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Sony Displays New PSP, Polished Games At E3
Sony had a lot to prove coming into this event, and kicked off on a high note. The PlayStation 2 is still selling units, and the PSP's numbers are apparently up as well. They followed that with the news of a new version of the PlayStation Portable. It's slimmer, lighter, has a longer battery life, and the ability to connect directly to your television to display video and games. There was a good deal of discussion about upcoming PSP titles, some of which are connected to a PSP bundle. Pushing out the PS3, they show several PlayStation Store titles, included the fascinating-looking Echochrome . Moving onto the Home service they discussed cellphone and website tie-ins to the Home service, as well as the ability to launch games from directly within the Home environment. Referencing the price cut, they reveal sales have already gone up. NCSoft, Epic, and Ubisoft are all referenced as heavy backers of the PlayStation, with a tantalizing statement suggesting that user-created mods for Unreal Tournament will be coming to the console via the Playstation Network. A lengthy Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer and a statement that the game is only for the PS3 (still to be determined), due early in 2008, cap off the third-party section. First-party titles show all of the highlights of Sony's portfolio with the LittleBigPlanet trailer emphasizing creation rather than play, and their Heavenly Sword highlight showcasing the game's story for the first time. A new sandbox title with a morality component was announced, InFamous, as was a new chapter in the Gran Turismo series. The press conference wrapped with a gripping trailer for Killzone 2, completely running in real-time.
I hope it's running in real real-time and not just real time like the previous trailer at last year's E3. Because as real as time was at the time, the demo wasn't very real, just based on what they believed would be real.. at the time.
Of the 3 presentations it was by far the most interesting.
Engadget has the photos. It doesn't look that much thinner to me.
And I'm pissed that I can only play Zelda on Nintendo products and Halo on Microsoft products...
Will it blend?
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
I think you misposted -- you should be at http://blog.us.playstation.com/
I think that this year's E3 was exactly what Sony needed last year. Overall I think they showed off plenty of eye candy and a few exclusives that should help to drive sales in the coming months. The only problem is that many of these key games (MGS4 in particular) won't be coming until after the holiday season. A lot of the media and public opinion is that Sony is failing and a big holiday season for them would help to dispell some of those doubts.
What I liked most about their conference is that they focused on showcasing the games coming out on their system instead of talking about sales figures and statistics (After watching the first fifteen minutes of the Nintendo conference, I was about ready for a nap). I suppose most of that stems from not having a lot of good news on that front. I don't mind a little bit of business, but I'm really more interested in seeing the games.
Depending on how things turn out over the next few months and other games that Sony manages to add to the PS3, I might almost consider buying one now that they've dropped the price a little bit. Hopefully I'll get to learn a little more about some of the games being released before the holidays to see if it's worth purchasing one of them. It also seems as though they've done a lot to revitalize the PSP, which is also a lot more appealing.
Overall I think that they should've given me a more compelling reason to puchase one of these during the holiday season or right now, but I think with the recent price drop and some of the good news from E3 that sales should pick up a little in the following weeks. If nothing else at least Sony has managed to pull its head out of its ass and get back on the right track. They still might end up like Nintendo during the GameCube era where they didn't receive a lot of support. They've still got a lot of leg work to prove to the rest of the world that they're a major contender.
The bundle with the PSP doesn't contain any UMD movies; it comes with the Family Guy Freakin' Sweet Collection, which is just five episodes (mind you, the best five episodes of the first three seasons.) It also comes with Daxter and a 1 GB memory stick.
The most exciting announcement about the entire conference for me was the new PSP's TV-out feature. I was disappointed that it didn't have TV-out on release several years ago, and I am very excited about it now. It's finally like a portable console, and the portability is finally a reason to actually buy UMD content. It's one of the things that is making me consider getting one someday, and the $199 bundle does seem like a great deal.
Also, Echochrome looks totally awesome. If I don't play that game soon, I think I might die.
Did anyone else notice that everything that looked amazing had 2008 attached to it? And everything that looked with par with the 360 had 2007 attached to it?
I mean its great they finally showed off some potential but slapping 2008 on it all doesn't give me much confidence to go out and buy the console today or even this holiday season.
I think it gives them some credibility when they talk about their ten year product cycle for the PS3. If the PS2 is still receiving new games and versions of games that aren't showing up on the previous generation consoles of their competitors they can point to this and how they stand behind their product. The fact that the PS2 is outselling all other consoles short of the Wii and still has content being developed for it is amazing considering that we're over a year into the next generation.
I think you're just muck racking and naysaying, trying to proclaim the death of Sony when you don't have anything of real substance. If you want to suggest that Sony is failing at least offer something more than a shot at the success and continued viability of the PS2 as a platform.
I can hear the 360 brigade and MS fan boys warming up on this thread. whooosh.
I have a PS3, I got it on day one, I love it, Resistance is a fabulous game.
