Even if it got off to a bit of a slow start, the Playstation 3 certainly has more than it's fair share of exclusive must-play titles - Little Big Planet, Ratchet and Clank and recent role-playing game Ni No Kuni to name but a few. If you're anything like us, even if you had a PS3, you may have a tendency of leaving games half finished when something new and shiny comes along, with the intention of going back to them at a later date - sometimes you do, sometimes you don't, but it's always nice to have the option. And when it comes to moving on to the next generation, it's recently been pretty much a given that your next console will play all of your old games - the 360 played old Xbox games (mostly), and the PS3 played old PS2 and PS1 games - but, sadly, for the Playstation 4, it sounds like that's all about to change.
Ni No Kuni is just one of the reasons to get a Playstation 3...
At last week's reveal of Sony's next console, the Playstation 4, the Japanese company chose David Perry, creator of the Earthworm Jim game and games industry entrepreneur to break the news. Now the head of Gaikai, a game streaming company which has recently been acquired by Sony, Dave came on stage to break the news to the world that the PS4 will not be able to play PS3, PS2, PS1 or your downloaded PSN games. At least, not as you'd expect it to. Instead, Sony plan to use Gaikai to stream those games to you over the internet. Perhaps the easiest way to imagine how this works is that somewhere in the world, there's effectively a few thousand PS3s running every game imaginable. By using Gaikai, you can plug your Playstation 4 into those machines, and start playing, with Gaikai sending you a live video stream of what you're doing. It's a confusing concept (and much more complex than our attempt at explaining it), and one that we're not entirely sure about. It's already been confirmed that your save games won't move across either - so will we have to start from scratch on every game? Will we need to buy access to games we already own? Also, will Gaikai let us access every single game, or only the big ones? And what happens if your internet cuts our mid-way through - or just isn't up to the job? So many questions, and a distinct lack of answers...
We're pretty gutted to be honest - one of our staff members has been toying with the idea of getting a Playstation 3 for a while, on account of all the 3D platformers and Japanese role-playing games that have appeared on the console in recent years. But it seemed to make more sense to hold out for the Playstation 4 and simply play them on that - but now it seems that may not even be a possibility any more, leaving them, and likely thousands of others, in a sticky predicament.
Hopefully Sony will clear things up a bit in the next few months - if not, we're sure to have a better idea come this summer's E3 conference when they officially spill the beans, and let all the cats out of their bags.
