Innovation, Sony Style

Last week, I touched upon how Microsoft is innovating with the XBOX360 by opening up the gaming console to small time developers, regular-Joe programmers, and students.

And of course, last year, I was just blown away by the initial peek at Nintendo’s new controller and how it literally changes the way we interact with games and adds another level of immersion.

So what about Sony and their PS3 then?

It’s hard to say.  For the most part, I don’t think that I’ve really been blown away by anything that has been touted for the PS3.  For one thing, I tend to view it simply as a Trojan Horse for Blu-Ray technology, an inferior technology so far as audio/video quality is concerned compared to Toshiba’s HD-DVD, so that Sony can cash in on it and force it down our throats. 

Is Blu-Ray innovative?  I don’t think so; it’s more of a natural evolution of the DVD format and basically gives us a bigger storage medium.  Aside from that, there’s not much that excites about the PS3 from a gaming perspective at all.  Sure, it’ll pump out some slick graphics, but is it innovating in any way?  Sony copied Nintendo’s montion sensing controller capabilities (half-assedly), so that doesn’t count.

To me, the PS3 has been perhaps the least interesting of all the next generation consoles and the one that offered the least amount of innovation.  But today, some news came out that showed some promise: the PS3 will run Folding@Home.  It’s not that Microsoft’s XBOX360 can’t do this as well, but for the first time, someone will be copying Sony this generation.  It seems like a match made in heaven for these compuationally expensive distributed computing projects as both XBOX360 and PS3 have CPUs capable of highly parallel computing (the PS3 features 7 SPEs while the XBOX360 features three, symmetric, dual core processors).

Interesting news to me at least 🙂

On a related gaming note, check out this smile inducing clip (via Kotaku) :-D.