You NEED this.

HD Trailer: BeyondUnreal, 3D Downloads, FileFront
SD Trailer: YouTube

BeyondUnreal has the box art & screenshots.

The guys from Epic also further re-re-re-confirmed last night that yes, there will be a simultaneous PC and PS3 release, the only thing their "exclusivity" agreement with Sony prevents is the 360 release from occurring this year.

Again, as we announced yesterday, UT3 is slated for release in November 2007. No specific date yet, but we'll obviously get that (and a demo!) relatively soon.

So lets dive right in:

PS2: Sony reminded us that the PS2 does exist, and they are still totally supporting it! And then they promptly said "Oh but we aren't talking about PS2 stuff today." Great job, Sony.

PSP Hardware: The $169.99 price drop apparently went well for them, and sales are up, but they're still nowhere near competing with Nintendo in the handheld market, or in any market really. So they've squeezed out the PSP remake. And what amazing new features does it have? Well, it looks almost identical to the old one, but it's 33% lighter and 19% slimmer than the old one, so it feels different. It also has a better battery (but they're not quantifying that one), and comes in "new" colors. What new colors? "Piano Black" (which sounds a lot like "black" to me) and "White Silver" (which sounds a lot like "white" to me). Very new, right? The new PSP also has the ability to hook up to some sort of standard video output (probably component), so you can watch your hilariously compressed videos and PS1-quality game graphics on your HDTV.

There's also bundles, they'll be sold starting in September in a $199 bundle that comes with one of the new PSPs, a Jak game, a Family Guy UMD collection (gotta move them UMDs!), and a large capacity memory stick. Additionally, there'll be a special goofy Star Wars branded new PSP which is just a white one with Vader on the back, which comes with a new exclusive Battlefront sequel. Oh, and it was introduced by Chewbacca. I am not making this up.

Why did they make this new model? Why didn't they do something major about size or add some onboard memory? Why did they make none of the changes anyone wanted except for increased battery life? What will happen to the price of the old PSPs? No one knows. It is a mystery.

PSP Software: Nothing incredibly shocking was shown in the PSP software montages. It's nice to see that stuff is still coming, despite how far behind the DS the PSP is lagging. Konami is still working on the Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles, Square Enix is still working on the Final Fantasy Tactics port, Silent Hill: Origins is still coming, and so on.

PS3 Hardware: Whoops, our big E3 surprise was let out of the bag thanks to Circuit City and Target. And a lot of people still don't think it was that big of a deal in the first place. Whoops! The bits about PS3 hardware completely reaffirmed the stuff I talked about in the PS3 drop announcement article, specifically that the 20Gb PS3 is dead to Sony. They're not dropping the price on that. That SKU is irrelevant. Unfortunately for Sony, a 20 or 40Gb PS3 priced at $300 or maybe even $350 would fly off the shelves, too bad they're still hung up on this theoretical huge base of users who have $600 to drop on consoles.

Third-Party PS3 Software: I swear, one of the montages they did was the exact same lineup shown in another montage from last night's Microsoft conference. Where there were exclusives, though, there were some big exclusives. Epic was a rather huge shocker. Somehow, despite how deep in bed Epic Games is with Microsoft, what with Gears of War and all the shiny new Live for Windows integration they're doing for the Unreal 3 Engine announced last night, Sony managed to score Unreal Tournament 3 as a time-limited console exclusive. Now, mind, that's "exclusive to this console, compared to other consoles". UT3 will still be launching simultaneously on PC and PS3. And the PS3 version will supposedly be able to benefit from mods developed for the PC version, by being able to download them via PSN. This announcement also got us an almost-release-date for UT3: November 2007. Oh, by the way, it looks great.

Hideo Kojima also came out to show off the latest real-time in-engine trailer of Metal Gear Solid 4, complete with real English voice acting. It was pretty outstanding, watch it for yourself. Sadly, Kojima mentioned that MGS4 is the end. Last Metal Gear game. Last game for Snake. Last game for Kojima. Whether he'll actually follow through with this is yet to be seen. MGS4 is presently slated for "Early 2008".

