Sony @ E3
As everyone (apparently except me, 'cause I had to look it up yesterday) interested in games knows, this week is the week of E3. Y'know, the week where all the big gaming developers get together and announce to the press (who announce to the public) all the big games for the upcoming year.
This year, I managed to catch Sony's E3 presentation live on G4. (If I could, I'd make a Battleship joke here...) For those who DIDN'T see it...well, honestly? It sounded like damage control more than anything else.
Sony's CEO spent more time telling us how awesome the Playstation brand-name is than he did showing us actual GAMES. On and on about how many units they've sold (we're not your board of directors, man), how "impossible" it is to make the games that are on the PS3 on ANY other system, and Sony's large number of exclusives. Which, actually, would be perfectly fine if Microsoft hadn't totally cockslapped them yesterday with the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII going multi-platform. This in addition to DMC4 (one of Sony's few non-shooter killer apps) being released on the 360 as well as the PS3, Square-Enix deciding to go with the 360 for its newest entry in the Star Ocean series, as well as releasing one of their few brand-new titles Infinite Undiscovery on the Microsoft system, and you get the feeling that...well....Sony's full of shit, and they're trying REEEEEALLY hard to hide that fact.
Unless I'm mistaken (doubtful), despite the "downsizing" of the convention after the record size it held in 2006, E3 is STILL a big event in the gaming world, so it looks bad when people look over your presentation and realize you spent most of it announcing how the sinking ship Sony is not really sinking. At best, all you're going to get us to think is that its not sinking as fast as we thought it was.
Of course, that's just me speaking on a general level as a gamer. On a more personal level...ugh. I feel like I wasted two hours that could've been spent on my usual ritual of watching Law and Order and back-to-back Scrubs episodes. I'm starting to see what Grant Morrison meant when he said that the world post-9/11 seemed to be obsessed with terror and death and depressing shit of that level. The gaming world certainly is. Too many American games can be narrowed down to games where you're either a criminal dealing with cops, stuck in some post-apocalyptic world, or in an army of some sort. To me, they're starting to all look the same.
The only game I saw that really interested me was inFamous, and even that one kicks the story off by blowing up a big chunk of the city you start in and leaving the entire game world in utter chaos. Know what we call that (technically, at least)? Yup. A post-apocalyptic world. At least with that one though you're given the chance to play Hero and clean up the place. Still. One wonders why we, as a country, seem to be so obsessed with fighting not just a losing battle, but a battle we've technically already lost. Is it representative of our country's record in wars for the past half-century? Or are we, in some sort of weird, hive-mind fashion, collectively preparing for/predicting the future as a culture? (That thought disturbs me, greatly.) I'm not sure, but I will say I don't care to take any sort of great part in it.
(By the way...for those who are curious, I'm commenting on Sony's only not merely because that's the only presentation I caught. I've never been a fan of the idea of Microsoft in the console world, and Nintendo by and large is seemingly doing its best to abandon any hardcore gamers outside of their first-party titles, nearly all of which have already been released.)
The only other game I saw that actually grabbed me was DC's new MMO, but the problem with that game and even the idea behind it...is really best left for another column.
The other problem with Sony's presentation was that mainly, it seemed to focus on merely what was coming out this year, purposely leaving us to wonder about "Year 3 and beyond" for the PS3's release cycle, even going so far as to point out that some of the better games on the PS One and PS2 came out after the first two years of their releases. Again, it would be a good idea but given how many games they seem to only get because they're multi-platform, and how many exclusives the competition seems to be stock-piling, it reads more like a hopeful smoke screen, leaving Sony loyalists (and, by "loyalist" I just mean anybody who went to the trouble of giving Sony the exorbitant amount of $$$ the system costs) to hope that the next few years for Sony will be better than the one we're having now. A more cynical person (not me, but I was cynical once so naturally the thought occurred to me) might even think Sony themselves are thinking the same thing.
