Three months after launch there is exactly one game I would tell somebody to buy a PlayStation 3 for, and Sony needs that number to change quickly.
Resistance is the game, and it is good. Not merely good relative to a launch lineup, which is a category where standards collapse, but a genuinely well made shooter with an alternate history premise it commits to and weapons that behave differently enough to matter. Insomniac built it in the launch window, which usually produces something rushed, and it does not feel rushed. If you own the machine, you own this.
After that the shelf gets thin fast. Ridge Racer 7 is a competent racing game that also exists in some form on every platform ever made. Genji was the subject of a stage demonstration that has become a running joke and the game underneath is mediocre. Untold Legends is filler. The rest is largely ports of things available elsewhere, frequently running slightly worse than the Xbox 360 versions, which is a difficult fact for a machine sold on technical superiority.
That last point deserves sitting with, because it is not what anybody expected. The PlayStation 3 has more theoretical performance than its competitor and multi-platform games routinely run better on the other box. The reason is Cell. It is a genuinely unusual processor with a small conventional core and a set of specialised units that need to be fed by hand, and it rewards developers who build for it specifically and punishes anybody porting code written for something normal. Studios building for both platforms write for the simpler architecture and move the result across, and the result is a PlayStation version that arrives second and runs fourth.
Sony’s answer is that the first party studios will demonstrate what the hardware can do, and that is a real answer with a real precedent. The PlayStation 2 launched thin and spent six years being carried by internal teams. The difference is that the PlayStation 2 was not competing with a machine that had a year’s head start and a functioning online service, and it was not priced where this one is.
Europe gets its machines next month, which means an entire continent is about to buy into this library rather than the one that will exist by Christmas. That is not a great first impression to make on a market Sony has owned for two console generations.
What I said in December still holds, which is that this is a machine having a bad year for reasons that are entirely Sony’s own doing. The hardware is not the problem. The price is a decision, the supply was a planning failure, and the software drought is the predictable consequence of shipping an architecture that is hard to write for without first giving developers the tools and the time.
None of that is fatal. Consoles are seven year propositions and the first year of a Sony machine has never been the one to judge it on. But somebody buying this month is buying a promise and one very good shooter, and they should be told that honestly rather than sold a specification sheet.