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The Sony Press Conference Report

Posted June 7th 2009 by Derrick Lutz.

E3 is over and I finally have time to write about the Sony press conference. If you've been keeping up with E3 all week then you will have already seen a lot or all of this stuff, but I'd still like to give my take on things and maybe it will remind you of some things that slipped through the cracks the first time.

The First Ten Minutes
Release Date: N/A
Video: N/A
No, that's not the name of a videogame. Sony Computer Entertainment of America's president Jack Tretton spent the first ten minutes talking about how successful the PlayStation brand is, and how today's PS2 owners will be tomorrow's PS3 consumers. Hopefully the investors buy that premise, for Sony's sake. I was glad that at least he didn't use the phrase "year of the PlayStation 3" or any variation thereof. It was mentioned that PlayStation will have at least 35 exclusive games this year; I'm guessing that includes PSP and PS2 as well as PS3.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Release Date: November 2009
Video: Trailer, Stage Demo
Some guy from developer Naughty Dog came out to present Uncharted 2. He said that Naughty Dog has been pushing the limits of PlayStation for 15 years, and that Uncharted 2 "sets the new gold standard for limit pushing." Way to combine hackneyed phrases to form the ultimate meaningless claim. The game looks like a sequel to Uncharted, which is cool with me. I like Uncharted.

MAG
Release Date: Fall 2009
Video: Stage Demo
Eight players in a squad, four squads to a platoon, four platoons to a company. That's 128 players per team. I have no idea how they expect this to ever work in a real world online setting. It's hard enough to have a fun and balanced match with 16 players total. Assuming that it does somehow work out, it looks like it plays like Battlefield.

PSP Go
Release Date: October 1, 2009
Video: N/A
To the surprise of no one, the PSP Go was announced by Sony Computer Entertainment president Kaz Hirai. It has no UMD drive, instead relying on 16GB of internal memory plus a Memory Stick Micro (M2) slot. M2 cards are currently available in capacities up to 16GB, with a theoretical maximum capability of 32GB. $250 for the system seems a bit too high, but I do like the design and the lack of physical media. In other PSP news, there will be a pink Hannah Montana themed regular PSP released this summer. Tweens!

Gran Turismo PSP
Release Date: October 1, 2009
Video: Trailer
Polyphony Digital's Kazunouri Yamauchi repeatedly emphasized that this PSP version of Gran Turismo was a complete Gran Turismo experience and not a cut-down version. I would certainly hope so, considering the game was first teased back when Sony announced the PSP at E3 2004. After spending several minutes talking about the game in Japanese (and then waiting for the translator to translate) they showed a trailer for the game which seemed to be just as much a trailer for the PSP Go system. It's Gran Turismo on the PSP. How did it take 5+ years?

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
Release Date: 2010
Video: Trailer
Hideo Kojima will be co-writing the script and producing this PSP game; this is a level of focus he did not imply about the Metal Gear Solid game coming to the Xbox 360. Peace Walker is set ten years after MGS3. It seems to have some multiplayer component; there were multiple Snakes in the game at the same time.

PSP Clean-Up, PlayStation Network and Home, Montages
Release Date: N/A
Video: N/A
Lots of PSP games shown in a lengthy montage: Resident Evil Portable, Little Big Planet, Motorstorm, SOCOM, Final Fantasy Dissidia, Monster Hunter, Soul Calibur, Persona, Echochrono, Pixeljunk Monsters, Fat Princess, Pangya, Petz, Rock Band Unplugged, and others.
Jack Tretton came back out for a long self-congratulatory speech about PlayStation Network and Home. Yawn. I remember that one time I decided to try Home. I created a character and played a game of pool. Then I quit.
Another too-long montage, this time for PS3 games. I'm not going to bother telling you what all of them are; there's way too many and most are multiplatform games. When you put Madden and a quiz show game in your montage, either your platform is desperate for content or your montage needs a few minutes shaved off.

Agent
Release Date: TBA
Video: N/A
This is a new Rockstar game exclusive to PS3. Developed by Rockstar North which is their main studio responsible for the GTA series, as opposed to one of their remote studios. Set in the 1970s, you're a globe-trotting spy. They showed a logo but nothing else.

Assassin's Creed 2
Release Date: November 17, 2009
Video: Trailer, Stage Demo
I kind of liked the basic mechanics of the first Assassin's Creed, but they didn't do enough with them to keep my attention for more than a few hours. Their big thing with this sequel seems to be making the experience more diverse, so maybe that will do it for me. On the other hand, the demonstration on stage bored me so maybe it won't. I do like how they choose time periods and settings that you pretty much never see in videogames. Assassin's Creed II takes place in the Italian Renaissance.

Final Fantasy XIII and XIV
Release Date: 2010
Video: Trailer, Trailer
I already covered XIII in my Microsoft report, the same applies here. The announcement of XIV as a PS3 (and PC, I assume) exclusive MMORPG was a crazy surprise, but I still don't care about Final Fantasy. Or MMORPGs.

PlayStation Motion Controller
Release Date: TBA
Video: Stage Demo
After an introduction by Jack Tretton that talked about Sony's history of motion controllers (which somehow neglects to mention the Sixaxis), a couple nervous Sony engineers demonstrated their new motion controller for the PS3. It's a remote-shaped device with a glowing globe on one end which the PlayStation Eye can track. It was all rough tech demos, no real games, but it had an impressive level of precision. Far better than Microsoft's no-controller solution or Nintendo's Wii Remote even with the MotionPlus. I'm still not sure what real applications it could have; I don't think the level of accuracy was the big thing holding people back from doing anything brilliant with the Wii motion controls. Maybe I'm wrong.

ModNation Racers
Release Date: 2010
Video: Stage Demo Pt. 1, Pt. 2
It was basically presented as LittleBigPlanet as a kart racer. I guess that's an accurate enough way to describe it; it has a cutsey style and your custom racer/car/tracks can be shared online. The track creator seemed kinda cool. Only problem really is I don't want to pay for a kart racer.

The Last Guardian
Release Date: 2010
Video: Trailer
This is Team Ico's game, the one that had a video leak a couple weeks ago with the codename Trico. The trailer shown here has been improved and extended, but is still basically the same as the one from a couple weeks ago. So it's still really awesome.

Gran Turismo 5
Release Date: TBA
Video: Trailer
Okay, this game still exists I guess. For a while there I was thinking they would just keep updating GT5 Prologue until it became a full Gran Turismo game. The trailer they showed didn't look a lot better than Prologue, but definitely had more diverse content. Stuff like NASCAR and WRC licenses, which I think is new for the series. Still no release date set.

God of War III
Release Date: March 2010
Video: Trailer, Stage Demo Pt. 1, Pt. 2
It's totally God of War. Three. As a person who is retarded with QTEs, I liked how they put the on-screen button prompts closer to the side of the screen relative to where the button is on the controller. So when you need to press triangle, the on-screen triangle is at the top of the screen; when you need to press square, the square is on the left of the screen. I think that'll help me.

Final Thoughts

I thought it was an obvious and boring choice to end the show with God of War III. It was nice to see it, but at this point the conference had gone on for two hours and seeing stuff like Gran Turismo and God of War seemed totally unnecessary. Again, nothing against those games; they are games I wanted to see, but Sony spent too much time on a relatively small number of games and tried to make up for it with long video montages. Otherwise it was a decent conference, and the motion controller worked better than expected.

Tags: Sony, E3-09