Geek Swagger.
Archive for July 17, 2008
Sony’s E3 press conference
Jul 17th
This is post number 2 of 2 concerning E3. Earlier this week you heard what I had to say about Microsoft's offering, and now I'm going to comment on Sony's. Unfortunately I missed the Nintendo conference...my most sincere apologies. When last we met our beloved hero Sony had been delivered a death blow, and I was very curious to see how they would counter-attack. Heading into E3 I was the most excited for Sony's conference, but now that I've seen both the Microsoft and Sony conference I have to say that the MS conference was the better of the two.
My biggest area of interest was an apparently fraudulent screenshot I posted in my E3 preview which showed a PS2 game store in PSN. That wasn't announced unfortunately, but as much as I was looking forward to it I didn't really expect it. After all, the (which is now live) leaked well before their conference. I'm assuming that if the PS2 game store was real we would have seen more concrete details about it. As I said Sony released their video store though, which is good. Unlike Microsoft whose conference was mostly based on new content coming down the road, this is one area where Sony was able to offer a deliverable on the day of their conference. The store went up Tuesday night so I promptly checked it out.
The Playstation Store is now split into two categories - games and video. The game store is exactly how the Playstation Store was before videos were added, with the addition of a button to flip to the video store. The video store has a great interface with lighter color palettes so it's easy to differentiate between the games store and the video store. I took a brief look at some of the content they're offering and, for day 1, there's a nice selection. The movies come in standard or high definition formats and range in price from $4 for rentals to $15 for purchases. There's also some TV shows, $1.99 per episode purchase. They have a lot of older movies to sift through but there's also some newer ones as well - one movie in particular that caught my eye was Rambo. I've been told I should see it and so that'll be my first PSN video store rental. It should be noted that I'm much more inclined to purchase videos from PSN just because my PS3 has hdmi outputs while my 360 is stuck with component. The only unfortunate part about this new video store is that it was launched the day after Microsoft previewed their new relationship As is usually the case, just as Sony and the PS3 are catching up with online functionality someone else comes and pushes the envelope just out of their reach.
The next area that I was eager to hear some news about was . Home has been in the works for it seems like forever, and especially with Microsoft announcing the avatar platform the day before it seemed more important than ever that Sony gives us some concrete information about their service. In the end all we really saw was a trailer for Home, showing some of the themed spaces of the game. They had already announced that games like would have their own dedicated infrastructure in Home and we finally saw a video of how that will work. From what I saw it just seemed like a building in Home that was dedicated to Uncharted. The building was decked out with furnishings with the same theme as the game and so on. That's all well and good but I really expected them to announce a launch date or at least do a thorough walkthrough of the service and say that they were going to start an open beta or something. If Sony is unable to publish Home by the time Microsoft deploys their avatar system via the Fall software update it's going to be a bit of a failure. We've heard about it for so long that, at this point anyways, it seems like it's never coming.
As far as games go there was a lot of attention paid to the games that I already mentioned in the preview. was featured with a single player demo, and it was really impressive. Little Big Planet was turned into a of sorts showing off the flexibility behind its gameplay based on user-created content. Killzone 2 was shown in a cinematic trailer. Aside from those three there was quite a bit of attention paid to upcoming PSN titles which was cool. I'm really glad that Sony's taking downloadable games seriously and not just putting out classic arcade games every week. Games like and Fat Princess confirmed that they have a dedication to putting out original content on a consistent basis. They didn't just stop at bite-sized games though, they also talked about full games that would be released on PSN for download. First they showed that looks to be a downloadable expansion pack of sorts for , a game that I finished not too long ago. Quest for Booty (it's fun to type, I must admit) will expand on the story found in Tools of Destruction and will only cost $15. The other game is . Blood Curse is another PS3 exclusive that's actually a follow-up to a cult classic from the PS2 days. It'll be delivered in episodes one at a time which integrates into the structure of the original game quite well. After playing the demo I'm pretty confident that I'll be picking up both Quest for Booty and Siren when they drop.
Other news related to Playstation games includes the introduction of Greatest Hits pricing for some games in North America, as well as a very solid PSP offering. Greatest Hits are basically legacy PS3 games (launch titles) that have seen a 50% price-cut and are re-packaged as a Greatest Hit. You can find a list of all of the Greatest Hits games but the ones I'm most interested in are and . I've been wanting to play Resistance but grabbing a launch title for $60 is a hard pill to swallow. Being able to pick up two launch titles for the price of an ordinary game is a pretty good value instead. Hopefully they'll add more games to the Greatest Hits lineup soon. As far as the PSP goes, there were a few games that interested me. There's going to be a Resistance spin-off built exclusively for the PSP called as well as a sequel , one of the most unique games I've ever seen on any platform. Also mentioned was a of my favorite PSN game . Those three games alone are enough to make me consider purchasing a PSP, but that's not all. All of the videos on the PSN video store can be converted to a PSP format, meaning you can take them with you wherever you go. That's pretty enticing.
The only whizzbang game announcement was a brand new franchise called . Although details are sketchy, the biggest seller of this title is the 256-player online mode. It's a shooter much in the same vein as a Battlefield game, just on a much more massive scale. All that was shown during the conference was a trailer, and you can tell that the game is still sort of a concept at this point, but it's something to get excited about. MAG was branded as the type of game that only the PS3's complex hardware could manage but it makes me wonder what sort of lag I'll see with 255 other players running around.
To sum it all up this year's conference was heavy into stressing Playstation 3 as a long-term platform. The first 15 minutes of the conference was all about showing the longevity of the prior Playstation systems, and it seems like Sony is trying to establish the PS3 for as long as 10 years. The overall theme of the conference was "If you think this is good, just wait until next year!" That's all well and good but I don't know how many people are going to go out and purchase a PS3 based on promises of a better tomorrow. I said that Microsoft had a solid showing and in comparison Sony had a weak one. To take as hard of a hit as losing Final Fantasy XIII exclusivity was and not have much to fight back with is...well, bad news.
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