14 DAY TRIAL // The PlayStation 3 is the most powerful console currently found on the market. Its Cell processor and Nvidia-powered graphics solution produce some of the most stunning effects ever seen on an HDTV. That is, if you know how to program for it, as a lot of developers have complained about the problems they encounter when they want to create a game for it.
We've heard Square Enix and Capcom, two local Japanese companies, complain about the problems they encountered when creating something for Sony's console, as opposed to the Xbox 360, which handles much better, and which, in Capcom's case, was the key to the Western market, in which Microsoft's console is more popular due to its lower price tag.
Recently, the executive producer for Wheelman, Shaun Himmerick, talked about the challenges the game he supervised encountered when it was brought to the PS3 from the Xbox 360 and PC platforms. He put it quite bluntly though, and stated that developing for the Japanese console was a real pain and you really needed to know what you were doing.
“The politically incorrect answer is that the PS3 is a huge pain [...]. Anyone making a game, if you're going to make it for both 360 and PS3, just lead on the PS3 because if it works on the PS3 it'll work on 360. The easiest way to look at it is, the 360 has one big chunk of memory, but the PS3 has two chunks of memory that in total are the same size as the Xbox, but because they're split you can't share memory the same way. We had to play catch up on the PS3 because of the memory constraints and how it renders, how it processes is just different. And it's harder on the PS3. The Xbox is just like a dumb PC, which is great because it's easier to build a game on a PC.”
A very precise explanation, which really puts the two consoles into perspective. The Xbox 360 has been made to play games and for some basic multimedia capabilities, and as such it is cheaper to produce, while the more expensive PlayStation 3 has been created as a true multimedia machine, with Blu-Ray capabilities among many other features, in which gaming doesn't occupy the important role it should.