, animated sequence. Retreat from combat, and the game shows a close-up of the troop leader galloping away, muttering with contempt. Similar games for the original PlayStation and its contemporaries crunch data much more slowly and therefore offer such animated sequences infrequently. "The PlayStation 2 system makes it possible to have much more emotional content in the games with less of a need for your imagination to fill in the blanks," says Don Mattrick, a top executive at game developer Electronic Arts. If so, game makers haven't found the heart and soul of the PS2. Even with the addition of these animated sequences, the game does not engage or challenge the player any more than most current strategy and simulation games. Ridge Racer V, the PS2 installment of the popular driving series in which you zoom through city highways and currently one of the most popular PS2 games in Japan, also fails to offer play to match its innovative graphics. Even though it simulates the look of driving so realistically that you can see glare from streetlights reflected on the hoods of cars speeding underneath, the game doesn't play any differently from the latest crop of racing games for the original PlayStation. Cars and guns. Game designers have attributed the lack of creativity to an unfamiliarity with the PS2. "Many developers have found it difficult to actually design games that fully exploit the potential of the PlayStation 2," says Yoshi Maruyama, vice chair of Square Co., the Japanese maker of the popular Final Fantasy role-playing series for the original PlayStation. Square is designing two games for PS2's American launch, the racing game Type-S and the fighting adventure The Bouncer. Typically, it takes about two to three years after the launch of a new video game console for designers to get familiar enough with a system to create games that fully utilize its strengths. But with serious challenges from Microsoft's X-Box, Nintendo's Dolphin, and an ever more daring Sega Dreamcast, Sony's PS2 will have to hook fans quickly. The fact that the PS2 can play games designed for the original PlayStation?a rare continuity among video game consoles?likely will keep many players loyal to Sony. Whether that will blunt the X-Box when it arrives in the fall of 2001 remains to be seen. The X-Box will ship with a 600-MHz processor, a unique graphics chip that Microsoft says is three times more powerful than the PS2, DVD movie-playing ability, an 8-gigabyte hard drive, and a broadband modem. Sony, which launched the PS2 in Japan without Internet capabilities, is expected to announce at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles next week that the PS2 will include a hard drive and modem when it debuts here this fall. How will Nintendo respond to the X-Box and the PS2? Though the Pok‚mon-pushing company announced the Dolphin nearly a year ago, few details have emerged beyond the fact that the Dolphin will have a 400-megahertz IBM processor. But once Nintendo enters the fray, expect an epic battle among the four electronics giants?just the kind of take-no-prisoners action that gamers love. usnews.com