PS3

• Resistance 2 - Sony's big focus this time around. Unfortunately, to me, it just looks like more of the same stuff. It's a shooter. There are aliens. Big aliens. Who cares?
• Little Big Planet - Now a suitable replacement for Powerpoint! Sony's usual "HERE HAVE SOME NUMBERS" section was presented via a Little Big Planet level. It was neat, but I just don't see how it'll be fun.
• Greatest Hits: They're $29.99 . . but, if you have a PS3 you probably already have all these games. Motorstorm, Resistance, Warhawk, COD 3, Fight Night, NFS: Carbon, Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six Vegas, Oblivion, Ninja Gaiden Sigma.
• YET ANOTHER FUCKING SKU. New 80Gb model coming in September, identical to the 40Gb model but with a larger hard drive. Sorry guys, still don't have it right. We need backwards compatibility, Wifi, and a user-upgradable hard drive. Give us that at $300 - or hell even $350 - and we'll consider it.
• God of War 3, no surprise whatsoever. No gameplay, just a trailer. Still quite a ways off.
• Infamous. Superhero sandbox, reminds me of Crackdown, but moderately less goofy. Spring 2009.
• Hilariously named "Massive Action Game", large-scale multiplayer shooter, supports up to 256 players, character growth, ongoing campaigns, squad-based combat, PS3 exclusive. You know, like Planetside, but hopefully not terrible.

PS2

• LOL 130 TITLES COMING THIS YEAR, CONSISTING OF NOTHING BUT EXCITING SHOVELWARE AND LOW-RES PORTS!
• STILL MORE SKUs! Lego Batman Bundle coming later this year for $199, features a PS2, Lego Batman, and one of the Justice League DVDs. Who the hell is still buying the PS2 at retail?

PSN

• Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty - $14.95 short sequel to R&C Future.
• lol trophies lol
• Gran Turismo TV - Racing videos. From PSN. We don't have Gran Turismo 5 for you yet, but we DO have a trip to the Ferrari plant hosted by one of the guys responsible for GT! That's . . sorta the same, right?
• HOME IS SERIOUSLY COMING GUYS OK. REALLY. SERIOUSLY. IT'S GOING TO BE AWESOME. WE MEAN IT. PLEASE DON'T LEAVE US.
• Video content: Like XBL, you've got movies, TV, etc. HD, SD, rental options, streaming preview, tons of stuff. Not as amazing as Netflix integration but the content is portable. You can take anything you get from the PSN Video Store and transfer it to a PSP.

PSP

• Ratchet & Clank pack, $199, includes Ratchet & Clank Size Matters, 1Gb Memory Stick, PSN voucher for Echochrome, and comedy-option UMD of National Treasure 2.
• Resistance Retribution - Third-person over-the-shoulder portable Resistance, developed by Bend Studios
• Also coming: Force Unleashed, Madden 09, Loco Roco 2, Super Stardust Portable, Patapon 2, etc.

Non-Game PS3 Stuff

• PS3 Branded Youtube
• "Life With PS3" coming later this month. Some kind of . . news . . thing? I don't know, Tretton didn't really explain it.

SOE! HEY GUYS, REMEMBER SOE?!?!

• DC Universe Online - PC/PS3. BIZARRO AM LOVING THIS INNOVATIVE GAME.

Conference Shockers

• No showing from Square Enix
• Only 15 seconds of Killzone 2

So . . . it looks like we're down to three omni-platform super-developer/publishers now. In one corner we have EA, the only company allowed to make sports games, and who will be making sports games with tiny little incremental upgrades every year until the end of time. They also have a stranglehold on the cross-promotional branded shovelware market, and have lately been bolstering their army of developers by buying-up companies like Bioware/Pandemic.

In the next corner we have the newly-formed Activision Blizzard. Activision on their own is already in the middle of a record season thanks to Guitar Hero 3, Call of Duty 4 and Tony Hawk 39, and as for Blizzard, well, Blizzard is always in the middle of a record season thanks to having the MMO industry by the balls. Normally when a company I like (such as Blizzard) gets gobbled up in a large merger like this I get worried, but in this case I'm not concerned at all. I'm pretty sure everyone involved knows Blizzard knows full well how to make mountains of cash without any intervention from whoever their corporate masters are this week. Furthermore, I'm rather sure everyone involved knows not to try and mess with Blizzard's practices.

In the last corner we've got Ubisoft. . . . but really, in light of this merger, Ubisoft is looking kinda weak. I mean, they've only got a tiny fraction of the licenses either EA or Activision Blizzard have rights to, and have only 3 or 4 studios compared to the jillions EA and Activision Blizzard have.

I'd watch your back, Ubisoft. Looks like you might be next.

