Philoking.com

Sony’s problems with the current generation of consoles have been well documented. Some have been deserved, others have not been. But today came several pieces of very welcome good news for the formerly unquestioned industry leader in console gaming.

First, comes news of a new firmware update with a number of excellent goodies.

And second comes word that a highly anticipated game from Ubisoft will be released for the PS3 alone in 2007. While the game will eventually go to the 360, it is still welcome news for Sony that the PS3 will have a game to counter Halo 3 with initially.

Of these pieces of news, I by far the most excited about the firmware update. Some of the games for the PS1 and the PS2 are truly unequaled in a lot of ways. The thought of me being able to play God of War 1 and God of War 2 with upconversion to a higher resolution (in my case 1080p!) is an incredibly welcome one for me.

A word of advice for anyone who hasn’t yet purchased their HDTV and plans to at some point in the future, keep in mind that bigger is not better in all circumstances. What I mean by that is that the bigger the TV, the more it stretches out the pixels in what is showing on the TV. The net effect of this is that if you’re watching something on your TV in a low resolution like 480i or 480p, it doesn’t look very good on a monstrous sized TV like my 61” Samsung.

Now obviously none of us play games exclusively for the pretty looks, but we also cannot reasonably deny that how a game looks has at least some impact on our overall gaming experience.

That is why the firmware update giving the PS3, which for the most part has excellent backwards compatibility, upconverting on older games is such welcome news for me. Having experienced upconverting on the HD-DVD add-on for my 360 (primarily before it started experiencing severe issues one month past its 3 month warranty) I can say from experience that adding upconverting can make a huge difference in picture quality.

It doesn’t always make a big difference. I don’t have the technical details on how the upconverting works and I know that the amount of upconverting that has been done on my DVDs that I’ve watched on the HD-DVD add-on in the past has been a bit inconsistent to say the least, but it frequently has a huge impact.

And hey, the price of “free” cannot help but be right for the PS3 firmware upgrade. Heck, it saves me the price of purchase of an upconverting DVD player to replace my busted HD-DVD drive for the 360.