Valve Software boss Gabe Newell has slagged off PS3 calling it " a waste of everybody' s time" in a latest attack on the console.

" Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There' s nothing there that you' re going to apply to anything else. You' re not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they' ve created" , Newell told Edge magazine.

" I don' t think they' re going to make money off their box. I don' t think it' s a good solution."

It' s not the first time Newell has slammed PS3. Earlier in the year he called it " a total disaster on so many levels... I think it' s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted" .

" I' d say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a do over" , he said in January.

Despite his negative reactions to PS3, Newell says that he thinks PS3 owners who buy The Orange Box are going to be happy with their game experience and that EA - which is handling the PS3 version - will make it a good product.

" But I think it' s harder to get it to the same standard as the 360 and PC versions" , Newell said.

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Cry baby much?

He' s got valid points but they don' t come accross very well and this certainly makes me want to avoid the PS3 version of Orange Box...

Yeah they do come out a bit harsh. I wonder how many are thinking the same though?

Most devs try to stay on good terms with everyone

Come on guys, from a developers stance it probably is a very undesirable platform to work on. The Cell processor was never designed for games. Never.

If someone told me to trim/sculpt their hedges but the only tool they gave me was an axe, of course I' d be annoyed too. Sure I could probably hack and bluster my way through, picking up some techniques along the way that make the job a little easier, maybe even end up with something decent. But the fact is, they gave me the wrong tool for the job and sculpting hedges with an axe is much more difficult than with (let' s say) a pair of hedge trimmers. Given the right tool at the beginning, my job would have been a whole lot easier.

Sony basically gave developers the wrong tool for the job. Cry baby much? Nah. I' d say Newell' s the only one with his priorities straight (and the balls to say what others won' t).

Undesirable is right, but comparable results can be achieved - it just costs more money and takes more effort. Valve were smart enough to outsource development of the PS3 version, but i like to see developers strive to make the best possible game for the hardware. Even though re-writing large chunks of the engine to take advantage of CELL' s strengths would cost much more than simply porting with major deficiencies and would consume more time - i figure if you' re going to bother at all then you might as well do a decent job of it.

I dunno. On one hand i agree with him wholeheartedly, and on another i think that it' d be best to work with Sony to create a proper toolkit for the engine and then licence it like Epic have with UE3.0. I guess after the weak Xbox port last gen i expected Half Life 2 on PS3 to be on par with the 360 version. I mean, if Infinity Ward can do it with CoD4...

I was just about to pre-order ORANGE box good thing i didn' t.

I mean if its such a disaster and sooo difficult to program for then i guess we would only be seeing about 1 or 2 games on the shelf.

If the guys at SQUARE, KONAMI, FACTOR 5, CAPCOM etc... can do it then he really cant complain.

Western developers like to moan, i think the potential of what can come out of the ps3 is great. We are already starting to see great results in such a short space of time. With a name like Gabe i cant take anything he says seriously anyway.

Its doable to program for the PS3 ofcourse, i think the point is, sony made it a lot harder than it has to be, to trojan out the cell processor!

I always thought Sony' s asymmetrical harware was designed to make it unique, so it was difficult to port games from the PS to other consoles.

But for that to work, the conosle has to become ubiquitous so devs end up choosing them and only them.

Its a disaster if it doesnt become ubiquitous, and GayBen (as he calls himself in the dev commentary of Portal ) being a PC dev wont leave his area of expertise to go learn about random hardware that was only designed to last one console cycle.

He does sulk a lot though!

Who cares,sony dev says their 5 hour long games couldn fit on a dvd9,so fuck them.

CELL is teh gay.

Hmm seems a bit harsh - gabe Is I mean, not agent lol.. - anway.. my uncle' s co has invested heavily in trying to get to grips with teh PStriple and it has cost them double the money that the PC / 360 versions have cost so far, due to costly uptake expense.

Pretty scary for something they are planning to shift a few hundred thousand units of.. costs were up to a horiffic level too.