I’m sure everyone was as blown away with the Killzone 2 demo that we saw at Sony’s conference, and it certainly succeeded in bringing a lot of people who thought they had seen the light with the Xbox 360 over to their camp. Now it seems all but certain that the demo, along with most of Sony’s other stuff, was pre-rendered and simply “indicative” of what their machine would be capable of.

That’s all well and good, but I can’t be the only one who has very clear memories of the unveiling of the PS2 as well. Sony’s rhetoric told us how it would be the entertainment hub of our homes (it turned out to be a crappy DVD player), that it would deliver graphics beyond our wildest dreams (was it really that much more powerful than the Dreamcast?), that it had the “Emotion Engine” (a link to the PS3’s “Reality Synthesizer”?), and that it would render CG quality in real time. They showed the ballroom scene from Final Fantasy VIII and told us that the PS2 could do it, and I’m sure that I heard Toy Story mentioned more than once.

Somehow they managed to pull exactly the same tricks this time and, as expected, everyone ate it up and it stole the thunder than Microsoft had built up with some real-time footage of games for their machine. I’m shocked that MS haven’t been making as much capital out of this as they can by making sure everyone knows that they showed genuine footage of their stuff that still managed to stand up to Sony’s nifty CG work. It makes me wonder if the PS3 is actually going to come out of the gate with any more power than Microsoft will do later this year.