Anime is a wild animal we all love. It gives us heartache, joy, and sometimes wants to shred us to pieces on site…along with our wallets and/or purses. With that in mind, I want to let everyone know to save up what little money you’re able to on the side if you can muster the will. As the title suggests, it seems Sony has its eyes on our money and is quite serious about a new “next-gen system” being released. Mind you, this news is probably 2 or 3 days old, but for the anime world in my opinion, this is serious! I just bought a PS3 during the schoolyear & must say I have enjoyed it thoughrally. Blazblue is wonderful, along with Uncharted 2…and a bushel of other fun games. But unlucky for us, the Playstation 3 train could be arriving to its final destination sooner than we think.

Regarding release dates and such, analysts seem to be all over the place. Play.Tm projects 2010 will be the Playstation 4′s entry into the videogame world, while others such as GamesIndustry.biz foretells the iconic system being released later, in 2011-2012. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the new system would probably be here now if it weren’t for development of its processor:

Yerli, giving a talk on “The Future of Gaming Graphics”, also explained Crytek’s plans for a new version of its in-house engine to be released in 2012, but stated his belief that the effective current gaming maximums would remain at resolutions of 1920×1080 and 60 frames per second until that time.

He also added that he believed GPUs and CPUs were on a collision course, with the former becoming more effective at general computing, and the latter more effective at parallel tasks – and that software such as DirectX 11 would help that collision to happen towards the end of 2009.

The first title to use Crytek’s current development technology, CryEngine2, was last year’s Crysis, with a new title – Crysis: Warhead – to be released in a few weeks. CryEngine 2 took 25 engineers four years to put together, and used the original CryEngine as a base – which itself took an average of 20 engineers three years to build. (GamesIndustry.Biz)

In other words, Sony’s still considering whether to scrap the infamously hard to program, “cell” processor, or move on to some different PC hardware. The web is flooded…and I mean FLOODED with Playstation 4 madness. I mean for goodness sakes, again, I JUST got my Playstation 3 earlier this year. Blazblue: Continuum Shift hasn’t even come out yet.

However, I was doing a bit more research on the subject beyond the boring stuff like energy usage, and stumbled upon a site talking about the Playstation 4′s backwards compatibility. “Hmmmm,” I thought. It only seems logical to keep compatibility with the PS3 especially since this will probably be the smallest margin between 2 console releases. And I was right for the most part. It appears Sony might to us one-better – COMPLETE backwards compatibility. Yup, you read right. Basically, by implementing emulation software for PS1, PS2, PSP and PS3 games on all formats. There’s even word that a ps2 emulation “patch” is in the works for the PS3 soon.

As far as price range goes, the quotes are looking mighty morbid. Various forums believe pricing for the Playstation 4 will begin at a hefty $1,000. Taking into account the initial price of the Playstation 3, some are thinking 600-800 dollars might even be the magic number. If one thing is for certain, the Playstation 4 will have to set its price to keep good competition with other potential consoles such as the Wii HD. We all know how terrible sales were in the beginning for the PS4 and we also know Sony simply cannot afford a large loss like that ever again.