Finally on Third Party software, Kaz Hirai is still sticking to his guns about the claim that there's going to be 200 new Blu-Ray games this year worldwide, with another 180 coming over PSN, and that 120 of those 200 Blu-Ray games would be coming to the US. So where are they all!?!? Why have they not been shown to us? Why weren't you featuring them during this press conference?

First-Party PS3 Software: Heavenly Sword still looks amazing. Uncharted still looks amazing. LittleBigPlanet is still completely uninteresting to me, someone who totally doesn't understand Sony's (or anyone's) attraction to things like Second Life. But really, what everyone came here for was Killzone 2. Sony totally swears that the latest Killzone 2 trailer is fully in-game, completely real-time, and totally not bogus in any way. The problem? I've never heard anyone explain why this is a good game. Same thing for Killzone 1. Same thing for the PSP Killzone. They churn these games out and all I have ever heard is the negative hype. All I've heard is about faked trailers and pre-rendered assets and other similar bullshit.

So with all that said, what do we have? A revamp that wishes it was as good as the DS Lite. A PS3 price drop that's too little, too late, and (in a hilarious turn of events) too early to be a big deal at E3. They've finally got some decent looking exclusives slated for the PS3, but in my opinion, only MGS4, Heavenly Sword and Killzone 2 look like ones that'll be Console Sellers, and what Sony needs so badly right now are some Console Sellers. They need exclusives people care about, not Second Life magical e-treehouse crap like Home. And until Sony realizes this, they're going to have to just enjoy their position down there at #3.

Numbers: Shocking news - Reggie loves his charts & graphs and Nintendo is totally dominating everything when it comes to numbers. The DS now makes up a quarter of the console market, and somehow the GBA is refusing to give up its marketshare. All the while, the DS is still gaining overall marketshare and the Wii is blowing up everywhere. The Wii has been effectively sold out worldwide since it was released. Nintendo is leading in market expansion, blah blah blah old people, girls, etc. Nothing new here, but still, good job Nintendo!

Dates:

• Smash Bros. Brawl - 3 DEC 2007
• Super Mario Galaxy - 12 NOV 2007
• Mario Kart Wii - Q1 2008 (With Online!)

The Zapper: We saw a prototype of the Zapper last year, and it's back, and ready to be released later this year. It'll be sold for $20, and will have some kind of software pack-in (fingers crossed for Duck Hunt Wii). The Delay in release was so they could have games ready for it, and now they've got games. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles was made for the Zapper, as was a port of Sega's Ghost Squad arcade light-gun game, and an upcoming Medal of Honor game from EA, which is slated to have 32 player MP. The Zapper is *not* slated to work well with Metrioid Prime 3, but that's because the Nunchuck is slated to be used for a bunch of weird gestures.

Wii Fit: I . . Still don't quite know what to think here. Nintendo developed a scale peripheral to help them further expand on the fitness training kind of stuff built into Wii Sports. The scale lets them measure balance, weight, BMI, posture, and so on. Based around this new input system they've built this whole new fitness training game, with 40 minigames split up into four main categories: Balance games, Muscle definition, Yoga and Aerobics. Like Brain Age and Wii Sports it tracks your progress over time along with your friends and family members. I guess again, like Brain Age, this is going to be another one of those things that doesn't seem like a game (because I don't think it is), and definitely isn't something anyone was demanding Nintendo to make or even hoping they'd make. But like Brain Age and like the Wii in general, it could very well be one of those things where as soon as you play it it all makes sense and you NEED one.

Tonight's press event was all about games. Microsoft is past fiddling with hardware (maybe), and is seriously focusing on content. And it's not content slated for way out in the distant future, the first big announcement was that all games Microsoft showed will be out in 2007. Except Resident Evil 5, but they specifically said no RE5. More about that later.

For standard 360 games, there was more than I could really list off. At points they were throwing stuff out faster than I can type. Microsoft is largely looking forward to a banner holiday season, thanks to the triple-threat of GTA4, Madden 08 and Halo 3.

One game that got the closest thing to a nailed-down date we've gotten in awhile was Mass Effect, which Microsoft currently has slated for November. Don't have an exact date, but at least a month is more than "eventually".

