PlayStation 3 stumbles over backwards compatibility

By Tom Sanders on Nov 16, 2006 11:51 AM
Filed under Hardware

Hundreds of PS2 games won't play on new Sony console.

Sony's PlayStation 3 console is having trouble playing 200 games designed for the PlayStation 2, Sony has acknowledged.

About 8,000 game titles are available for the console today, about 2.5 percent of which have issues ranging from missing sound or a complete inability to run.

Sony has promised to develop a patch that will be made available through an online software update.

Consumers in Japan started complaining about the lack of compatibility after the console's launch on 11 November.

The PlayStation 3 is slated for availability in the US on 17 November. The European release is scheduled for March 2007.

The software issues are yet another setback for Sony, which already had to delay the console's launch because of production issues with the Blu-ray high definition DVD drives.