Backwards compatibility problems arise with the PS3

When the X-Box 360 had problems playing original X-Box games it was somewhat expected. It was announced a good while before launch and the reason was because the hardware was so different. Up until this weekend Sony’s claim was that backwards compatibility would be supported for PlayStation and PS2 games. Now that it’s released in Japan we see that that’s not true at all.

According to this BBC article a Japanese newspaper has claimed that 200 games don’t play properly on the new system. Though Sony has acknowledged the problem and first stated it on their web site the day of the Japanese release of the system, they aren’t giving a number of how many games are affected.

As usual promises are made to add compatibility for problematic games through patches available online. This is all so familiar.

Sony now has the following statement listed on their description of the PS3’s features:

NOTE
Some PlayStation 2 or PlayStation format software titles may perform differently on this system than they do on PlayStation 2 or PlayStation systems, or may not perform properly on this system. PS3 does not support a vibration controller.

Gamers can go to this page on Sony’s official site to check to see what games don’t work. Unfortunately it’s all in Japanese so good luck in making much sense of it. Search for nothing to get a list of all games. The right colum shows if the game works or not. In fairness it took me a while browsing through that list to find a game with a reported problem but if you narrow your search down to include only PlayStation 1 games you’ll notice that problems are a lot more common. Use this to translate.

It still remains to be seen if Nintendo shares the curse of the current generation of game systems but given their track record of backwards compatibility in their handhelds I’m not terribly worried.