On the desperately-seeking-to-capture-the-casual-games-market front, Microsoft secured the exclusive rights to the first console port of the apparently wildly popular board game SceneIt. It comes with four can't-believe-it's-not-a-Wiimote wireless buzzers. No date on this one yet, or a price, but really I think anyone who wants SceneIt probably has it already. Then again, people sure do apparently love buying things they already have, so what do I know?

On the EA-presents-sports-games front, the big news here was that starting next week with NCAA Football 08, EA's Sports 08 lineup on the 360 will all be 60FPS. I will believe this when I see it.

They had a ton of news over in XBL land. Slew of new games coming out, many of which are completely new titles. Ones we've heard about previously, like the Wing Commander game I'm still pissed about are still around, but almost everything else was brand new. The highlights from their montage as far as I'm concerned were A new classic-style Bomberman (you know, because Hudson apologized for Act Zero), Sonic 1, Track & Field (seriously), Golden Axe, Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, Marathon: Durandal, and Puzzle Quest. Sonic and Golden Axe are apparently up on Marketplace right now.

I'm slightly confused about the Marathon entry. There were some rumors earlier in the year that the trilogy had been rated by the German equivalent of the ESRB, targeted for the 360, but the montage labeled it as just Marathon: Durandal. That's Marathon 2. What happened to Marathon and Marathon: Infinity? Who knows. Hopefully we'll get this clarified later in the week.

Digital video distribution is apparently a much bigger deal via Live Marketplace than I thought, and to help push that along Microsoft has inked yet another massive deal with Disney and Disney's affiliated studios (like Miramax) to put a ton of their movies online for purchase via XBL Marketplace. In HD. Tonight. Additionally, Microsoft will be expanding Video stuff to Canada and Europe later in the year.

After all that it was time for a bit of PC gaming. Not a ton, though, because PC gaming obviously isn't important enough for Microsoft to spend too much of their time talking about, despite the fact that so many games are dual-platform 360/PC these days. The big news here was ports, specifically Viva Piñata and Gears of War. Gears of War was the real focus, and internet gaming developer superstar CliffyB came out to tell us that yes, we already knew GOW was coming to PC thanks to a leak last week, but we didn't know that it would be coming with a level editor, extra PC-exclusive content, online coop would be intact, Live stuff would be intact, AND it is not going to be Vista exclusive.

This flies in the face of the last remaining excuse Microsoft had as to why both Shadowrun and Halo 2 for PC were Vista exclusive. First they said "DX10! DX10! DX10!" Then it turned out there was no DX10 stuff in either game. Then it was "Oh, we can't do Live stuff on XP, it's too hard to backport!" And now here we are at E3 and Cliffery says it'll all be there on XP. Great job Microsoft, at least you're setting it straight for GOW. Maybe that won't send it straight to the bargain bin like Shadowrun PC and Halo 2 PC.

Additionally, they mentioned that thanks to the work done to get Live stuff from GoW ported over from 360 to PC, Epic Games went ahead and built Live integration into the Unreal 3 Engine, so all future games built with the U3 Engine will be able to easily interact with Live for Windows. So expect to see lots more of Live for Windows as U3 Engine games start getting released.

Before wrapping up, they showed off a couple more games. Like the old GTA4 trailer, with the new bonus dig at Sony that the trailers were all capped off 360 hardware. Plus, as we were told earlier, there will be two installments of GTA4 episodic content that'll be exclusive to the 360, and will be expected to be out by Spring 2008. We also got confirmation that Beautiful Katamari is really coming to the 360, but won't be an exclusive (the other platform is a coin toss, really). Some stuff was shown of Call of Duty 4, and they announced a 360 MP beta that you can sign up for at CharlieOscarDelta.com, assuming you can get it to load. They also showed the first video I can think of for Resident Evil 5, but only showed a tiny snippet of it, the full trailer will be out on July 26th. RE5 came with a big disclaimer that it was the only game they're showing anything of that won't be out this year. But it was so good that they just had to show it off.

The Assassin's Creed demo was . . . a thing. I don't know what was going on there, but it just didn't seem right. As such, I'll wait to talk about it until we get a sane demo of it when they actually seem prepared. Cause I know what they were doing wasn't representative of the game.