In the end, I think I'm going to end up more satisfied by the announcements at the Tokyo Game Show in October. (I hope.)
This year, I managed to catch Sony's E3 presentation live on G4. (If I could, I'd make a Battleship joke here...) For those who DIDN'T see it...well, honestly? It sounded like damage control more than anything else.
Sony's CEO spent more time telling us how awesome the Playstation brand-name is than he did showing us actual GAMES. On and on about how many units they've sold (we're not your board of directors, man), how "impossible" it is to make the games that are on the PS3 on ANY other system, and Sony's large number of exclusives. Which, actually, would be perfectly fine if Microsoft hadn't totally cockslapped them yesterday with the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII going multi-platform. This in addition to DMC4 (one of Sony's few non-shooter killer apps) being released on the 360 as well as the PS3, Square-Enix deciding to go with the 360 for its newest entry in the Star Ocean series, as well as releasing one of their few brand-new titles Infinite Undiscovery on the Microsoft system, and you get the feeling that...well....Sony's full of shit, and they're trying REEEEEALLY hard to hide that fact.
Unless I'm mistaken (doubtful), despite the "downsizing" of the convention after the record size it held in 2006, E3 is STILL a big event in the gaming world, so it looks bad when people look over your presentation and realize you spent most of it announcing how the sinking ship Sony is not really sinking. At best, all you're going to get us to think is that its not sinking as fast as we thought it was.
Of course, that's just me speaking on a general level as a gamer. On a more personal level...ugh. I feel like I wasted two hours that could've been spent on my usual ritual of watching Law and Order and back-to-back Scrubs episodes. I'm starting to see what Grant Morrison meant when he said that the world post-9/11 seemed to be obsessed with terror and death and depressing shit of that level. The gaming world certainly is. Too many American games can be narrowed down to games where you're either a criminal dealing with cops, stuck in some post-apocalyptic world, or in an army of some sort. To me, they're starting to all look the same.
The only game I saw that really interested me was inFamous, and even that one kicks the story off by blowing up a big chunk of the city you start in and leaving the entire game world in utter chaos. Know what we call that (technically, at least)? Yup. A post-apocalyptic world. At least with that one though you're given the chance to play Hero and clean up the place. Still. One wonders why we, as a country, seem to be so obsessed with fighting not just a losing battle, but a battle we've technically already lost. Is it representative of our country's record in wars for the past half-century? Or are we, in some sort of weird, hive-mind fashion, collectively preparing for/predicting the future as a culture? (That thought disturbs me, greatly.) I'm not sure, but I will say I don't care to take any sort of great part in it.
(By the way...for those who are curious, I'm commenting on Sony's only not merely because that's the only presentation I caught. I've never been a fan of the idea of Microsoft in the console world, and Nintendo by and large is seemingly doing its best to abandon any hardcore gamers outside of their first-party titles, nearly all of which have already been released.)
The only other game I saw that actually grabbed me was DC's new MMO, but the problem with that game and even the idea behind it...is really best left for another column.
The other problem with Sony's presentation was that mainly, it seemed to focus on merely what was coming out this year, purposely leaving us to wonder about "Year 3 and beyond" for the PS3's release cycle, even going so far as to point out that some of the better games on the PS One and PS2 came out after the first two years of their releases. Again, it would be a good idea but given how many games they seem to only get because they're multi-platform, and how many exclusives the competition seems to be stock-piling, it reads more like a hopeful smoke screen, leaving Sony loyalists (and, by "loyalist" I just mean anybody who went to the trouble of giving Sony the exorbitant amount of $$$ the system costs) to hope that the next few years for Sony will be better than the one we're having now. A more cynical person (not me, but I was cynical once so naturally the thought occurred to me) might even think Sony themselves are thinking the same thing.
In the end, I think I'm going to end up more satisfied by the announcements at the Tokyo Game Show in October. (I hope.)
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