I’ve played, maybe the last month or so, mainly PS3 and PS2 games. PS2 was released in 2000 and PS3 was in stores 2007 (in Europe). Between these seven years we saw a very strong development and advancement in technical aspects when it comes to video game consoles and the technology they use. Not only did these newer games look better. They also felt better. So also the way that games were made, how the menus felt like and looked like and how controls felt like advanced. I am going to now dive deeply into these differences between these two very popular video game consoles.
PS2 sold more than PS3. There were 153 million units sold of PS2 while PS3 sold 80 million units. I had to look up these numbers and they are only directional. While looking at only the sales numbers you cannot truly determine which one of these two consoles is better. And I think I am not going to go into this debate of which one would be better. We are going to just find out how things developed and how these two individual consoles differ from each other.
First of all we have to consider how PS3s technology is more advanced than PS2s. PS3 had a hard drive. My hard drive can hold 320 GB. There were different models and they differed from each other a bit. One PS3 model was also backwards compatible with PS2 games. All PS3 models had backwards compatibility to PS1 games. PS2 didn’t have a hard drive and you had to have a memory card for saved games. This memory card had 8 MB of space. We have also seen memory cards as big as 128 MB also. I just have had some bad experiences of these third party memory cards and I have had my saved game data corrupted. I haven’t had any problems with Sony’s own memory cards.
While PS2 could handle already some pretty neat 3D models PS3 was way more powerful when it comes to 3D models and the ability to display graphics. You can firmly figure the difference between the sharpness of the picture that these two consoles provided if you think that PS2 had a solid DVD support while PS3 had a support for Bluray discs. There were some technical aspects related to this graphical matter but I am not going to go so deeply into it.
Hardware in PS3 was in every other way more powerful. We are talking about several tens of times. It was a very big technical advancement. How were controllers different? With PS2 you had a very nice controller. It was connected with the same type of connector that was used with the first PlayStation. PS3 had a wireless controller. You could, like I always do, connect it with a wire so you wouldn’t run out of battery at all. PS3 had USB connectivity also. The wireless connection was established with Bluetooth technology. The names of these controllers were Dual Shock 2 and Dual Shock 3. They look very same when you look at them. By the way, I have lately been playing my PS3 with that controller that is also in the featured image of this blog post. It is Spartan Oplon and it is also compatible with PC.
What about the backwards compatibility of these two consoles? Sony was already making their policy of backwards compatibility with their decision to not support PS2 games on PS3. As you might know PS4 didn’t have a backwards compatibility at all. So even PS3 games couldn’t be played with PS4. Today, also you might know, PS5 supports also games of PS4. I am not going to talk about Xbox backwards compatibility here. It is more wide but it also has its flaws. As an issue backwards compatibility is technical and complex. I must say that emulation has advanced lately. This is nice as you can achieve a very good emulation of PS2 and also today PS3.
I think you cannot strictly say if one of these two consoles is better. Neither was it my point right here in this blog post. If this blog post that I am writing has some deeper level (as my writings sometimes have) it could be that the technology of video games made a huge step between the release of these two video game systems. I have concluded here some main points for you to think about. I have to also mention one more point. Where game design and gameplay come these were also advancing quickly between 2000 and 2007. We saw some steep advancements in this area also. Actually this advancement was so huge that it makes me think that games have come a long way. And I like PS3 games. Heck. I might like them even more than PS2 games.