Sony E3 2009 Press Conference
It’s a little hard to summon up the energy to write another of these conference reports, especially after Nintendo’s conference which had a few gems but was largely full of a lot of low-energy talking and a lot of video montages of people playing games (which is much less interesting than montages of games). What hurts Sony is that it seems like almost all of their big announcements were already leaked. I expect to see PSP Go, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2, and God of War 3 on PS3 and Dissidia and Little Big Planet on PSP. I will be excited if I end up seeing PS3 Slim, Trico (the current version of the game, not the concept trailer released last week), or a Twisted Metal game. Also there are rumors of a new motion control ‘wand’. Will it be there? At least Sony always has slick, professional-looking presentations regardless of what they’re showing.
And the conference starts with images of the PSP, PS2, and PSP rising like monoliths across a cityscape. Kind of emphasizes how bulky the PS3 is when seen next to the PS2. But I don’t really think the PS3 Slim announcement is coming today. The opening video montage has already show clips of every single game I said I expected to see.
Now Jack Tretton comes on stage and the show begins. I miss Phil Harrison, but at least Tretton seems human unlike those Nintendo robots. Phil Harrison was more like the badass cyborg who hunts down robots. Anyway, Tretton is already joking about how much of the material has been leaked. “We are the industry leader, and that includes press leaks”. I guess that may mean that the leaks were not intentional.
The crowd seems a little more energetic at this conference. They are cheering just for the text “Heavy Rain” on a screen. Sony is starting out with the PS2. This aught to sap the energy out of the room. Tretton is talking about PS2 outselling current-gen systems (which he still calls next-gen!) last month as if this is a good thing. I guess $99 works well in a recession. “Today’s PS2 owners are tomorrow’s PS3 owners” - OK, when will PS3 be $99? 20never? Now they’re talking about PS2 in Latin America. Booooring! Tretton namedrops 4 game review sites but does not mention 1UP.
Now we’re talking about Naughty Dog and Uncharted 2. The Uncharted 2 trailer came out a few days ago, and it looks really great. I don’t know why they couldn’t have held it for another few days since it would have made a great impression during the conference. It looks like it’s a live play demo, though, so different from what we saw in the trailer. This game really looks gorgeous. This is one of those cases where I think a console game looks a lot better than what is available on PC, even with the much lower hardware power. In terms of prettiness, I think it’s the best one I’ve seen at any of the conferences so far.
Next up is MAG, the 256-player online game. A lot of people are pretty skeptical about whether it’s really worthwhile to have 128 vs 128 player combat. Are you going to feel like you are just a little ant in the larger scope of things? Will you even notice that there are so many players within your own field of play? They are going to show off an actual 256-person battle on stage, which is pretty impressive from a technical standpoint at least. So far it just looks like any other FPS to me. There are experience points popping up whenever he kills a guy, so I guess this game has some sort of RPG aspects to it? I haven’t really played a big multiplayer game since Battlefield 1942, so this game doesn’t mean that much to me.
Now we’re going to talk about PSP. There are 50 million PSPs sold worldwide - so why are there so few games? Lots of sarcastic cheering from the audience over the Lilac PSP bundled with Hannah Montana. Kaz is coming out now to talk about PSP and PSN. Here comes the PSP Go announcement. Or “worst-kept secret of E3″ as Kaz puts it. Kaz is clear that the PSP Go will be sold alongside the old PSP and they will not be completely eliminating UMD. It is 50% smaller and 40% lighter than the original PSP (not the current PSP). They’re adding some new software that will automatically select music from your library based on your mood? Weird. For a second I thought they were dropping the price of the PSP, but they’re actually dropping the price of the PSP dev kits by 80%. Hopefully that adds some more games in the future. The PSP Go will be $250. Ouch! that’s $80 more than the existing PSP. Tough sell for existing PSP owners.
Polyphony is on stage announcing Gran Turismo for PSP. Is this the same game that was announced…5 years ago? I’m really not interested in racing sims, so it’s not much to me. Blah blah 800 cars, etc.
Kojima is on stage now. But he’s talking about Metal Gear on PSP rather than the game he showed for 360. Metal Gear: Sleepwalker? No Peacewalker. It takes place in Costa Rica in the 1970s and will be developed by the main MGS4 development team. He stresses that it’s not a half-assed side story like all the other Metal Gear PSP games.
