Sony Wavers on PS3 Hardware

But if you're repulsed by the bat-stick, we recommend that you start getting over that as soon as possible.

Sony president Ken Kutaragi drew looks for his semantics recently when he called the upcoming PlayStation 3 an "entertainment super-computer", denying that it was just a games machine. As such, you'd expect it to be a given that Sony's new console would ship with a hard drive, but that isn't clear yet.

When asked by Japanese magazine Famitsu whether the PlayStation 3 would come with a hard drive, Sony's chief technical officer Masayuki Chatani replied that, "it has yet to be decided."

Like Microsoft, Sony is hoping that you'll buy the PlayStation 3 for more than just its ability to play the latest Killzone and Gran Turismo instalments, but, aside from the communication features Sony is keen to push, several of these other uses require a hard drive. It seems likely that Sony will include one with the system in order to avoid fragmenting its userbase, but we'll only find out closer to launch exactly what Sony will do.

And that's not the only part of the hardware that Sony is still debating. The company shocked many gamers with its radical new redesign of the Dual Shock controller. Chatani admitted that while the final controller will likely look similar to the prototype shown at E3, there could still be minor adjustments.

Which begs the question: How minor is "minor"? Will we see something more like the current Dual Shock controller when the console launches next year? This year's Tokyo Game Show, scheduled for mid-September, should have the answer to that and, hopefully, playable games too.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games