PlayStation Festival 2000 Details

Because we feel you need to be informed on all counts, I decided to post this story on the recent PlayStation Festival that just completed in Japan, courtesy of SegaWeb. Unfortunately, there was bad news, but some good news for us Sega fans as well:

Of course the PlayStation 2 is good. It’s a very exciting piece of hardware, and although there is no doubt in my mind that the hardware’s performance has been exaggerated over the last few months, it is certainly impressive. Released a year and a half after the Dreamcast, you’d expect the technology to be better – and it is. But the good news is that it’s not THAT much better, not at all.

The key software that was at TGS has improved. Last year I remarked that GT2000 looked like a Pentium II game, because at the time it did. Now the jagged edges along the side of the roads and other edges are better aliased, and the game looks more impressive than before.

Sony are only launching one ‘AAA’ game on day one with the machine, Ridge Racer 5. It looks nice, but visually inferior to both GT2000 and also Square’s very impressive racing game that was playable at the show. Gameplay though, is same old Ridge Racer. Tekken and GT2000 will come within the next month, although it’s fair to say that all of these titles are only updates of existing PlayStation games.

On our forums the DOA2 on Dreamcast VS Tekken Tag on PS2 debate has been going for quite a while. It’s no longer relevant, because this was the show when DOA2 on PlayStation 2 was officially announced, and shown to the assembled press. It looks VERY clean. Of course, it’s just the same as the arcade/Dreamcast version. The differences are that some of the lighting is better and the pre-fight cut-scenes run at 60fps instead of 30fps like in the Naomi / Dreamcast version. So is this Naomi-beating hardware? Using this as evidence, yes.

It looks like Dead or Alive 2 will not be released on Dreamcast outside of the States, which is a shame. Whilst that’s two thirds of our readership happy, Europeans are still hanging in there for any news of a PAL announcement, or even a Japanese one so that European import gamers can get it without snapping up a US or modded Dreamcast. Fact is that DOA2 kicks plain ass whatever form it’s in, though.

The PS2 launch has some faults, let there be no doubt. The software lineup is good but not on day one. It’s also quite expensive. Because of the brand name though and the great local marketing (there were loads of PS2 ads outside Shibuya subway station in Tokyo) PlayStation will sell a lot.

Clearly though, Sega GT is a very close game in terms of quality to GT2000, and there can be little doubt that with the staggering range of titles Sega have on the horizon, both import and domestic, the war is far from decided. It’s going to be interesting, that’s for sure.

Again, the launch of the PS2 is March 4th, and that’s a Friday the 3rd a huge chunk of the day for most of the visitors here (Australia and that surrounding area excluded). We’ll have some form of a report of how it went either Friday or the next Monday.