Yes there are not as many games, yes it costs more - but for fucks sake it's a blu-ray player! not some piddly DVD player. At the time I got the PS3 I could not get a blu-ray player for that money. I like the machine, the geek in me admires the Cell technology. And I feel that strongly that Sony are getting a rough ride from a bunch a script kiddies and annoying teenagers. There I said it.
Sony are trying to run a business, not gain a foothold with massive loss making subsidies and oppressive leverage. I'm not saying that what MS is doing is wrong after all they are trying to run a business - but that does not mean I admire them for their business tactics.
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Having said that, in a few months I'll be getting a 360 for Halo 3, which looks to be a fabulous game!
Sales are up after a price drop!
So. The real question is this: How much higher will they be a month or so AFTER the price drop?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Title says all, unless you don't know what operator != means.
Have you ever actually watched a movie on your PSP?
I've watched hundred of hours of movies and TV shows on my PSP.
Air travel + PSP + movies (on a memory stick) = Heaven.
No need for a laptop in your carryon means you can "sail" through security. The instant on/off is wonderful as well. You can use it while actually standing in line. One 4Gig stick will hold an entire season of a television show plus a movie or two.
You get good battery life (a little under three hours) because it's not hitting the UMD, but for longer flights you can get: a USB battery box and a USB charging cable. It will suck down batteries (but this setup allows the brightest screen mode) but work like a charm. I went through 16 AA's on a 24 hour flight once.
Oh yeah, I also rest it on the treadmill in front of me while running. I've lost 10 pounds when I never had the patience before. No physical media = no skipping.
I just kick myself for waiting a year to get one. It is by far the best video player available and Sony has marketed it INCREDIBLY poorly.
Never played a UMD though. Those are a waste of money IMO.
The thing that excites me as a gamer, is that Sony seems to have embraced the idea of user generated content - from the ability to use user created levels in UT, to being able to create an share user generated levels in Little Big Planet, basically a cushy physics simulator.
In the link that led to talking about user generated content being less certain on the 360, that's because it would have to go through Live and Microsoft still has not worked out what they want to do there. They may yet also allow substantial user content, they just haven't done so to date with the fervor Sony has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, they had a good show. But keep your frickin' pants on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exK-gV7yaE oh my. oh my.
.. And I thought Resistance looked good. Dribble.
Bash Sony = Mod Up
Praise Wii = Mod Up
Baseless comments are getting too much attention. People need to stick to the moderator guidelines or stop modding up groupthink style.
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
I Wonder, why is NCsoft a "heavy backer" for the PS3? So far they've mostly released MMORPGs for the PC...
Sony impressed me and also failed to impress me.
PS3: Impressive. I'm glad to see they're able to showcase a lot of high class games as well as a number that are reaching out to a broader crowd. Things may take off for this system yet, though I doubt its possible for it to gain enough momentum to dominate this generation. It would at least break previous precidents if it did.
PSP: Unimpressive. I feel like Sony is trying to copy the DS Lite without understanding why the DS Lite did well. The DS Phat's key dimensional problem was its depth. There were a number of pockets incapable of holding one, and to boot it was relatively heavy. The DS Lite improved on all of these, while looking simultaneously much sleeker. The new PSP is hard to distinguish from its predecessor, which was sleek to begin with. I'll be very surprised is this causes any long-term changes in PSP sales.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
"But because it's Sony, he's modded down and called an astroturfer."
Look at his post history. Nothing but repackaged Sony press releases.
The MGS4 trailer is most definitely the in-game engine. No doubt about it whatsoever. And I'd reckon it's the engine actually running in realtime, too - do you reckon the RSX (basically a 7800 GT, so we have a very good idea of its performance) could do that in realtime? I do.
... gah, what'd I just say?! ... *sigh* My wallet is going to hate me for even saying that in its presence... wake me when they announce a bigger price drop.
It's not farfetched at all; it's good, with excellent particles and depth of field. I like the shaders on the tarps. And it's got all the little flaws I spot with my 7-series card all the time, and overall the graphics quality reminds me very greatly of MGS3, just in a higher resolution, with higher framerates.
If you have any doubts as to whether it's realtime, just look at the shadows on the beige before Snake lines up his first shot at Liquid. They match the usual shadow artefacts I see on my 7900 GTX precisely; decimated because the shadow buffer resolution is too low, then interpolated via texture filtering. Yup, that'll be real-time.
Besides, Kojima just doesn't pull stunts like that. He's not a dog-and-pony-show kind of guy, and he prefers polygon demos to FMV, because it doesn't seem out of place with the rest of the game's visuals.
Anyway, it looks like a damn good game from what we've seen. Even if Snake's starting to look like his dad. And is that Raiden and Vamp?
I might buy a PS3 for it-
Recently, I've found that the real value of the PSP is in its non-UMD power.... namely, being able to emulate the NES, the Playstation and everything inbetween :P
The movie thing is cool too, I guess... but emulating actually good games makes up for the lack of such titles in UMD format.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
The first and more important fact is that the hardware is powerful enough on both the 360 and the PS3 that you can get more payback for good artistic direction and heavy technical investment than ever before. The 360 and the PS3 will both respond very nicely to extravagantly expensive development budgets, and the skill of the developers and artists working on the average game will probably make much more difference in the quality of the results than any differences between the hardware will.
