Sony's President looks to widen the role of games for PS2 with Internet and handhelds

At the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas last weekend, Sony President Nobuyuki Idei spoke with a confidence and determination that should have everyone in the videogame and PC world reprioritising their efforts for the next five years. In his keynote address, Idei said that PlayStation2 will change the way we use TV, but more importantly, he indicated that PlayStation2 and its multimedia abilities will overshadow the role that once belonged to the PC.

Bold words indeed, but Idei's intentions were clear: he expects PlayStation2 to merge the lines between PCs and games, music, movies and appliances. As reported in September, PlayStation2 offers phenomenal graphics and previously unseen game features, as well as backward compatibility, Internet connectivity and a set of new peripherals, including a massive hard drive for downloading movies.

During the demo, Sony showed several PlayStation2 demos, including a flock of birds, two mannequin heads, an hourglass demo with cool reflections, GT 2000 and Dark Cloud movies. We have a long real-time movie of the demo straight from the Comdex site that shows the entire event. For a link to the movie, click here, and for a link to the Comdex site, click here.

However, the most interesting part of the show was Sony's plan to merge everything into PlayStation2, and the amount of excitement the company have generated for developers. While a few sites have posted that 250 titles are supposed to be available at the launch of PlayStation2, officials have refuted this as misinformation. Sony and their second- and third-party developers are working on about 250 game titles altogether for 2000 and 2001, but not all for the March 4, 2000 launch in Japan.

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Courtesy of IGN.com