Out of nowhere, EA has decided that it would be super neat if they went ahead and bought-out Bioware and Pandemic, to build upon their game-development Empire of Doom. If they were another less-established pair of independent developers, sure, this would be pretty decent news, since it would mean stable funding and a guaranteed publisher for whatever projects they come up with.

. . . but this is Bioware and Pandemic. When was the last time either of them had a hard time getting a publisher? And when was the last time EA bought out a developer and then let it retain its unique culture? Look at what's left of Maxis. Look at what's left of Westwood. Sure, it might turn out ok in the end, but the odds are stacked against them. Lets just hope we don't end up with MASS EFFECT '09 w/EA TRAXX.

In one month, on 1 SEP 2007, EA will drop online support for the following games on the following platforms.

All versions up through 2006 for the following series on all platforms but PS3:

• Arena Football
• FIFA Soccer
• FIFA World Cup
• Madden NFL
• NCAA Baseball
• NASCAR
• NBA Live
• NCAA Football
• NFL Head Coach
• NHL
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour

Also getting the axe on September 1st are:

• Fight Night Round 3 (PSP/Xbox only, not 360 or PS3)
• Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects (PS2/Xbox only)

And then, two months later on 1 NOV 2007, even more games get dropped:

• Burnout Revenge (PS2/Xbox)
• Need for Speed Underground (PS2)
• Need for Speed Underground 2 (PS2/PC)
• Need for Speed Most Wanted (PSP/Xbox)

Good job, EA! Now people will be forced to buy your 2008 lineup! Brilliant and respectful way to treat your customers.

Source: TGDaily

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.

No further orders on anything will be taken. All un-filled purchases will be cancelled. Everything will be refunded.

In their going-away-notice, Lik-Sang had this to say:

"Sony have failed to disclose to the London High Court that not only the world wide gaming community in more than 100 countries relied on Lik-Sang for their gaming needs, but also Sony Europe's very own top directors repeatedly got their Sony PSP hard or software imports in nicely packed Lik-Sang parcels with free Lik-Sang Mugs or Lik-Sang Badge Holders, starting just two days after Japan's official release, as early as 14th of December 2004 (more than nine months earlier than the legal action).

The list of PSP related Sony Europe orders reads like the who's who of the videogames industry, and includes Ray Maguire (Managing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Alan Duncan (UK Marketing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Chris Sorrell (Creative Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Rob Parkin (Development Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited), just to name a few."

While I'm not directly impacted by this, as I have no presently outstanding orders with Lik-Sang, and nothing I was itching to import at the moment, I'm still saddened by losing such a valuable source of import products. My Navy Blue DS Lite was supplied by Lik-Sang, and even though I ordered it stupidly late, they managed to get it across the world and to my doorstep just in time for me to take it to E3 2006. I enjoyed the service I got from Lik-Sang, and it sucks for them to get shut down in such a manner.

So, Europe, Sony has successfully saved you from yourselves. You will no longer have to worry about playing a wide variety of PSP games when the rest of the world gets to, or worry whatsoever about picking up a PS3 until 2007. And those of us elsewhere in the world have one less quality online retailer. THANKS, SONY!

The Tokyo Game Show took place last week, and during Sony's keynote, Ken Kutaragi dropped two last-minute changes. First item: Upgrade. HDMI is in now, for real, on both models of PS3. No, you probably don't have a TV that supports HDMI yet, but it's nice to know that Sony is preparing for the long haul, expecting that the PS3 is going to be around long enough that HDMI might be useful within it's lifetime. Second item: Price Drop. The 20 GB model was slated to ship for 62,790¥. That price has been dropped to 49,980¥, a price drop of around $110.

The price drop appears to be an attempt to closely match the price of the Xbox 360 Core System + HD-DVD addon (which will run 48,800¥ when they're both released in November). The price of the HD-DVD addon hasn't been announced yet for the States, so we can't really come up with an estimate combo price Sony might try to drop it near here. Adding HDMI to the 20GB US model seems logical enough, since it wouldn't make sense for Sony to produce three different models of PS3. If a price drop is coming here, Sony better announce it soon.

Ok, with that good news out of the way, time for some weird stuff. First, the undisputed most hilarious PS3 rumor I have heard to date: There will be two versions of Gran Turismo HD, and one will ship with no actual content. You heard me. No cars, no tracks, no nothing. And on top of that the game is just a 1080p port of GT4. The idea is instead to go for the long-ago-foretold micro-transaction worst-case-scenario. All content for the game will be bought online, one piece at a time. This is purely extrapolation based on the epic amount of content in GT4 and the preliminary prices mentioned in a few reviews, but the estimated total cost to get all available content is anywhere between $426 and $950, probably somewhere closer to $750. All for a port. No actually new content. Is it true? Is it really going to happen? Does Sony really think this kind of stuff will fly? Probably not, but you have to admit that it's the kind of crazy that completely falls in line with the kind of stuff Sony has been spouting off recently. As insane as it sounds, I can't consider anything "beyond" Sony at this point.

