PS3 Fanboy

Phil Harrison has reassured us lately that more than 100 games are in development for the PS3. Not all are launch titles, of course. He reiterated the fact 10,000+ dev kits have been shipped and the company is in full swing for the November launch. This isn't exactly breaking news, but to hear him say as fact the rumors and speculations going around is sort of nice. Especially about the negative press on Blu-ray, he countered: "Right now there are more than 100 Blu-ray movies available today, in the US. More than 100 games are in development, and all the major third-party publishers have pledged their strategic support for the platform."

About the developers, he said, "Developers now have final hardware in their hands, though there will be some upgrades to the operating system - there's nothing unusual about that. The new controller is now in developers' hands, so all the pieces of the puzzle are there." All the pieces, except the OS upgrades. Whatever. Here's an interesting bit about the developers: they have working PS3 Blu-ray drives, so they can burn their games onto Blu-ray discs and check 'em out that way, as opposed to running the games off the hard drive or some other media format. At the Tokyo Game Show, we'll see how well the Blu-ray versions stack up. Hopefully some developers will have a decently running beta of a game off of the final hardware and such.

The PS3 dev kits on display at GDC apparently skipped the HDMI connection for some of their demos, casting doubt on how far along Sony's come with its hardware and digital standards compliance.

During GDC, Sony brought along a few PS3 demo units to show off audio and video, which TG Daily spied from a distance. As you can see above, the PS3 graphics demo unit used a standard AV Multi-Out connector while the "two HDMI ports right below the AV Multi-Out port were unused." TGD apparently offered to lend Sony officials an HDMI cable of their own to connect to the system, but they were turned down.

Of course, there's also a conflicting pic which Chris Grant took for us on Joystiq Central that seems to show that very HDMI connection being used, probably with another unit. (Scroll down to the second pic here to see it.) So what's the real story? Was Sony lacking enough updated HDMI 1.3 hardware and/or 1.3-compatible TVs to show off the HD goods, or were they simply short on cables? Maybe their budget was a bit tight for GDC (what with Phil's focused keynote and abundance of GDC sessions from Sony), so hopefully we'll see everything hooked up nice and tidy for E3.

[Thanks, Michael, Racky, pheen, and DocEvil; via TechSpot and CD Freaks]