That said, and while the 360's graphics chip is probably superior to the PS3's, the PS3 was designed to have the Cell and RSX working together in a very close fashion. Killzone 2 is being developed with a deferred renderer, in which the Cell can overlay lighting calculations on top of the rendered polygons, rather than having all of that be always done with the RSX. Lair is using the Cell to do dynamic winnowing down of the in-game geometry to present only the essential data to RSX, while continuing to animate everything with high fidelity. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is using Cell to do very ambitious dynamic animation blending on the main characters.
Between Cell and RSX, you can do awful lot on PS3, but you have to develop the games for it, and the kind of distributed programming required to harness 8 distributed processing cores (1 PPU, 6 SPU, 1 RSX) takes a lot of time and money to do, and straightforward ports from 360-style DirectX games won't necessarily show what the PS3 can really do to best advantage.
The PS3 has another advantage with the Blu-Ray disc, as it has over 5 times more on-disc storage than the 360 has (though at the cost of a reduced maximum transfer speed). That can help allow for more extravagant level budgets, especially in titles that support streaming audio and graphics loading.
The bottom line is, we've not begun to see the best of what either the 360 or the PS3 will be capable of. The good news is that Sony is making a big enough push that they might get enough purchasers of their console that the budgets will have a chance to continue to be there to make these amazing games.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Because Slashdot isn't written for you personally. Rather it's for a whole lot of people in addition to you. And they don't all have precisely the same opinions as you. Nor are they obligated to choose as you have.
Some people besides you won't let one incident in the past, an incident that maybe didn't even affect them directly, decide their entire future from that day forward. Perhaps you want every single one of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for Sony (and Sony-BMG and presumably Sony-Ericsson) to lose their jobs for one bad decision of a few record company losers. But not everyone does.
That anyone could mod that insightful or even take that seriously is sad.
1. 3 hours is enough for flights 1/2 way across the country (you can't have it on every single second.) I gave a very cheap way to extend battery life (because I'm a cheap ass) but for the price of a laptop I could purchase 2 additional proprietary batteries for 9 hours of battery life and still be at a third the price of a laptop.
2. You ignored the fact that I take it on a treadmill everyday. I also take it with me around town when I have to wait at the Doctors and the like. I would personally not want to take a laptop with me to either place.
3. People complain about it being too big as it is. The screen is the size it's at. That doesn't stop people from enjoying the PSP or the DS for hours at a time.
Sure the big hitters (and PS3 exclusives) MGS4 and Killzone2 are 2008, but there are big hitters were not shown, that will be the bread and butter until then.
Unreal Tournement (PS3 timed Exclusive till late 2008)
Haze (PS3 exclusive)
Ratchet And Clank Tools Of Destruction(PS3 exclusive)
Warhawk(PS3 exclusive)
Drakes Fortune(PS3 exclusive)
Lair(PS3 exclusive)
GT5 Prologue(PS3 exclusive)
In addition, you have GTA IV to keep you happy until then..
I'm sure there are plenty more that I forgot, either way, that list is releases between now and Xmas..
I keep a spare PSP battery for long flights.
The cake is a pie
It's just you.
The PS2 continues to sell extremely well and continues to be a major revenue driver.
You don't really want to have the most GFLOPS/polygons/texels per second videogame. What you want is to have the most profitable one.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Ah, considering alot of those "unreleased" games were featured in hands on demos to the press the last few months, including KZ2 which was played at E3 in real time, i'd say you more likely work for MS or Nintendo than Sony.
Oh yeah? Well I can't wait to get an XBox 1 this year. There are so many awesome things happening for the young system.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Baseless comments are getting too much attention. People need to stick to the moderator guidelines or stop modding up groupthink style.
I hope you realize the irony of the situation... You were modded up since it's now part of the groupthink to mod up groupthink criticism.
I pretty much agree with your assessment of the PSP as a video machine. The screen is beautiful (though I do get frustrated at my dead pixels from time to time). You can pickup a proprietary Sony memory card for pretty cheep these days.
I actually used my PSP as an MP3 and movie player more than a game player and it sounds like you're doing the same. The gym was my main use. I never saw Star Trek DS9 so I ripped the episodes to my PSP and watched an episode while at the gym. That's a good 45min workout.
I did buy "Ghostbusters" and I was given "Without a Paddle" UMD movies. The movies where nice. good quality, lacking in features that the normal DVD's had, but at least they had sub-titles. I wouldn't buy any more UMD's though. Far to expensive.
Anyway, the point is still, the PSP is still lacking in the gaming department, but it's a great mobile video machine. Oh, and I own a 2nd battery as I fly to France from Chicago from time to time (8 hour flight).
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
E3 isn't for hardcore gamers or even casual gamers. It's for industry people. Retailers want to know what will be hot so they can know what to order. Wii Fit was unveiled to continue generating interest in the system and games with retailers and industry, not so that gamers will drool over the system.