We got a call from Nintendo telling us that the Wii was only a block away from the office. Previews editor Brad Shoemaker and executive producer Ryan MacDonald ran downstairs to catch the Wii delivery on tape. We thought it would arrive in an armored truck, but then we heard the familar jingle of...
an ice cream truck!
And Brad takes delivery of the Wii!
Got any more Wii boxes in there?
Rich, Jeff, Alex, and Greg in the studio getting ready for the live On the Spot Wii marathon.
Brad heading to the studio with the Wii.
Rich reading a letter from Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime on air.
Let's get this box open and start playing! Check out GameSpot's "We Just Got A Wii Marathon" right now.
Sony PR man Ryan Bowling stopped by the GameSpot offices to do a PlayStation 3 demo for yesterday's On the Spot. He arrived an hour early to give us some hands-on time with a retail unit featuring the final shipping hardware. He couldn't show us the PlayStation Network features because it's still a work-in-progress, but he did walk us through most of the cross media bar options. I'm covering the backward compatibility testing first since a lot of readers have been asking about it.
Here's the PlayStation 3 sitting next to the 1080p HDTV we bought in preparation for the HD era.
Slide in a PS2 game and the PS3 will recognize it as a "PlayStation 2 Format Disc."
Before launching the game, the PS3 will prompt you to create an internal memory card on the hard drive to enable game saves.
Gran Turismo 4 loaded just fine on the PS3.
The PS3 doesn't do anything special to improve image quality for PS2 or PS1 games, but GT4 has built-in support for 1080i.
We used Battle Arena Toshinden 3 for our PS1 backward compatibility test.
The PS3 ran Toshinden perfectly but couldn't do anything for the decade-old graphics. Finally, we tried out a Japanese version of Kingdom Hearts 2 to see how the PS3 handled region locking for PS2 games.
The new console can play PS3 games from any region, but it looks like the system will obey region restrictions for games from older PlayStation platforms.
I've only seen the PlayStation 3 console in pictures or behind plexiglass for the past year and a half, but I've somehow managed to get up close with the system on two separate occasions in the past week.
We were fortunate enough to have a number of PlayStation 3 test systems and development kits on the show floor at this past weekend's After Hours event. Sega had eight units running Full Auto 2 and Namco had four more systems showing Gundam and Ridge Racer 7. One of the developers we spoke to told us that the test systems were "final hardware" but didn't have the finished operating system. I got another chance to examine the system at Sony's PlayStation 3 Gamers Day event today in San Francisco.
The PS3 test system's exterior is actually a smoky, translucent black instead of the solid black we've seen in the official PS3 press shots. The eject and power buttons are pretty slick--they aren't actually buttons that you can press down. Just slide your finger over either button symbol to get the disc to slide out of the slot-loader or to power the system on or off.
The console itself feels very sturdy. I'd guess that it's a couple pounds heavier than an Xbox 360. The running system exhausts a noticeable amount of heat, but I wouldn't say it runs any hotter than the 360. The noise level in the demo area prevented us from checking out the system's acoustics, but we've been told that the system is as quiet as the PS2.
Keep your eyes on the PlayStation 3 Launch Center. We'll have all of our Gamers Day event coverage up shortly.
