Japan’s Cnet.com reports backwards compatibility problems for over 196 PlayStation 2 titles. This figure counts multiple versions of the same game (budget versions, limited editions, etc.) as a single entity and includes the full range of problems, from simple sound issues to more dramatic freezing issues.
In response to these issues, Sony’s PR department pointed out that it, from the start, expected backwards compatibility to be less than 100%. It was also good enough to point out that some people can put up with playing games that lack sound.
Phil Harrison said that as long as the games adhered to the technical requirements checklist, they would be compatible.
Unfortunately, only licensed developers are allowed to see this, and they must be working on a Playstation title as well, as far as I know. And if the TRC is privileged information protected by a contract clause of some kind, you’d get in a lot of trouble for publicizing it. Trade secrets and all that.
but they’re right. I play games without sound. Games like Field Commander for the PSP where sound is so crappy you don’t bother with the headphones… not exactly a selling point for a game.
Someone brought up in another thread that a lot of peripherals won’t work even with the adapter, Guitar Hero being the most tragic example. That makes me sadder than any other compatability issues that may arise.
Oh, I just knew these news story would surface sooner or later. 196 approximately equals around 97-8% of the entire library of PS and PS2 titles released in Japan thus far. The very first release that was updated very soon of the PS2 had less backwards compatible titles than it eventually did after the update as well. The Japanese PS2 had three to four times as many titles to take into account as other regions, and the same ratio is generally true of most consoles.
Both I and Tatsu have tried a good deal of our collections (we both own around 80 or 100 PS1 or PS2 games each) and so far, only Phantom Brave and Star Ocean 3 have shown a problem on his unit, though we’re not done yet.
It would be nice if working versions of PS1 & PS2 games that were incompatible with PS3 and semi-popular became downloads from the Sony online store thingy. Though I suppose it would be asking too much for someone to revisit those programs and fix them for reconsumption.
Dude, chill. They’ve already released one update to make the list of titles grow, since this is also what happened at the time of the PS2, I have no problem believing they’ll fix it.
And the only thing that happened in the game was that when you move your character the sprite would stutter sometimes or the polygons would tear.
On the positive, on a good half of the titles we tried load times were improved, sometimes rather dramatically. This was surprising considering what Sony said about it not offering any enhancements. Also, we believe it’s possible to install the PS2 HDD compatible games to the hard drive, though as this was an option for a lot more Japanese games than I think Western games, I’m not sure how much that will matter to people and we didn’t try it, in the same way we didn’t try PocketStation games with an adapter – Tatsu doesn’t want his to break and won’t do anything outside the normal reins of the unit until he’s sure it won’t. :P
I assume you mean 2-3 percent. Sony have released a webpage that you can use to check compatability, here. There’s no need to check each game individually.
Sony hope to add support for problematic games in future updates.
Yeah I meant around 97-98% of games are compatible with PS3 and like I said above, there’s already been an update, plus some rather unexpected benefits to the games (beside the obvious unlimited memory card space).
And I know very well about that list, thanks. We’re not going by it, because so far it’s differed for some people, in that the title didn’t actually display the problem in the time they played it, while for others it displayed right away.
Well, although it appears Sony has done a much better job out of the box than Microsoft, it seems both systems are going to need patching in order to ensure backward compatibility.
The relentless march of consoles towards PC gaming status continues…
The difference between the 360 and the PS3 being backwards compatible is that the PS3 has the PS2 chips built in, correct? The 360 is doing compatibility via emulators.
Not quite, the PSOne is emulated, while the PS2 is in the hardware, which is why most of the problems are minor sound and video playback problems.
And Kirian, read my post in reply to BobJustBob, across the board we noticed shorter load times for nearly every game. It’s not an option, you’re right, it happens whether you like it or not.
Considering they essentially put the entire PS2 in the PS3 then how can’t they do better? I am sure if it were technically/cost feasible MS would have done the same with the 360.
