The Next-Generation of Gaming?
A console is only as strong as its library of games. The PlayStation 3 could do a lot of things at launch, such as playing music, browsing the internet, watching movies on the new Blu-ray format, but to justify that massive initial price tag, it also needed to have some killer titles to entice people to buy it.
From memory, I remember myself and friends being quite dismissive of the PlayStation 3 at launch due to the lackluster offering of launch titles. After compiling the list of launch titles, I was surprised that I actually hadn’t played most of them, given I have played well over 350 PlayStation 3 games now and was eager to find out if what I remembered was true - were the launch titles really that bad?
I asked PlayStation 3 Forever contributor Alessio (see History of Japan Studio, PS3 Custom Firmware) what he remembers from this time:
I just remember working at GameStop at the time and none of the titles were very appealing. My co-worker had one and we played Haze, Genji and Heavenly Sword. We'd run all these trailers on the shop TVs and like 90% of the upcoming titles blew the launch titles out of the water. The sentiment was very much "why bother now?".
So let’s look at the generally agreed upon list of launch titles:
- Call of Duty 3
- Genji: Days of the Blade
- Madden NFL 07
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
- Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire
- NBA 2K7
- NHL 2K7
- Resistance: Fall of Man
- Ridge Racer 7
- Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07
- Tony Hawk’s Project 8
I won’t be exploring the sports games from this list. It’s not that these games are necessarily bad, but I just don’t have much experience with sports games, and I feel that they sit in a special bucket where, except for a few key exceptions, there is very little enthusiasm amongst most retro gamers to look backwards. If you were a big sports games fan, and there are a lot of them, a next-generation take on your favorite series would potentially draw you in, but for those of us looking for something unique, let’s explore the titles.
Genji: Days of the Blade
Genji Days of the Blade seems like a great launch title to me. It’s a bright, colorful, action game with some interesting mechanics. When we reviewed it back in Issue 4, I felt like it had some PlayStation 2 vibes about it, which is not a surprise given when it was released, but it didn’t have that special spark that made me feel it was a next-generation game. I think its appeal is also quite niche and would unlikely to pull many people in to purchasing the console just to experience this. If I purchased a PlayStation 3 at launch and got this in a bundle, I would like to think I’d be quite happy.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire
I had to reach out to Alessio for this one as I do not own it and could not find it for a while until I realized it was known as Mobile Suit Gundam: Target in Sight in Japan and Europe and here’s what he thinks of it.
It’s a mech based action game with some light RPG elements. The story mode has two campaigns which cross over with each other to provide an interesting perspective from both sides. There is an interlude between campaign missions where you can recruit and manage your pilots. The voice acting and music is also decent. On the negative the game does suffer from performance problems and some of the textures don’t give you a warm next-gen feeling. It’s definitely not a game that would have made me go out and buy the PlayStation 3, but it’s definitely the type of game I would have loved to play. A solid B+ and one I might actually keep on playing a little longer.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
This is not a game I had played before writing this article. It’s a sort of top-down, beat-em-up style of action game, a style quite popular at the time, and importantly, it has local co-op for up to four players all on a single screen (I played it with my kids). There are tons of Marvel characters to choose from, all with different play styles and powers, and more to unlock and encounter as the game progresses. This game was developed for a lot of different consoles across both generations, and I do feel like it shows. The delivery of the story and the graphics really do make me feel like I am playing a slightly more polished PlayStation 2 game rather than anything truly next-generation. Given that lack of graphical performance, it comes as no surprise to me that this title plays in 1080p, which is one of the few that do on the system. Its strength, I think, relies on that couch co-op feature, and that would have been of interest to me at the time - but it’s not a system seller for most.
Resistance Fall of Man
I think this is really the only one on the list that had the potential to be a system-selling, blockbuster icon of the PS3, but unfortunately, Sony had decided to put its exclusive title into a genre that was already extremely saturated and had some tough competition. I think it’s fair to say that as far as first-person shooters go, you’d probably have a better experience with a Call of Duty on the Xbox 360 than with this one, but I still appreciate the game for creating a new narrative, universe, and throwing that curve ball on alternate history. I think it’s not a system seller, but if you were getting an early PlayStation 3 title, it would make sense to get this for exclusivity, if not anything else. See our full review in Issue 1.
Ridge Racer 7
Now we are talking next-generation. Ridge Racer 7 is a fun arcade racer with impressive graphics and perhaps less impressive physics - although those physics may be intentional. Firing up the game today, I was shocked to see the online leaderboard still works and people are still racing and uploading times today. It also runs at 1080p.
Tony Hawk’s Project 8
As a younger kid, I was completely obsessed with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1, 2, and 3 but stopped playing the series after those titles. I really enjoyed giving this one a test on the PlayStation 3. Compared to some other games on this list, this game offers depth and replayability. There are a lot of different activities and plenty of ways to hone your skills. I believe that if I had played this game when it came out, I would have easily spent hours and hours. But there is a problem - the performance is not so good. It’s slow and choppy, and it’s clear it was not optimized for the PlayStation 3. This was so important at the time; why would you pay for a console so much more expensive than its rival and then buy a game for it that performs worse!
Call of Duty 3
It’s quite interesting to look back at an earlier Call of Duty, a series that is still running to this day, to see what it used to be. It was a much more genuine attempt at a historical shooter than what it has turned into today, but it still had that action flare to it. This is a great FPS for a launch title. The graphics are good, the cinematic moments feel very next-generation, and the game runs well on the PlayStation 3. Whilst Resistance: Fall of Man has its unique sci-fi twist and is an exclusive, in terms of raw FPS action, CoD 3 might execute it better. This version also attempted to include some six-axis motion controls for the melee actions, but I could not get them to work consistently, and fortunately, you can turn them off. I think this is a decent launch title.
Conclusion
Playing through some of these games now, I feel like we were too hard and overly critical about the launch titles for the PlayStation 3. I guess it is hard to remember the time in which you were about to spend a ton of money on a system and then another ton of money for a single game or two. It’s for me to say a game is ‘fun’ when I have spent £5 on it from eBay.
But many of them don’t feel like the big system sellers we saw later, like LittleBigPlanet, Uncharted or The Last of Us. Most of them were sequels in long-running franchises.
Looking at the Xbox 360 launch titles provides a really interesting comparison. Included in their list is Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, Call of Duty 2, Ridge Racer 6, and then a similar mix of sports titles. They had a few other exclusives but nothing that I would deem system-seller material either. It’s almost like Sony looked at that list and decided they would produce something similar, or it was simply coincidence given the periodic churn of sequels the game industry relies on.
What is missing from that context is that those games came out over a year before the release of the PlayStation 3, and at the time of the release, the Xbox 360 was getting games like Dead Rising and Gears of War - a hugely successful and influential title. So at this time, the 360 had really got going and just kept getting good games, meanwhile, the PlayStation 3’s extremely expensive option looked dated, and that’s before you even consider that a lot of cross-platform titles didn’t even run as well.
The PlayStation 3 made it through in the end, but it really could have done with just one more system-selling exclusive at launch.