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Plenty of Emotion Greets PlayStation 2

Crowds eagerly await the console that could change the way we think about video games.

By Martyn Williams, IDG News   

The new PlayStation 2 games console from Sony Computer Entertainment arrived here Saturday morning to large crowds and excited domestic media coverage that easily eclipsed the arrival of Microsoft's latest operating system just two weeks earlier.

Game enthusiasts, including some from overseas who had traveled especially for the event, began waiting in Tokyo's electronics district on Friday evening to be sure of snapping up one of the $370 consoles on Saturday morning. In the rest of the country, game fans were just as eager to get their hands on the console and thousands thronged retailers as they opened on Saturday morning.

What excites the majority of the early buyers is the new gaming technology built into the PlayStation 2. Based on a microprocessor codeveloped with Toshiba dubbed the "Emotion Engine," the console boasts a performance of 6.2 billion floating-point operations per second and a graphics processor capable of displaying 75 million polygons per second. Those technologies bring the most realistic rendering yet to games on consumer systems.

Not Just Playing Games

But it will likely be for its additional capabilities that the PlayStation 2 makes its lasting impact. Based on DVD, the system doubles as a DVD-Video player and also comes with a selection of ports which, although of little use now, could make the device the center of the living room entertainment system in a few years.

Those include an ILink port, Sony's brand name for the IEEE 1394 interface, which allows the unit to be connected to a digital home network, a Universal Serial Bus port for connections to other computer-related devices, and a PC Card slot that SCEI plans to use for connections to future broadband network adapters. Once a suitable network is available, SCEI plans to offer games on demand, and later video and audio to PlayStation 2 customers, but such a network is still not ready.

Speaking at the PlayStation Festival near Tokyo last month, SCEI President Ken Kutaragi predicted a 2001 broadband launch date for Japan but was vague when asked what technology--digital cable, wireless, or leased line--would provide the path to the home. The company may have problems launching a cable-based service after rival Sega Enterprises signed a string of deals with major cable network operators in late January.

An alternative option is wireless. Parent company Sony is currently busy building a nationwide wireless network but capacity could be a problem, as the parent is eyeing using its network for on-demand audio and video services. An SCEI spokesperson at the PlayStation Festival was keen to point out the network is that of Sony and not SCEI.

The console's inability to offer network gaming, something that the competing Dreamcast console from Sega offers out of the box, is unlikely to put many buyers off. Sony's slick marketing has already sold the console, in the mind if not in stores, to millions of customers and, should a real demand for narrowband access become apparent, SCEI expects a third-party developer will produce suitable equipment.