PlayStation 3 disappoints

When we asked a kid in line why he wanted a PS3 badly enough to wait a week for it in the November weather, he responded in one word: graphics. Of the people not planning on selling the console on eBay, graphics was the common cry.

But when I observed two games (MotorStorm and NBA ‘07), I left less than impressed. I guess I expected next-gen graphics to be something more than a mere level of refinement comparable to what we say between the original PlayStation and the PS2.

The environments in MotorStorm, an off-road racer offering plenty of spectacular crashes, were inconsistent; the level of detail in the terrain varied greatly, making some hillsides look rife with rounded pebbles while others could have been impressive bitmaps stretched over a lonely polygon.

The single improvement on the b-ball court was the court itself. No longer is the flat surface stuck with a solid reflection: The individual boards in a wooden court reflect at slightly differing angles, which made me flashback to elementary school gym class.

It should be noted that launch titles historically have inferior graphics—and many other qualities—when compared to the system’s entire catalog. This is reasonable: programmers and artists cannot be expected to grasp a system’s strengths and limitations when it is young. I hope we see the PS3’s graphical capabilities—touted as being unsurpassable this generation—better utilized as the system matures.