Oh 3D, so unready

I just attended this year's eurogamer expo in London and boy oh boy was I excited to play Killzone 3 and GT5 in 3d. I am a loyal ps3 owner, not so much a fanboy, but I do root for Sony... so it pains me to inform the readers of N4G how shockingly underwhelming playing in 3d was. I thought, before I arrived, "potential side-effects, cost and inconvenience of 3d technology in the home be damned, if it's good enough, people will bear the burden, as will I!"

It might not be good enough.

1) The screen is dimmed to the point that I felt a bit depressed playing the game. When I took off the glasses I felt like you might feel if you had been in your room during the day and when the sun falls and you don't realize how dark your room was until someone turns on the light for you. "Ah, that's better!" I thought, "Clarity, once more!"

2) The depth wasn't profound, AT ALL! In a bid to create a subtle 3d effect that doesn't run the risk of offending the potentially queasy masses, Sony has dumbed down the effect so much that, while you notice it, you don't really care all that much. This is disappointing because I once saw just a video of motorstorm pacific rift in 3d one day and it really blew me away, no such feeling in GT5.

3) You can see a faded version of the wrong image half the time. It's very distracting. I thought that this made a bit of sense in the theatre where polarized lenses may yet let a bit of both feeds into each eye (and really, you don't notice it very often), and I was very surprised to see the same effect on the synced glasses (only worse, somehow), because the technology is supposed to close the right eye shutter when the left eye image is being shown. I guess it's a sync problem, and it sucks.

4) Killzone 3 was... it's difficult to describe, but definitely sub HD. There were times where I could have counted the pixels, but this wasn't the case always. The 3d must take a toll on performance and they probably had to cut the res to keep up the rest of the visuals. Also, the controls are still laggy. Maybe less so, but I wish they would stop this ridiculous bid to add more realism to the game. What's so real about me waggling my gun all about helplessly trying to nab headshots, even if it does LOOK weighty? Get over it guerilla, 20 million gamers can't be wrong, just steal what works from modern warfare 2 and swallow your pride.

So there you have it, dark screen, not very exciting, ghosting and sub-hd killzone 3. I was ready to be a very happy camper at the eurogamer expo, and now I'm just disillusioned. What's more, motorstorm apocalypse's graphics blow chunks, and certainly more so in 3d.

I'm afraid all this focus on 3d has distracted Sony from their quite realizable goal of becoming the king of 2d visuals. Someone stop the madness, they say there is yet untapped potential in the cell, and now it's being wasted on this likely fruitless project. Suddenly, the cost and inconvenience (of glasses) are actually sounding like deal breakers.