So one hour into the conference and I think they have shown 4 games? Too much talking. OK, video montage with lots of games. Little Big Planet, Jak and Daxter, Dissidia, some truck racing game, Metal Gear, some game I can’t identify where a guy with a fancy mustache fights a giant bug/dinasaur, Soul Caliber, an anime-looking game, a tile-based SRPG. Madden, Tiger Woods, tennis, unidentified JPRG, anime golf game, something with lightsabers, a game with guinea pigs (alert Zach), another football game, and Rock Band. I might have missed a few.
50 more titles coming to the Playstation store on PSN, including Final Fantasy 7 today (maybe I’ll buy that). Uh oh, Playstation HOME on screen. I don’t know a single person who actually likes Home. This music video is not convincing me.
OK, finally we’re getting to the meat of the PS3 presentation. The first part of the Sony presentation was as long as the entire Nintendo conference. Lots of games on a reel that I’m not going to bother listing. It’s a really long reel. Tough to say how many of these games are PS3 exclusives and how many will also be on 360.
New exclusive game from Rockstar called Agent. Tretton says that Agent will have the same impact as GTA…not likely. Next up, Assassin’s Creed 2 unveiling. This may have been leaked before, but I wasn’t paying attention. This game takes place in the Italian Renaissance. Nice. It turns out that Da Vinci was like the Q of Jame Bond, only for assassins. Regardless, the game world looks pretty good. There were a lot of things that looked rough about the first Assassin’s Creed, so if they can improve upon them, I might check this game out.
We get a new video of Final Fantasy XIII. This one is in English and a lot of new footage, unlike what was shown at the Xbox conference. They show some exploration in more lush areas that look better than the stuff available in the demo. Still coming in 2010. Holy crap, first footage of Final Fantasy XIV? In 2010?? And exclusive to PS3! Well this may be my motivation to buy the PS3. Tough to tell too much about the game from the short trailer, but the teaser at the end calls it a new ‘online’ epic. Does that mean this is an MMO like FFXI? If so, big disappointment.
Nervous-looking Sony engineer comes on to show off a new Sony motion controller. Controller or sex toy? It looks a lot like the latter. He claims that it surpasses other motion controllers. This guy seems really nervous. The sex toy design is ‘just an engineering sample and will change’. The tech looks better than WiiMotion Plus. The guy is having a really hard time hitting the tennis ball with his racket, so it changes from racket to bat to sword to stop sign. The tech looks like it works pretty much perfectly. Engineer claims ’sub-millimeter accuracy’. Now he’s drawing with it. The precision looks really good. This is the sort of demo I wanted to see from Nintendo for WiiMotion Plus. They also have archery, and it looks a little better than the WM+ archery. Will launch in Spring 2010.
ModNation Racers, an original new title from Sony’s Play-Create-Share initiative (that brought Little Big Planet). It’s an un-original kart-racing game based on user-generated content. Everyone has user-generated content this year.
Finally, Trico is here (called The Last Guardian)! Third in the trilogy that included the awesome Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Wait, this looks just like the leaked trailer from a few weeks ago :( Different music and slightly different costume for the main character, but otherwise exactly the same. Sony has really been hurt by these leaks.
Now a teaser of Gran Turismo 5. Always with the teasers, never with the actual game releases. Lets see if it can do anything to answer Forza 3…well I guess I wasn’t really paying attention during the Forza 3 demo. Still no release date for GT5.
God of War 3 on display now. Live demo of the first 3 minutes. Final chapter in the GoW trilogy. Why is everything a trilogy? If Star Wars had been a quadrilogy, would everything be quadrilogies? Yep, this game looks like a GoW game. Slightly prettier version of GoW2. Kratos is fighting in the foreground while Helios and a Titan fight in the background in a very epic fashion. This game has amazing boss battles as usual. March 2010? I thought this game was coming out this year for sure.
And the final conference is over. Pretty good overall, but they really should have shortened it up. Remove a lot of the talking and the PS2 section and it would have been a lot tighter. PSP Go was a big disappointment since all of its information was leaked ahead of time, with the exception of the price, which was disappointingly high. The Sony motion controller tech demo was cool and what they showed was better than what Nintendo showed of WM+, however it seems like it will be a long way off since they are still playing around with engineering samples. While it looked a little more game-like than Microsoft’s Natal, it didn’t really seem to offer anything new, other than more precise control, whereas Natal has the possibility for completely new experiences. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’m really on board with any of the 3 motion controllers, since I still enjoy using a standard controller for the majority of games.
On a game front, I think Sony showed off the most games I’m interested in out of any of the conferences, but their impact was blunted by the fact that almost all of the stuff leaked ahead of time. The Uncharted and Last Guardian footage would have been really amazing if this was the first time I had seen it.
And with that, I will take a rest take in the remainder of the E3 news in text form.