Monday, May 08, 2006
The fourth dimension is quite a letdown
Evening, folks. Tom and I have been enjoying LA quite a bit, and despite Sony's best attempts to sour the experince we're still having a good time. Assuming you've heard that their conference was an absolute abortion. The pre-show reception was great - lots of mediocre free food, a literal pile of hundreds of candy bars to choose from, lots of random gaming journalists and quasi-celebrities for me to geek out over (got a great picture with Atsushi Iniba, and paparazzied Kojima and his red bowling shoes [which I'll post later]), boring PSP demos to download (Ratchet was fine, but it's tough to get excited about), Morgan Webb picking her teeth for a good two minutes, and Brendan.
The conference itself, not so good. Not that they showed anything particularly awful, it was just astoundingly underwhelming with almost no surprises. They didn't even show Jaffe's PSP game for hells sake. In short, as I'm sure you've seen elsewhere by now if you care, the PS3 hits November 17th with two SKUs - one with a 60gig hard drive for $600, and one with a 20gig and no HDMI/wifi/sd card support for $500. Not overpriced, but certainly expensive. There's also some tilt functionality so you can play Warhawk by waving your controller around like an idiot, but as an afterthought it's not especially exciting (and cost us the rumble feature - lame). Without a killer app, and considering the 360 will be hitting it's stride right around the launch, there's actually a chance I won't buy one right away. I would have never guessed I'd be saying that when I woke up this morning.
Resistance looks like fun, in a Call of Duty 2 meets Black meets aliens kind of way, but it's not Halo or Ratchet, so what's the point? Warhawk did look fantastic, but it looked fantastic last year. Even Naughty Dog's new game which I've been pioneering the existence and important of for quite a while was just a boring gun game in a jungle. Far Cry meets Prince of Persia meets Nick not giving a damn, from what I could gather. Without any sort of art style either, just pure realism. In fact, now that I think about it almost none of the games had any sort of significant visual style of their own, outside of MAYBE Heavenly Sword. Just blah realism, which wasn't very realistic for the most part. While Nintendo is looking to change gaming and Microsoft is looking to better it, Sony seems content with completely resting on their laurels and assuming standards won't change in the next five years. Ugh. It's really quite disappointing, especially since they were FAR AND ABOVE the best publisher of the last generation.
In short, there was nothing to get excited about. Nothing. After the presentation they had several of the games playable in the room, and I chose to not make Tom and Dan wait five more minutes for me than play a Playstation 3. And that is SHOCKING. It's bed time for us now, but I'll have a lot more to say tomorrow night after having seen all three conferences. Bad times though so far. Where's Fumito Ueda when you need him?
The conference itself, not so good. Not that they showed anything particularly awful, it was just astoundingly underwhelming with almost no surprises. They didn't even show Jaffe's PSP game for hells sake. In short, as I'm sure you've seen elsewhere by now if you care, the PS3 hits November 17th with two SKUs - one with a 60gig hard drive for $600, and one with a 20gig and no HDMI/wifi/sd card support for $500. Not overpriced, but certainly expensive. There's also some tilt functionality so you can play Warhawk by waving your controller around like an idiot, but as an afterthought it's not especially exciting (and cost us the rumble feature - lame). Without a killer app, and considering the 360 will be hitting it's stride right around the launch, there's actually a chance I won't buy one right away. I would have never guessed I'd be saying that when I woke up this morning.
Resistance looks like fun, in a Call of Duty 2 meets Black meets aliens kind of way, but it's not Halo or Ratchet, so what's the point? Warhawk did look fantastic, but it looked fantastic last year. Even Naughty Dog's new game which I've been pioneering the existence and important of for quite a while was just a boring gun game in a jungle. Far Cry meets Prince of Persia meets Nick not giving a damn, from what I could gather. Without any sort of art style either, just pure realism. In fact, now that I think about it almost none of the games had any sort of significant visual style of their own, outside of MAYBE Heavenly Sword. Just blah realism, which wasn't very realistic for the most part. While Nintendo is looking to change gaming and Microsoft is looking to better it, Sony seems content with completely resting on their laurels and assuming standards won't change in the next five years. Ugh. It's really quite disappointing, especially since they were FAR AND ABOVE the best publisher of the last generation.
In short, there was nothing to get excited about. Nothing. After the presentation they had several of the games playable in the room, and I chose to not make Tom and Dan wait five more minutes for me than play a Playstation 3. And that is SHOCKING. It's bed time for us now, but I'll have a lot more to say tomorrow night after having seen all three conferences. Bad times though so far. Where's Fumito Ueda when you need him?
// posted by Nick @ 10:58 PM 
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