If Microsoft kind of shit the bed, and Nintendo completely blew me away, Sony comfortably took the middle road. There wasn't much in the way of surprises, but nearly everything that was shown was presented competently and looked reasonably enjoyable. Unfortunately for Sony, though, they seemed really intent on letting the whole freaking world know what, exactly, was up their sleeves, and whereas Nintendo was presenting old franchises with radical changes (Metroid: Other M, Kirby's Epic Yarn, and Kid Icarus: Uprising come to mind), Sony seemed much more content to show off true sequels with little to separate them from their earlier counterparts except for a few new features.
The show was hosted by the head of Sony's Computer Entertainment division in North America, Jack Tretton, who started the show off by saying that Kevin Butler (a fictional character, mind you) wouldn't be hosting the show. Thank god. I kind of hate Kevin Butler, and I can't fathom why so many gamers go apeshit for him.
It was kind of funny to see Sony go so deep into extolling the virtues of home console-based 3D gaming, when Nintendo had basically just ripped on them for doing just that earlier. Those silly glasses were out in force, as Sony decided to "wow" everyone with Killzone 3. Umm, OK. Killzones 1 and 2 didn't come out that long ago, and there's not much here to make me change my mind about the series (not that a series with a name like Killzone would ever really have my attention in the first place). The main changes appear to be that it's snowy, it's in 3D, and you can use Move to control it. Those Move controls might be nice, but the whole oppressively quasi-realistic shooting game genre doesn't interest me in the slightest.
Sony then went on to let everyone know that tons of games were going to be in 3D by next year, including a Sly Cooper HD collection, which is pretty nice of them. I don't know who this appeals to – how many people actually have 3D TVs right now? Put up your hands? Anyone?
Peter Dille then came on stage to demonstrate the Playstation Move. Unlike the somewhat disastrous showing of Kinect on Monday, Sony left most of its intolerable bits for a Move demonstration event earlier this year, and instead focused on some actual games, which was a nice change of pace.
The games they showed, however, were a bit of a mixed bag. I think Sorcery actually looks pretty cool – it appears to be a mash-up of Harry Potter and Zelda with Move controls, and that actually sounds enormously appealing to me.
Heroes on the Move, too, looks pretty OK – very bright and stylized, and features a crap-ton of Sony mascots. It kind of looks like it'll play like a PS1-era platformer, which I'm absolutely OK with. On the other hand, they showed off games like Tiger Woods 11 (having played the Wii version of 10, it is a very accurate facsimile of the real thing, but leave these sorts of presentations for the EA conference, please) and announced that Heavy Rain is going to be getting Move controls. Ugh. Why won't this game just die already?
But hey! New Time Crisis! That's exciting, no? Even though way too many people are against rail shooters, it'll be fun to see them eat their words when this game comes out because it's on an HD console. I have to say that I wasn't blown away by it, and prefer 3rd person rail shooters like Sin and Punishment, but it's an update of an old genre, and that's a sometimes admirable thing in my books.
It was perhaps a bit of bad timing for Sony, but everything about the PSP just seems hells of underwhelming after the 3DS showing. People were sort of expecting a PSP2, and while I think that would be a horrible idea for Sony (I personally think they'll just abandon the handheld game altogether), it would have been something to steal Nintendo's thunder a little bit. Unfortunately, all they had to go on was a CG trailer for the new handheld God of War game, and the announcement that there would be 70 new PSP games before the end of the year. Most of those are probably ones that people won't really care about, to be fair, but hey! Patapon 3!
Then they showed off LittleBigPlanet 2, which I'm still not certain needs to exist right now. If all it is is grappling hooks and improved level-making functionality, well… maybe they should have waited a bit longer to release it. Just sayin'. There's no denying that the original is a fantastic game, though, and more of the same won't be a terrible thing. Just not a particularly inspiring thing.
Sony then made their biggest mistake of the show, I feel, in trying to convince people that PSNPlus is a good idea. Basically, the thing that separates PSN from XBox Live is that, well… it's free. But now, they're making it so that if you want exclusive stuff, you'll pay like $50 a year, which seems awfully steep to me. I don't know, I guess for people who are into PSN and want more of it, it might seem like a good deal, but I'm kind of worried about persistent payments after the fact, especially when you might have paid quite a bit for your console.
Next up was the multi-platform section of the show, and it's hard to get too excited about this (for me, anyways). Trying to sway customers from buying one console or another seems pretty futile – only a very, very small amount of people even have the choice of which console to buy things for – they've probably, at most, got either a PS3 or an XBox and maybe a Wii, DS or PSP, so they're only going to buy for the console they own, not based on which version of a game has more "features." So Medal of Honor: Vanguard, Dead Space 2, and Portal 2's presentations didn't really come off as being all that exciting for me, even though I think Portal 2 will probably rock some shit (and integrated Steam Cloud functionality is probably a pretty cool thing, even if I don't exactly know what it is!).
They wrapped up the conference with four games that fans of the respective genres could get excited about, I suppose. The first was Final Fantasy XIV, which I'm personally not all that thrilled about – I prefer my JRPGs offline, although that's just a preference I suppose. Gran Turismo 5 was finally shown off, and while I've never been a fan of GT's mostly realistic approach to gaming, for enthusiasts, they're some of the best racing games I guess. inFamous 2 was outed a couple of weeks ago and besides the ability to use ice, doesn't seem drastically different from its predecessor.
The one big "surprise" was a new Twisted Metal game, but once again, not a genre that I'm overly fond of. If you have great memories of playing the original on your PS1, then you might have lost your shit, but I was thinking to myself, really? That's the Big Game you want to end on?
The show almost definitely could have been improved if some conspicuous absences weren't so… absent. Namely, Team Ico has been working on the gloriously amazing-looking The Last Guardian, and there were rumors of an Ico/Shadow of the Colossus HD remake set, but neither were there. Mostly, what Sony's conference seemed to lack was punch. It kind of felt like last year's Nintendo conference, where, besides Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid: Other M, there was a complete absence of surprises. It was a safe and unembarrassing conference, but nothing more.