The Playstation has officially proved itself as being the extreme gaming machine, with popularity and sales exceeding that of the Nintendo 64 worldwide, and with veritable multitudes of titles to choose from and play it and the company behind the name has made itself a success under much opposition. Since it first appeared on the scene amist a competitve market during the early to mid nineties with Nintendo at the top, the Playstation has become the machine to own for killer games for more mature gamers. Although not technologically as powerful as the N64, it has used it's CD storage format to bring new worlds of imagination to life and allow full cinematic gaming experiences like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII, Parasite Eve, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Xenogears, just to name a few. The Playstation has been the home for popular favorites like Tomb Raider, Tekken, Gran Turismo, Crash Bandicoot, Twisted Metal, and Syphon Filter. Although there are many good games for the system, there are an equal if not more quantity of poor "filler" titles that are continuously pumped out by 3rd party developers. This continual effusion of crap has been a blemish on an otherwise gilded rise to glory of the Playstation.

And here we are 5 years later from the original Playstation's launch looking at the next big consoles on the horison. This fall (9/9/99) we will see the Sega Dreamcast, the first 128-bit system, planned to be sold at a reasonable $200 price tag. Although the system is the first to step up to the "next-generation" plate, whether it hits a home run or strikes out remains to be seen. Recently this past March, Sony released it's info and design specifications for the Playstation 2, and shocked the world sending a shudder down SEGA's spine. Only time will tell is the upstart Dreamcast can hold it's own against Sony's (and perhaps Nintendo's) goliath of gaming systems looming just a year or so away.

Sony's Playstation 2, is quite a machine indeed, surpassing the capabilities of Silicon Graphics workstations and bringing PIXAR movie quality graphics right at a gamer's fingertips! Just how good is the Playstation 2 in technical terms? Well, let's just say it time to start dropping jaws because this one's a doosey! The PSX2 is expected to display a maximum polygon rate of 75 million polygons per second. At the core of the PSX2 is the 128-bit "Emotion Engine" clocking in at 300 Mhz. Currently, The most sophisicated computer graphics cards can only display in the neighborhood of 14 million pps, and the Dreamcast renders 4 million. The Playstation 2 is capable of rendering 20 million pps for real-time 3-D environments with all effects turned on at 60 frames per second. The software storage media for the PSX2 is DVD-ROM as well as CD-ROM, thus allowing for a maximum storage capacity of 4.7 GB of data on a single disc. The PSX2 employs a special kind of laser able to read both CD and DVD format, a technology currently not available in DVD players but soon will be. The "Emotion Engine" has been touted as being capable of rendering the many variations of facial expression and emulation of human-like traits in characters. For a gamer, it's like playing an entire video game at Final Fantasy VIII cinema cutscene level graphics if not even better. Whats more, the Sony super-system is backwards compatable with it's predecessor, meaning old Playstation games, controllers, peripherals, memory cards, etc., can be used with the Playstation 2. For those who like to not only see the game but hear it as well, the PSX2 supports Dolby Surround Sound. The system also support Universal Serial Bus connections thus potentially allowing images or video to be imported onto the Playstation and/or manipulated by it's software. For software developers the Playstation 2 is intended to use a Linux environment and come equipped with applicable middleware that will reduce production times and simplify the ability of developers to work with the machine as a tool of artistic expression. What all this technical information means is that games will be created like none that have come before with unprecedented 3-D quality and far more imersive that anything that has followed. This thing gives Video Gamer X a shiver just thinking of what can be accomplished, and all for between a projected retail price of between $200 and $300.

Many companies have already expressed interest in working with the Playstation 2, including the illustrious Squaresoft, who have hinted at a potential Final Fantasy release for the system, and trust me, you can bet your ass that with the resounding success of Final Fantasy's VII, and VIII, there will be more Final Fantasys, and without a doubt a sequel for Playstation 2. The PSX2 will redefine what a RPG is, and truly bring our imaginations to life. The potential applications for the Playstation 2 extend even beyond gaming to allow new avenues of entertainment and interactivity to our television experiences. I've always invisioned a time when all games will essentially be inherantly Role Playing in nature, with a super-environment where all genres of gaming are encompassed within it's virtually limitless boundaries created by an world-wide-web-like cyber infrastructure. Games would become "photorealistic cyber dimensions" and a player would literally transmogrify his or her cyber presense from gaming scenario to gaming scenario almost like the mind passes from dream to dream during REM sleep. If anything brings gamers closer to this notion it is the Playstation 2, with it's gratuitious armament of cutting edge technology just waiting to be expressed to its fullest potential. The next 10 years and the subsequent technological changes are going to be breathtaking for gaming and entertainment as a whole. Be prepared, The ride of our lives is about to embark, and the future is now. The time for the Nintendo (ironic isn't it) generation to take stride and actualize tommorow's present is at hand.