And in even more weird news, apparently Sony had a "tech demo" showcasing the PSP / PS3 interaction at TGS 2006. It was less than convincing. Apparently the "tech demo" consisted of a PS3 and a PSP and a model who pointed at them. The PSP was pre-loaded with a demo of Loco Roco and RIIIIIIIIIDGE RACER. . . and that was it. A tech demo showing interaction with . . no actual interaction. Great job, guys. Just great. I want to know who Sony thought would be impressed by this. And if the answer is "no one", then why display it at all?

Thanks, Sony! Keep up the good work!

Bad Music.

12 licensed tracks for the forthcoming PSP sequel to the only good PSP game Lumines have been announced. Here we go:

Beck - "Black Tambourine"
Black Eyed Peas - "Pump It"
Chemical Brothers - "Star Guitar"
Fatboy Slim - "Gangster Trippin'"
The Go! Team - "Bottle Rocket"
Gwen Stefani - "Hollaback Girl"
Hoobastank - "Born to Lead"
Junior Senior - "Take My Time"
Missy Elliott - "Lose Control"
New Order - TBD
Junkie XL - "Breezer"
Stigmato Inc - "Reality Check"

Now, sure, not every game involving music can have a stellar track list, in fact even my two favourite music-involved games have tracks I wouldn't mind never hearing again, but shit, Hollaback Girl? Are they serious? They can't be serious.

I really should have seen this coming, what with the little snippets of gameplay we saw of Lumines 2 at E3, but I just didn't expect it to be this bad.

It should be noted that this news comes only in reference to the title "Lumines 2". Lumines 2 is not the only Lumines title on the horizon, as we still have the release "Lumines Plus" coming to the PS2 in October. Everything I've seen about Lumines Plus is that it's more or less a direct port from the PSP but with more skins, but since it's being developed by the same devs responsible for localizing Lumines 2, anything can happen.

Source: 1up

Examine this wonderful quote from a recent interview LEC's President Jim Ward had with MCV, a UK Gaming Mag:

“There’s an attitude in this industry that says in order to make a great game, it takes whatever time it takes and it takes whatever money it takes, and that that’s okay,” he claimed. “Well it’s not okay – it’s wrong. It’s not okay in other entertainment businesses. In other businesses it’s big trouble.”

Guess what, Jim: videogames aren't like other forms of media. If you rush a movie by a couple months you're not going to risk releasing it with a bug that shuts off movie theater projectors 15 minutes in. You're not going to have to cut the entire ending because you didn't have time to get it to work. With videogames, even the smallest overlooked bug due to rushing can be the difference between "buy it at release" and "don't buy it at all because it's a broken piece of crap that's going to require seventeen patches to be playable".

Now, no one is expecting every game ever to be entirely free of bugs at release, hell, several of my favourite games of the past few years have had some quite major bugs at release, but when you have a corporate mentality of "RAR! DEADLINE SLIPPAGE IS RUINING THE INDUSTRY! RUSH FASTER!", your games are going to have more bugs and more severe bugs.

Look at KOTOR and KOTOR 2. LOOK AT THEM. Look at ANYTHING ANYONE SAID ABOUT BOTH GAMES. KOTOR wasn't rushed too horribly. It had bugs, but it was an overall amazing game. KOTOR 2 was rushed like mad to get it out for Xbox in time for the 2004 holiday season. It was impossible to go ten minutes in the game without running into some kind of glitch (ranging in severity from "depressing but benign" to "gamebreakingly horrible") or awkward poorly-designed bodged-together quest element due to the devs trying desperately to salvage all the cut content. The result was a confused and disjointed game that paled in comparison to its predecessor. It all made sense once the PC version was released and we could finally see all the remnants of the hastily cut content, including the entire ending of the game.

Luckily (but also sadly), there's only one game coming from LEC in the near future that I remotely care about: Lego Star Wars 2. Good news: it looked quite far along at E3, and we're still three months away from release. Bad news: it's got a hard release deadline that coincides with the re-re-re-re-re-re-release of the Original Trilogy DVDs. However, we know the dev team responsible for the Lego Star Wars games has had to deal with LEC's crazy hard deadlines in the past, with Lego Star Wars being released vaguely in conjunction with Episode III's theatrical release. So it might turn out ok, despite Mr Ward's attempts to rush all his games into the ground.