And finally, to wrap things up, some Halo. And a new console announcement . . sorta. Coming straight out of the I'm-still-not-certain-what-I-watched department, they started off this last segment of the conference by name-dropping Neill Blomkamp, Peter Jackson and Weta. All people supposedly/maybe working on the still stalled Halo movie. And then what do they show? Some live-action 1-2 minute long Halo 3 promo. Is this what they're doing now that their studio funding has been pulled? It was neat and all, but some answers would be nice here.

After that it was console time. Not being content with extracting $129.99 from rabid Halo fans for the "legendary edition" of Halo 3, or $69.99 for the "limited edition", or $249.99 for a Halo 3 Zune, Microsoft has made a whole bonus 360 model for Halo 3. We don't know the specifics yet, but Bungie says it has an HDMI port. This might make it just a re-painted Elite, or it might make it a completely different model, somewhere between the Elite and the Pro. Or it might be even more of a comedy option, by going beyond the Elite's 120Gb drive. No clue on the price yet, either, but we expect to hear that later.

Then, to wrap things up completely, the new Halo 3 trailer, showing the first single player action. I won't bother trying to explain it. Watch it for yourself in glorious HD thanks to Bungie.

Overall, Microsoft is showing yet again that when it comes to software, they're the ones to beat when it comes to quantity, quality, first-party exclusives, third-party exclusives, third-party non-exclusives, everything. They're not fiddling too much with hardware, at least not like Sony, and it's because they really don't need to right now. The only thing they might consider doing with hardware in the near future is a price drop to mirror Sony's, but they don't need it so desperately that they have to make it right this minute. They still have games, and in a console war, it always comes down to who has the games. Microsoft has shown that they have the games now, and they have a TON of games coming out later this year.

While Nintendo might match the star power of Halo 3 with Smash Bros Brawl or Metroid Prime 3, they don't have the same variety or quantity of titles Microsoft has lined up. And despite all the claims Kaz Hirai & friends over at Sony have made about the 300+ games they're going to have over the next year, I don't see it happening, yet over at Microsoft they've already got it, and are specifically showing us. And don't get me started about the lack of exclusive triple-a games Sony has lined up.

Microsoft has again had a very solid showing. Now it's just time to see if Nintendo or Sony can pull out a miracle similar to what Nintendo did last year. . . and we'll find out in about 10 hours when those press conferences happen. Due to the close proximity of the two conferences later today, I probably won't update between them, but instead do two updates after the Sony conference ends.

"Gee, I sure wish Sony would stop being ridiculous and drop the price of the PS3. You know, so normal people could actually afford the damn thing."

Then it turned to something we flat out expected:

"Aahaaahaaha Sony is getting crushed. They've got to drop the price soon if they want to survive this one.

Then it turned to rumor:

"We hear from 'sources' that Sony is totally really going to drop the price of the PS3 at E3 2007. For reals. We mean it this time."

Then last week retailers let it slip:

"With or without Sony, Starting the weekend of the 21st, Circuit City is going to be selling the 60Gb PS3 for $499. Oh and some Targets are already selling them at this price."

And of course Sony denied it. And then they went back on that and said "Oh ok, you got us."

Starting more or less immediately, Sony will drop the price of the 60Gb PS3 from $599 to $499. The 20Gb model won't change because the 20Gb is dead to Sony. (This might change though, who knows!) A new 80Gb model will be taking the $599 price point. Additionally, this new 80Gb model is going to have Motorstorm as a pack-in.

Why an 80Gb model? Are people out there really filling up their 20 or 60 gig models? Nobody Knows! I guess Sony just really loves that totally goofy $599 price point.

More details are obviously expected to come out later this week at Sony's E3 Press Conference on Wednesday, but really, the big question is going to be "Will Microsoft respond with a 360 price drop?"

An equally big question is "Does this drop save Sony?" Personally, I really don't see them flying off the shelves at $499. However, if retailers decide to drop the old 20Gb model down well into 360 pricing territory, then that might start turning things around. But Sony isn't exactly talking about the 20Gb model anymore. Maybe they'll have something to say on Wednesday.

And, you know, maybe they'll also announce some games someone might remotely care about.