Should you buy a PAL PS3?

Mike Bantick
Thursday, 01 March 2007 03:40

Opinion and Analysis

As the ‘rest of the world’ launch draws near for the Sony PlayStation 3, we discuss some of the negative press, the facts and the reasons consumers would nab a PS3.

So the uproar continues over the Sony Eleventh hour removal of the Emotion engine hardware within the PlayStation 3, the bits that gave the PS3 98% backwards compatibility with PS2 and PSone game discs.

The cries go out across Europe and Australia, “we are paying more for less”.  Pre orders get cancelled as the nose thumbing starts from Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo Wii and PC gamers.

Will you buy a PAL PS3?  Of course you will, how could you consider your-self a hard-core gamer otherwise?  Sony loves the hard-core gamer, the PS3 is aimed at the gadget-geek-gamer that inhabits all parts of globe.

Packing a supercomputer, capable of churning out 1080p resolution of bright crisp lurid colours, allowing for USB2 attached devices such as MP3 players and Media file laden hard drives.  Going Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 7.1 Hi-Fi, Blu-ray and SixAxis around the living room has never been more fun.

So your biggest worry now is backwards compatibility with the vast library of favourite PS2 & PSone games – hopefully you did not trade your PS2 in on the PS3 pre-order.  Good, well now you can just reposition the aging PS2 (perhaps it would look good on top of the Xbox 360 in the entertainment cabinet) and away you go.

Sony has stated reasonably clearly that with the PAL version of the PS3 (and most likely a future iteration of the US/Japan model) PS2 backwards compatibility is not the focus.  There will be software emulation of, a yet unspecified list of PS2/PSone titles, with the final list being available on the day of launch, March 23rd