The real problem here is that deadlines are one of those things that you can't take to either extreme. If you enforce unflinching drop-dead dates like the one that was imposed on KOTOR 2, you end up with a product full of bugs and failed potential. If you take an absolute "when it's done" approach, you end up with Duke Nukem Forever. To produce good games you have to take the middle road. Deadlines are great, but shipping an unfinished game to make it hit an arbitrary deadline is ridiculous. I know LEC's business model in recent years has been based entirely around milking Star Wars license tie-ins, but I seriously question the value of getting a mediocre or bad game out "on time" vs a highly polished game out "slightly late".

Squeenix's Press conference this year was largely about two things: release dates of known projects and Final Fantasy XIII. There were a couple other new product announcements, but largely it was about known stuff and FF13. So lets run down the list.

MANA SERIES

• Children of Mana - DS - Summer/Fall 2006 - Classic top-down 2D Mana game.
• Dawn of Mana - PS2 - Release TBA - Fully 3D game, new for the Mana series.

FF PORTS

• FFIII - DS - September 2006 - First time FF3 will show up stateside. The real FF3.
• FFV - GBA - Late 2006 - Still just a straight port.
• FFVI - GBA - Late 2006 - Also still just a straight port, but should be awesome regardless.

VALKYRIE PROFILE PORTS

• Valkyrie Profile - PSP - 18 JUN 2006
• Valkyrie Profile 2 - PS2 - September 2006

FF12

• FFXII - PS2 - October 2006 - Localization is coming along very nicely. They went all-out on high quality voice actors.

DRAGON QUEST

• Rocket Slime - DS - September 2006 - Might be a port of Slime MoriMori Dragon Quest?
• Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors - Wii - Launch title for the Wii. Hilariously long title, wouldn't be surprised if that changes.

MOBILE STUFF

• Squeenix is jumping head-first into the mobile market. They're pushing not only a ton of Final Fantasy-based mobile games, but also leveraging their acquisition of Taito to get classic Taito games out on mobile platforms. Will anyone care? Time will tell. Even if no one cares, that probably won't stop them, because they seem REALLY committed to phone gaming.

FF: CRYSTAL CHRONICLES

• Ring of Fates - DS - Just Starting Development - It'll be a Crystal Chronicles game, with 4 player wireless multiplayer, and they promise to make it have a worthwhile single player story.
• Crystal Bearers - Wii - Just Starting Development

COMPILATION OF FF7

• Dirge of Cerberus - PS2 - 22 AUG 2006 - New levels / features are being added for the stateside release. hopefully some of those additions include "make the game fun".
• Before Crisis - Phones - "Soon" - Even the Turks can't make mobile phone games attractive. Think about this, Squeenix. Please think about this.
• Crisis Core - PSP - Date TBA - Crisis Core is a Zack / Cloud / Sephiroth game, which I know nothing about.
• After these, FF7 is done. Seriously. Please stop. Please. Now.

FINAL FANTASY 13 [The main event!]

• For reasons I apparently don't "get", they're making three FFXIII games. Here they are:
• FFXIII - PS3 - Core game, based in a far-future setting where "magic and technology have merged and evolved" [I suggest we call this combination "Magitek", and perhaps have it powered by "Espers"]. It's being made by the FFX team, with the director from FFX-2. Apparently they were doing it for PS2, then they paused to make the FF7 PS3 tech demo. After that they threw out everything and made what we've seen of FF13 from scratch, over the past year.
• Versus XIII - PS3 - Not a whole lot is known about this, except that Tetsuya Nomura is taking the Kingdom Hearts team, pairing them with the Advent Children team, and making a very pretty touchy-feely game about "bonding". I think we should expect zippers. So many zippers.
• Agito XIII - Mobile Phones - ACES, ANOTHER SQUEENIX MOBILE PHONE GAME!
• Squeenix is calling the FF13 project as a whole the "Fabula Nova Crystallis" project, Latin for "The new tale of the crystal". Squeenix apparently has some kind of massive hardon for Latin as of late.
• The really weird thing about this project is that none of the games - as far as they've told us - are in the same world. It's not going to be like Compilation of FF7, where there's like, 38 games all in the same closely-knit deeply involved world. Instead, they're looking to build a whole new Final Fantasy "Mythology", and then tie the games together with that. Expect confusion once both FFXIII and Versus XIII are both on sale.

So . . it looks like a lot, and from one company it is, but these are largely all products we knew were in development. We just have a bunch of dates now. And as the development of the projects we knew of winds down, new projects get announced. We'll be looking for more in-depth stuff about all these projects once the expo actually starts, and will be reporting on what we find worth talking about.

Now . . On to Nintendo and Microsoft . . .