E3 2011: Sony presentation times

It should be kind of telling for you that I didn't do this wrap-up until two days after the fact. That's just kind of the feeling that Sony's presentations inspire in me. I've owned the PS1 and PS2 for a while now, and there's no denying that those were quality systems, and truth be told, were the cost more reasonable, I would likely own a PS3 instead of an XBox right now – the games that are different from Microsoft's console just appeal to me more. It's still an overpowered excuse for techboys to wave their e-dicks at everyone, but Sony has slowly (very slowly!) made some concessions towards people like myself, who look for something a little deeper from their games.

So this naturally leaves Sony's conferences stranded somewhere in the middle, and just like last year, I was left not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. Just whelmed.

There's always one thing (person) who gets my goat every goddamn year, and that's the head of Sony America, Jack Tretton. Instead of apologizing with any hint of contrition or remorse, he made a stupid little quip about the largest internet security breach in history. Little consolation for the millions of people whose information was compromised. This was the moment to try to win back consumer trust, and instead, they made a joke about it. It's more than a little heartless and cynical to not only not address your own failings, but to then basically not even acknowledge the massive leak of information at all. It really put a negative spin on the rest of the proceedings.

Proceedings that, on the whole, were kind of OK. Oh, you know the main things they talked about: 3D, Move, 3D and Move together. 3Move. MoveD. Etc. Etc. There was a bit of Uncharted 3 (a series which I've never played. Is it anything? I know people fall all over themselves about it, but it kind of seems like Indiana Jones. I love Indiana Jones, but I'd never say that Indiana Jones was the best movie ever or anything. And to boot, Uncharted seems kind of faulty as a video game. Once again, based only on second-hand viewings of it.), Resistance 3 (another series I've never played/don't care about), a God of War HD collection. All hyper violent, all big yawns from me. Now, the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus collection would be cool if I didn't already have them on the PS2 (higher definition isn't that big of a deal to me).

More Move stuff, more sports stuff. YAAWWWN. None of this stuff is bad, per se, but it's hardly the stuff great conferences are made of. Nothing new was really announced (except for a PS3 MMO called Dust 514), and there's this palpable sense that there's not much going on for exclusives on the PS3. This is kind of the case for all three of the Big 3, but it was pretty noticeable at this point of Sony's presentation.

Then they announced the name for the NGP – it's now called the Playstation Vita, which I still contend sounds like a budget-level car model and not a handheld. The thing is pretty much a handheld PS3. The technology is undoubtedly impressive, though it doesn't seem to understand that console games played on the go aren't the same thing as handheld games. What's funny to me, though, is that the baseline model is launching at $250, a clear target at the 3DS's price. Now, I'd contend that the PSV isn't really doing anything new – it's just a kind of "Swiss army knife" of video gaming – but it's going to be quite the fight for Nintendo in Japan, where the PSP has eroded their market share to a considerable degree. What's also funny to me, though, is that people kept saying "the 3DS costs too much!" but now that the PSV is the exact same price and up, people are falling all over themselves. I guess the ploy to launch the PS3 at such a ridiculously high price paid off – everything seems like a discount now! I guess it's just me, but after the DS and the PSP, I'd pay a higher price for the system with, you know, games. That could very well change with this generation – I don't want to deemphasize that this is actually a good move for Sony, even if "hardcore" gamers are complaining that the specs have been dampened to allow for such a price. The PSV never needed to be as overpowered as it originally was, and this puts it squarely in market acceptability territory, if it weren't for the abject uncoolness of the PSP brand. I've never met a person with one, and if I were to pull out a PSP around my friends, I'm sure they'd assume that I'd become a computer programmer and that I was planning on wearing cargo pants and l33t speak t-shirts.

With that being said, some of the games look pretty OK. Little Big Planet looks just as gorgeous as its PS3 counterpart, Wipeout is making a pretty glorious-looking return. But there's nothing screaming out to me just yet. The PSV might win over the "hardcore" component of gamers who lurk around internet forums, but the handheld wars have never been about hardcore gamers. It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo can reclaim some of the bad PR that has been swirling around them this year, but I don't think Sony poses a major threat at the moment (at least, not as big of a threat as Android). There's a ton of features, to be sure, and it's at least nice to see that Sony's playing with a full deck of cards this time around.

Like Nintendo's conference, there were very few games on display, and that's ultimately what made Sony's presentation a little staid. Yes, the price of the PSV was a nice surprise, but not much else was – the rest was made up of games that we either knew about or which weren't that big of a leap to imagine. Add in the douchiness of Tretton and that was a presentation that was doomed from the beginning.